New Urban Trend: Homeschooling

By Rod Dreher • February 5, 2012, 5:00 PM

We think of homeschoolers as evangelicals or off-the-gridders who spend a lot of time at kitchen tables in the countryside. And it’s true that most homeschooling parents do so for moral or religious reasons. But education observers believe that is changing. You only have to go to a downtown Starbucks or art museum in the middle of a weekday to see that a once-unconventional choice “has become newly fashionable,” says Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford professor who wrote Kingdom of Children, a history of homeschooling. There are an estimated 300,000 homeschooled children in America’s cities, many of them children of secular, highly educated professionals who always figured they’d send their kids to school—until they came to think, Hey, maybe we could do better.

Just over a decade ago, when our firstborn was still a toddler, we belonged to the New York City Homeschool Educators Alliance (NYCHEA). It’s non-sectarian, and as I recall, there were many secular homeschoolers in the group. We moved from NYC when our son was only three, so we never got fully involved. Still, it’s there, and I bet it’s a lot bigger today.

14 Responses to New Urban Trend: Homeschooling

sal magundi says:

February 5, 2012 at 6:14 pm

when i first heard of homeschooling, it was hippies wanting to protect their kids from rightwing/government indoctrination. made sense then, makes sense now. frank zappa was also a big proponent, his father being autodidact.
Geoff G. says:

February 5, 2012 at 6:52 pm

What do you think of this trend in light of this post?

This strikes me as another symptom of the separation of the population into two strata, with the upper, educated people having the inclination and the ability (both in terms of education and in terms of doing reasonably well with only one breadwinner in the family).

Prior to landing my new job, we had the experience of surviving on a single income for a couple of months. Bear in mind, there’s only the two of us (and a dog) to support. No kids.

The idea of having both of us working and bringing home a paycheck seems so natural that it hadn’t struck me that things have changed so much in the last few decades. Even if one of you is earning well above the national median, it’s difficult if not impossible to cover the needs of just two people, let alone kids.

Lots of people need two incomes to just stay afloat. Which means that the public school system, in addition to providing an education, is also in the business of providing day care.

Unless you’re in that higher echelon. In which case you pull your kids out of school, have one spouse home school, and then you agitate to reduce property taxes that pay to keep the public school system running (because you got yours, right?)

Note that this is the situation you’re going to find yourself in even if you’re doing everything right by conservative standards: getting married, working hard, going to church (assuming you don’t work on Sunday, consistent weekends tend also to be something far more available to that upper echelon too), etc. If you’re a single parent, things are even more impossible.
Dave D. says:

February 5, 2012 at 7:07 pm

Great, the atomization of society continues. Given that threads like this quickly descend into being pecked into swiss cheese by flocks of homeschool moms nesting on the shores of Lake Wobegon, I will artfully change the subject and link this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/childrens-add-drugs-dont-work-long-term.html?pagewanted=all

It’s a psychologist having second thoughts about Ritalin. Thoughts, Rod?
Mitchell Young says:

February 5, 2012 at 7:57 pm

” Hey, maybe we could do better.”

LOL. “Hey, maybe my kid won’t do well in a 90% black and hispanic environment.”
Lulu says:

February 5, 2012 at 8:29 pm

Well, what would you do if your school put “The Lovely Bones” on its recommended reading list for your 12-year-old daughter? A tale about a girl’s being raped, murdered, and dismembered–with very descriptive language describing same. This happened, in NYC, and I am apalled.
Maxine says:

February 5, 2012 at 8:54 pm

Newsweek is just now figuring this out? Figures. They’re pretty late to the party.
Matt says:

February 5, 2012 at 10:08 pm

Good to hear!

With any luck, I’ll be doing this in the future, so here’s hoping!
Naturalmom says:

February 5, 2012 at 11:29 pm

No surprise to me. I live in a medium size city where there are lots of homeschoolers of all stripes.

Unless you’re in that higher echelon. In which case you pull your kids out of school, have one spouse home school, and then you agitate to reduce property taxes that pay to keep the public school system running (because you got yours, right?)

This may be true in big coastal cities where the cost of living is high, but it’s not my experience here in the midwest. Most of the families are single income, yes, but that means they live on pretty tight budgets and forgo many of the “toys” that their peers with similar education enjoy. Cost is always a factor when our homeschool group tries to organize classes, etc. If they cost is more than “pretty cheap” lots of families won’t be able to participate. I think the feeling about funding public schools varies quite a bit. I know many of us are supportive of efforts to have good schools and will vote for millage increases if they seem needed. The kids in public schools will be our children’s co-workers, spouses and friends, after all, and they’ll be helping to run our world when we get older! But sure, there are some homeschool parents who take an attitude of “to h*&# with them.”

Education level is a different matter. Most of my homeschool mom friends are college graduates; a few have at least some education beyond that. A minority have some college but didn’t graduate, and very few have only a high school diploma. I run with the “inclusive” crowd which includes seculars, liberal religious families, and conservative religious families who believe too homogenous an environment isn’t always a great thing. The “exclusive” Conservative Fundamentalist/Evangelical crowd may have different educational demographics, but I doubt it’s much different.
Naturalmom says:

February 5, 2012 at 11:38 pm

I’ll also add that I can think of several single moms off the top of my head who homeschool in my area. They aren’t numerous, to be sure, but they exist. They rely heavily on each other and other homeschooling friends for childcare, etc., as well as flexible and/or non-traditional work schedules. It’s got to be tough though. My hat’s off to them!
bmj says:

February 6, 2012 at 7:25 am

The co-op here in Pittsburgh is largely secular. Most of the Christian co-ops are tucked away in the ‘burbs.
MIke says:

February 6, 2012 at 9:02 am

This shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone. SWPL parenting trends tend to occur on both the left and right. Immunization hysteria crops up in Brooklyn mommy blogs and megachurch mom groups. Anxious parenting has no political party and homeschooling is an extension of that concern, even when done for good, thoughful reasons.

These stories are deceptive, though, since the evidence (and political heft) shows homeschooling is largely a Christian, social conservative phenomenon. The large groups actively involved in homeschool rights are aligned with the far-right, which is why homeschoolers are a key grassroots group inside Evangelical, GOP politics.
David J. White says:

February 6, 2012 at 9:03 am

Newsweek is just now figuring this out? Figures. They’re pretty late to the party.

Well, they’re continuing their putting of putting the spotlight on the latest, trendiest thing. Last fall they had a cover featuring those hot, cutting-edge newsmakers, Jerry Seinfeld and Regis Philbin.

What I noticed about the homeschooling story is that, as they did with the Andrew Sullivan piece on Obama a few issues back, they advertised the article on the cover with a throughly tendentious, provocative headline (or whatever the term is for a line on a cover advertising the story inside) that was quite misleading about the tone of the actual piece.
Naturalmom says:

February 6, 2012 at 9:48 am

The large groups actively involved in homeschool rights are aligned with the far-right, which is why homeschoolers are a key grassroots group inside Evangelical, GOP politics

This is annoyingly true. Most non-right wing homeschooling families decline to join the BIG national group, the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) because they advocate for right-wing political causes that go beyond homeschooling interests. And even their homeschool “defense” is based on some cultural norms that not all homeschooling families find helpful.

I think HSLDA is a big reason that homeschooling has a reputation of being a Christian Evangelical phenomenon. As a national organization, they get invited on TV and radio to talk about homeschooling *in general*, then they proceed to portray homeschooling as a Christian thing, often without even a sentence acknowledging that all kinds of families choose homeschooling for all kinds of reasons. It makes me want to scream at my radio!
Stef says:

February 6, 2012 at 5:22 pm

The article sets up a false dichotomy between “evangelicals and off-the-gridders,” and those affluent enough to have a stay-at-home parent. In my long homeschooling experience, the urban homeschoolers I knew had one thing in common – whether they were very conservative, politically right wingers, or highly liberal anti-gun socialists. In both camps, the fathers were professionals (lawyers, doctors), managerial, “creative class” (writers, graphic designers, professional musicians or artists), or technical (engineers, engineering managers, programmers, scientists.)

Many of the families by “mainstream” standards would have been considered not terribly affluent, as their families were large, and it’s expensive to live near a major city (compared to the far rural areas.) While they might have wanted to live out in the country, in most cases Dad needed to commute to work.

Homeschooling is not something most middle-income people with two working parents can afford to do; I think that transcends the political differences.