Home schooling today — The history
Home schooling crystallized as a social movement in the late ’70s and early ’80s as a big tent for two groups with perpendicular views of human nature, according to academics who’ve researched the movement. Some home-school parents were influenced by the intellectual traditions of the New Left and Free School movement. They sought to apply the teachings of John Holt, a famed ’60s author who disavowed institutional education and called for children to be unschooled, said Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of education and history at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. “To many on the left, schools were oppressive institutions,” Zimmerman said. “It was a ... philosophy, that kids have a natural inclination to learn.” At the same time, he said, many parents of the religious right were following the trumpet call of organizations like the Moral Majority, which railed against social corruption and the Godlessness of public education. Many evangelicals became involved in the Christian day-school movement, others turned to home education.
To one group, public schools were assembly lines that ignored the natural growth and goodness of children, stamping out individuality. To the other, public schools offered too much diversity and not enough moral instruction, he said. The Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association, or HSLDA, an advocacy organization for home-schoolers nationwide with 80,000 dues-paying member families, was founded in 1983 by Washington state lawyer Michael Farris. At the time, Farris faced financial and legal consequences for home schooling his children. Couples around the country faced similar opposition. In 1984, one Alabama couple spent 132 days in jail for violating truancy laws, and another faced a civil lawsuit and arrest, according to stories published in a state newspaper. To prevent action against home-school families, Farris’ organization lobbied for specific home-school laws in most states. The organization also reviewed existing state laws to find loopholes for home-school families, according to Dee Black, a lawyer for the Home School Legal Defense Association. The 1982 church school exemption law in Alabama was one of those loopholes, she said. By 1988, the Alabama law, which had been passed to allow churches to run schools with non-certified teachers, was the legal protection for 95 percent of the 600 home-school families in Alabama. The other 5 percent were state-certified teachers who were home schooling under the private tutor act, said Connie Atchison, who began home schooling her children in Alabama in 1984. The idea to use the church-school exemption law in Alabama was proposed by HSLDA lawyers, who communicated with home-school organizations in the state during the mid-80s, she said. Some parents defined their homes as a “satellite campus” of an existing church school or spoke with their church leaders about creating a church school for home-schoolers, she said. Yet, while churches and church schools allowed home education to grow in Alabama, many church members did not approve of home schooling. “You were ostracized, even at church,” said Chris Christian, president of the Christian Home Education Fellowship of Alabama. He has home-schooled his children for 18 years. “People said, ‘You hate your children, because you’re taking them from all these opportunities.’ Pastors were often not for us. “Home-school families were very isolated because of the legal and social environment,” he said. “There was real independent spirit in the early days.” Academic church requirements drove many parents to create home churches, with the father as pastor and mother as principal, Christian said. “We named our house Grace Christian School,” said Atchison, who continues to attend a home church. “All you had to have for a church was a gathering of believers. A lot of people created home churches with just one other family.” |
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