Brian Ray
April 9, 2025
Excerpted from NHERI Working Paper
Whether by scholars, teachers’ unions, policymakers, or nonprofit advocacy organizations, most of the controversy about homeschooling has centered around who should have control over who spends institutional-school school hours passing on to children knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and worldview. Attorneys Whitehead and Bird (1984) wrote that
… they recognize the importance of the constitutional rights involved, and the ramifications for the family raised, in the state’s frequent assertion of control over home education and ultimately over the child. . . . . . (p. 10). Therefore, whereas public education involves open-ended group instruction (or mass teaching), home education is the structured, individual instruction of a child (or children) by parents in basic living skills as well as in traditional and additional courses of academic study. Generally, home instruction is from a specific religious or philosophical viewpoint” (p. 16)
They recognized 40 years ago that control by the state (civil government) versus the parents was at the heart of the controversy over homeschooling. Likewise, Lines (1985) explained that some state and local education professionals oppose home schooling because they lose the ability to promote “… progressive education and secularism …” to the children; they lose control and parents have it. By 1988, the National Education Association (1988, 2020) was promoting the thesis that the state should have control over home education by forcing parents to use only state-approved curriculum and state-licensed teachers.
Ten years later, the Montana Human Rights Network (1999) was fighting for the state, rather than parents, to have more control over home-educated children. “The Network board has been very concerned about the so-called parents’ rights movement which advocates the idea that parents have absolute power [control] over children.”
By one-quarter of a century ago, about 15 years into the modern homeschool movement, Ray (2000) historically and philosophically developed his thesis that power and control are essential to arguments for or against homeschooling and its definition. Some want the state to have the power while others favor the parents.
People have been competing to control the education of children since the first Homo sapiens was born. ….. In like manner, the discussions about parent-led, home- and family-based education – home schooling – are simply a continuation of the struggle over who will control what goes into the minds and affects the hearts of children-the future full-fledged citizens of any nation” (p. 272).
Scholarly work and lay literature repeatedly show that a key element of what it means to homeschool is whether the parents or the state should, fundamentally, have primary and final authority over a child’s education. Stevens (2001) affirmed this when he penned that homeschoolers “… are wary of state intrusion into family life and generally are skeptical of the ability of bureaucracies and “experts” to meet the task of child rearing” (p. 5). Along the same lines, Gaither (2008) addressed a core element of homeschooling this way:
Given this pan-ideological commitment to local, authentic, private life and contempt for establishment liberalism, it is not surprising that members of both the countercultural right and the countercultural left began to practice and advocate homeschooling. (p. 103)
Gaither recognized that homeschooling is about who will have charge over who transmits knowledge, culture, and worldview to children.
….
Although Apple’s (2000) reasoning was nuanced in his arguments against homeschooling, they revolved around who would be in charge of what is taught to children during school hours and how that would impact society. His argument was partially based on the claim that the parents are “conservative” (p. 257), “selfish and antipublic” (p. 269), and antistatist” (p. 263). He wants the state to have more control over what is taught to homeschool children, especially if “public money” (p. 269) is involved. Later, Apple (2006) argued that homeschooling is bad for black children and society because homeschooling would not promote his personal values and beliefs about what is good for state-run schooling or society in general.
The more one reads scholars who have argued for less parental control and more state control over homeschool children’s education, the clearer it becomes that authority, control, and power are at the center of what it means to home educate. West (2009), for example, laid out seven “harms” that a parent’s “right to homeschool,” without enough state control over the practice of home-based education, might “… inflict on the children so educated” (p. 8). She especially focused on children of “religious parents” (p. 8). Some of the potential harms, she claims, are that the children will not be loved unconditionally by their parents, will follow their parents’ modelling of not questioning authority, will be ethically servile, and may not be academically literate. Therefore, West promoted more state control–than exists in all of the 50 US states–over homeschooling in the form of curricular review, mandatory academic achievement testing, and home visits by civil government agents.
Lines (2009) was not arguing for state control over homeschooling but focused on home education in her essay and explained that Plato “… would ban private education, whether at home, in a private school, in a library, or on the street. For him, parents play a subordinate role: “Children must not be allowed to attend or not attend school at the whim of their father; as far as possible, education must be compulsory for ‘one and all’ … because they belong to the state first and their parents second” (pp. 42-43). Plato was firm that the state must control a child’s education and would not allow the family to do so. Hasson (2012) also was not arguing for more state control over home education but her analysis pointed, again, to control being at the center of what is homeschooling.
Progressives’ criticisms [of homeschooling and parents’ jurisdiction in it] seem to boil down to little more than a complaint that homeschooling families do not present opposing beliefs and values in a favorable light. The proposed remedies seem to favor a government-mandated platform, through mandated curriculum or testing, designed to ensure that progressives’ beliefs and values are presented in a positive light, creating the opportunity to persuade homeschooled children to abandon their parents’ beliefs and values. (p. 17)
Three U.S. scholars have promoted during the modern homeschool movement the outright banning of homeschooling. Fineman (2009) argued “… that public education should be mandatory and universal” (p. 17). They go to this position because they are opposed to the fact that “Homeschooling is the only educational environment that affords parents the highest level of control over the information that their children receive” (p. 106). They want the state, not the parents, to have this authority over children. In a similar vein, Bartholet (2020) called for “… a presumptive ban on homeschooling …” (p. 3). She wants the state, not the parents, to have charge over children’s education because she does not want parents to isolate their children from ideas and values that she thinks are “… central to our democracy …” (p. 3), holds that too many parents will teach their children “… racial segregation and female subservience …” and to “… question science” (p. 3), and without more state control over home education too many children will be abused and neglected. That is, overall, the state, not parents, must control all children’s education.
Ross’ (2010) call for more state control over home education also shows that state authority versus parent authority is at the epicenter of what homeschooling means. She was particularly worried about the values and beliefs that “traditionalist Christian parents” (p. 991) will teach to their children, and ones that Ross believes will not be taught to children, without more state control over parents teaching their children at home. She wants herself and the state to decide which lessons, values, and beliefs should be taught to all children and lay state-enforced “mandatory curricular requirements” and testing dictates (p. 1008) upon all home-educated children. That is, control is at the focus of what it means to homeschool.
Along this same line of thinking, Yuracko (2007) expressed her concerns that left alone, too many parents who home educate their children might approve of clitoridectomy and child marriage (p. 9) and “… shield their children from liberal values of sex equality, gender role fluidity and critical rationality” (p. 10). She also promoted the idea that religious homeschoolers have a “… a belief in parental control—indeed ownership—of children” (p. 5-6). Therefore, Yuracko argued, “… that states must – not may or should … ” (p. 11) control homeschooling to ensure that children get the education of which she approves and promotes.
Rarely do negative critics of homeschooling or of parental authority in home education make clear their worldview presuppositions. Dwyer and Peters (2019) are an exception. Two of their philosophical axioms are that “The state must have the ultimate authority to determine what children’s interests are” and “No one has a “right'” to control the life of another person” (p. 156) and, therefore, the state should have primary and final authority over a child’s education and not the parents, as the latter which is the case in most U.S. states. It is clear, then, that their “… analysis of state policy regarding homeschooling …” (p. 156) is about who will control all children’s education, and these authors know that they are arguing against homeschooling as it has been known for 40 years in the United States and as it has existed in many nations across millennia.
The above-mentioned negative criticisms of clear or unfettered parental authority over children’s education and the promotion of the civil government having more or total authority over children’s education–all in the context of discussing homeschooling–either plainly imply or explicitly show that a sine qua non of the definition of homeschooling is control. The main reason that there are negative scholarly critics of homeschooling is that homeschooling gives control to the parents and not to the state, which the negative critics want to use to impose more of their own beliefs, values, knowledge, and worldview onto all children. Scholars and organizations like the National Education Association and the Coalition for Responsible Home Education chide policymakers about how homeschooling in the United States (and other nations) exists because of its very nature. Its nature is parent controlled, home based, family based, private, privately funded, and under no or relatively little state control in the eyes of these negative critics. In short, homeschooling is parent-controlled home-based privately-funded private education (PCHBPE).
Source: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5211580
Excerpted with permission of the author, Brian D. Ray.