Does Homeschooling or Private Schooling Promote Political Intolerance? Evidence From a Christian University

Abstract

Political tolerance is the willingness to extend civil liberties to people who hold views with which one disagrees. Some have claimed that private schooling and homeschooling are institutions that propagate political intolerance by fostering separatism and an unwillingness to consider alternative viewpoints. I empirically test this claim by measuring the political tolerance levels of undergraduate students attending an evangelical Christian university. Using ordinary least squares regression analysis, I find that for these students, greater exposure to private schooling instead of traditional public schooling is not associated with any more or less political tolerance, and greater exposure to homeschooling is associated with more political tolerance.

• homeschooling
• private schooling
• political tolerance

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Patrick Wolf and the reviewers of the Journal of School Choice for providing feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. 1. Compared to 12th-grade public-school students, 12th graders at the fundamentalist school also exhibited greater dislike of groups advocating for more homosexual or women’s rights. But after controlling for background characteristics, the difference became statistically indistinguishable.