The Private Voice: Homeschooling, Hannah Arendt, and Political Education

ABSTRACT

What becomes of the political orientation of American education when children are educated in the home rather than in public schools? Homeschooling critics raise concerns over the larger consequences: political exit and even indoctrination. Drawing on a recent study of 62 interviews with 35 homeschooling families in 11 states in the USA, we offer a theoretical argument grounded in empirical observations and perceptions of homeschoolers themselves. Using the work of political theorist Hannah Arendt as a guide, we suggest that, contrary to critics’ claims of political exit over voice, homeschooling may provide the opportunity for some families to respond with a “private voice” that is politically robust because it is intentionally subversive to a (perceived) homogenous dominant culture. We thus argue that some homeschoolers offer an understanding of private life that is political without being “public,” and that they reconcile this irony by attempting to cultivate reflexive “thinking” in their children regarding questions of conformity, materialism, and plurality.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to James Arthur, Albert Cheng, David Franz, Perry Glanzer, Charles Glenn, and Emily Rose Gum for critical comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

¹ The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) estimated the figure at 1.77 million for 2012 (Redford et al., 2017, pp. 5–6) whereas the nonprofit National Home Education Research Institute estimated it at over two million for 2010 (Ray, 2011). The data for report from the National Center for Education Statistics should be taken as estimates. The National Household Education Survey, the data source for the homeschooling figures, changed its sampling procedure in 2011, and the NCES has recently withdrawn some of its published data on homeschooling due to concern about the validity of its adjusted figures. The range of their estimates is from 1,543,000 to 2,003,000. See the “Technical Notes” section of Redford et al., 2017.

² The empirical evidence is mixed. Some argue that homeschoolers make “good citizens” (see Ray, 2004; the sample in this study was not representative of the homeschool population, and a public school control group was not included in the study, so national averages are used for comparisons; Cheng, 2014; Smith & Sikkink, 1999). But some recent studies with longitudinal data suggest different results and show less civic activity for young adults who were homeschooled (see Hill & Den Dulk, 2013; Pennings, Seel, Neven Van Pelt, Sikkink, & Wiens, 2011).

³ To be clear, we are not arguing that Arendt (1971)would approve or disapprove of homeschooling. Rather, we find her framing of “thinking” a helpful way to understand how a private activity in late-modernity may “cease to be a marginal affair in political matters” (p. 445). Arendt is obviously not writing about homeschoolers, and homeschoolers are not citing Arendt in their articulations of their ideas. But we suggest that the homeschoolers in this study are Arendtian in important ways.

⁴ In this paper, we argue that political has a broader meaning than what we usually consider as activity in the realm of civic affairs in relation to the state. Arendt sees politics as Aristotle (2002) did – we are political animals because we have the capacity to speak with each other about the world and what is just and unjust, good and evil, useful and useless, and then actually do something about it (p. 1253a). This ability to speak and act with each other is what draws light and meaning into our world – politics thus begins as a way to preserve a space for the freedom to do this very human activity (Arendt, 1961, p. 146; 2005, p. 128). And so, though all aspects of human society (for Arendt, labor and work) are related to political life in some way, politics itself is something we do for its own sake, distinguished from the things we must do because they are necessary (1958, p. 13, 2005, p. 119). “The meaning of politics is freedom,” Arendt (2005, p. 108) reminds us. Thus, quoting a letter of Jefferson’s, Arendt (1963) writes that to be “a participator in public affairs” is more than voting, and more than managing other men (p. 128); in the words of Tocqueville (2002), what is at stake when we reduce politics to that narrow conception of voting and governing is the experience of freedom itself (II.4.7).

⁵ We want to be clear: we are not arguing that all homeschooling families align with the political act of resistance in private life that we outline here. We fully acknowledge that the homeschooling population is highly diverse and that there are undoubtedly families for whom the critics’ concerns may be accurate. Here we simply provide empirical data alongside a theoretical framework to suggest that there are many homeschooling families that complicate the critics’ concern that homeschooling is necessarily contradictory to the common goods of democratic life.

⁶ The idea of “thinking” is as old as the nature of philosophic dialogue. For theorists like Charles Taylor (1991), individual identity has a “dialogic” character, a notion he borrows from George Herbert Mead, and through which we receive our “horizons of significance” (33ff). Other social theorists, most notably Margaret Archer (2003), distinguish the interior dialogue from that which Taylor speaks of and that which we may hold with a friend. Though the kinds of internal conversation differ, many theorists suggest that our mode of “reflexivity,” or thinking, can sustain and transform our social worlds, mediating between social structures and individual agency (Donati & Archer, 2015; Vandenberghe, 2014,; Wiley, 2016).

⁷ By negative narrative, we mean that by which homeschooling families are seen as united across a wide range of motivations: whether they homeschool because of religious reasons, pedagogical reasons, lifestyle (family moves a lot), special needs, etc., they all have a vision of what their children need that, in their perception, is not provided by conventional education. Although they homeschool for different reasons, they are united by what they stand against – the public school. For some families, the explicitly “political” aspect of that negative narrative ends here – they aren’t trying to make a political statement and simply want room to do what they see as best for their family. But others draw on their own experience and that of their friends as basis for a political critique against conventional education and, in their perception, the conformity symbolized by it. Both kinds, we argue, are political by implication.

⁸ This research was conducted as part of the School Culture and Student Formation Project at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. See http://iasculture.org/research/culture-formation/school-cultures-and-student-formation-project.

⁹ That document first described the larger, collaborative study like this: “The School Cultures and Student Formation Project, hosted at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, is a nation-wide research study of moral and civic education in high schools. The project seeks to understand the various ways that high schools influence the life direction of students, especially regarding moral and civic development, systematically exploring distinctive approaches to character and citizenship education across a variety of different school sectors: public and private, religious and secular, and homeschooling.”

¹⁰ Although there is continual debate over what is and is not included in a phenomenological method of interpreting social scientific data (Bird, 2009; Van Manen, 2017), it begins by asking questions about the “phenomena” at hand, moving to theory and interpretation or explanation after detailed observation and description. For our study, this meant following a general pattern of questions in our interviews that focused on moral and civic formation, coding the data according to the patterns that began to emerge among participants, and then re-visiting the transcripts alongside theoretical accounts like that offered by Hannah Arendt. In following a phenomenological method, what is considered primary is the data itself (in our case, the articulated actions, perceptions, and justifications of the homeschooling families recorded in the interview transcripts and in our observation notes). The theory (Arendt) serves as an assistant in understanding the phenomenon (homeschooling), helping to expand the researchers’ and readers’ imaginations to better understand another’s subjective world. See Bogdan and Taylor (1975) for more information on the process of a phenomenological method.

¹¹ All names have been changed to protect the confidentiality of participants.

¹² Unschooling denotes a specific homeschooling approach rooted in the self-directed learning of the child. The educational environment is intentionally highly unstructured, allowing for the natural curiosity and interests of the child to guide the learning.

¹³ Respondents’ perceptions of “public school” come up frequently in the interview data. Perceptions, of course, do not always match reality. In some cases, these perceptions are based on actual experience in a public school – Scott, for instance, was in a public school until high school, some homeschooled students took one or two classes in the local public school, and many of the mothers we interviewed were former teachers in public schools. In other cases, however, the perceptions of public schools were not based on any actual experiences in public schools but based on hearsay or stereotypes. Of course, many homeschool critics also base their perceptions on hearsay or stereotypes. It seems to us that both sides could gain from some charity in their framing of the “other..Nevertheless, to reiterate a point made earlier in the paper, perceptions matter sociologically because they have a way of palpably structuring the parameters of social life and interactions.

¹⁴ The literature on homeschooling generally divides the population into two groups. Van Galen (1991) labels them “ideologues” (Christian fundamentalists who object to what the public schools teach and want to pass on their conservative political and religious beliefs to their children) and “pedagogues” (people who believe that children learn more naturally apart from formal schooling, and desire to grow children’s innate curiosity and creativity). Stevens (2001) uses the labels “believers” and “inclusives” to describe roughly the same groups, and Gaither (2008) calls them “closed communion” and “open communion.” Although the dichotomous categories are helpful descriptive tools, families do not always fit into discrete groups. Respondents in our sample roughly fall on a continuum between these two groups. The important point here, however, is that the activity of thinking seems shared by families across the continuum.

¹⁵ This seems to be a broader phenomenon among late-modern American parents (See Dill, 2015).

¹⁶ In Durkheim’s (1972) words: “Education is thus simply the means by which a society prepares, in its children, the essential conditions of its own existence” (p. 203).

¹⁷ As we saw in Julie’s description of diversity, homeschooling families often articulate broader definitions of diversity than race, ethnicity, or income alone. Many see diversity as including a range of age, ideas, interests, ability or disability, and learning style. This expanded understanding of diversity could be a place for a further critique, however: by seeing each individual person as unique, the pressing concerns of inequality and injustice to groups in education could be underplayed.

¹⁸ Arendt’s infamous phrase arising from the encounter – “the banality of evil” – remains highly controversial, as does her description of the trial. See Stangneth (2015) for a recent contribution.

¹⁹ “Reality is different from, and more than, the totality of facts and events, which, anyhow, is unascertainable. Who ‘says what is’ always tells a story, and in this story the particular facts lose their contingency and acquire some humanly comprehensible meaning … The political function of the storyteller – historian or novelist – is to teach acceptance of things as they are. Out of this acceptance, which can also be called truthfulness, arises the faculty of judgment … ” (Arendt, 1961, pp. 261–262). As a note, one of Arendt’s most perplexing concepts is her notion of “judgement,” which we have intentionally left out of the major content of this paper for two reasons. Primarily, we have no authoritative text from her on the subject. In addition, in other works where she does pick up the notion of judgement in relation to education (1959, 1961), it is often to show that thinking precedes judgement and that it and requires a certain amount of life experience.

²⁰ Arendt (1961) writes that one of the assumptions of modern education is “that there exists a child’s world and a society formed among children that are autonomous and must insofar as possible be left to them to govern. Adults are only there to help with this government. The authority that tells the individual child what to do and what not to do rests with the child group itself … it takes into account only the group and not the individual child” (p. 181).

²¹ This reveals a further irony in the contemporary homeschooling movement: it is made possible only because of modern individualism (see Stevens, 2001 for more on homeschooling and individualism). That is, their resistance to conformity (what we are calling their political action) is built upon assumptions of individualism rooted in modern liberalism. But the irony works both ways – the rise of Arendt’s “social” sphere of conformity is a uniquely modern phenomenon, which draws on an original point from Tocqueville that individualism and collectivism arise together in modernity.

²² “In such emergencies,” Arendt (1978) writes, “it turns out that the purging component of thinking … is political by implication” (p. 192).

²³ Some families were explicitly involved in state political activities as well, often through organizations such as Generation Joshua, the civic education arm of the conservative Homeschool Legal Defense Association. In some cases, grassroots Generation Joshua chapters would volunteer in political campaigns of candidates who support homeschool causes, and these candidates were almost exclusively Republican or conservative Independents. One of our student respondents, Martha Billings, led her local Generation Joshua chapter, which sponsored debates between both candidates in local elections. She saw her role as educating community members so they could be informed voters: “I’d rather have an informed turnout than a large one. Most people who come in, they are not informed. They say they wanna vote for the person but they have no idea who the person is.” A successful meeting, for Martha, “means like grassroots, like people are like actually engaged and are actually interested in this, and not just going for like the free food or whatever.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Kern Family Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey S. Dill

Jeffrey S. Dill is the Donchian Scholar of Character and Culture at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He teaches sociology in the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University in St. Davids, PA. Address: Fowler Hall, 1300 Eagle Rd, St Davids, PA 19087.

Mary Elliot

Mary Elliot is a Lonergan Graduate Fellow at Boston College, where she studies cultural sociology and social and political philosophy. Address: 308 Bapst Library, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467.