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Introduction
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
>> 1 Introduction “Won’t your children be social misfits?” “Do you really think you can teach them as well as a professional teacher?” “What about the prom?” More than 1.5 million children in the United States are homeschooled. This number, a conservative estimate, represents 2.9 percent of the schoolage population1 and is up significantly from the mid-1980s, when the U.S. Department of Education estimated that fewer than 300,000 American children were homeschooled.2 Since 1993, every state has provided a legal option for parents to educate their children at home,3 and although homeschoolers have gained legal legitimacy and visibility with their growing numbers, they have yet to secure mainstream acceptance. Homeschooling is widely misunderstood by the non-homeschooling public, and homeschooling parents themselves feel the stigma sharply each time they are asked whether they are worried about destroying their children socially and academically. Misconceptions are fueled by national media stories that sensationalize the role of homeschooling in unusual events—either triumphs, such as a homeschooled child who wins the National Spelling Bee, or tragedies, such as a homeschooling mother who, under the influence of postpartum 2 > 3 these families’ lives were affected by taking on such an enormous commitment , especially one that is so disparaged. Raising children is hard enough when a family is going with the tide; I could not imagine adding “educate children” to the domestic chore list and, further, swimming upstream to do it. How do parents persevere with such a monumental yet stigmatized family choice? With these questions fueling my curiosity, I decided to investigate homeschooling sociologically. The issue of household labor and its effect on families is a vast area of study in sociology. With that in mind, I knew any information I gathered about the workload of homeschooling would be complex and interrelated with other areas of family life. In addition, groups or activities that are stigmatized affect people in multifaceted ways, from identities to relationships to social standing and access to resources. No survey of fixed-choice questions emailed to homeschoolers could tap these issues deeply enough to reveal the intricacies of the experience. To study the workload and stigma of homeschooling , I needed to have extended conversations with homeschoolers themselves. In March 2001, with the intent of learning more about homeschooling from the people who do it, I located Cedar County’s primary organization , which I call the Parents’ Association for Teaching at Home, or PATH, a homeschooling support group with more than 600 member families. Based on this number, PATH claimed that Cedar County had the highest homeschooling rate in the nation, and though I was never able to confirm that statistic, the number does suggest that our rate was at least twice the national average.7 PATH’s meetings, held one night a month in a public school gymnasium , were open to the public, so I began attending even though I was not a homeschooler, nor even a parent. The most striking fact I encountered in my early experiences with PATH was that homeschooling “parents” were mothers. Cedar County homeschoolers , like homeschoolers nationally, were overwhelmingly mothers in twoparent , heterosexual families, who stayed at home and educated the children while their husbands earned enough in the paid labor force to support their families on one income. Fathers were occasionally involved in PATH, but mothers proliferated the subculture, attending meetings and posting to the email listserv to seek support for or offer advice about homeschooling . I quickly understood that homeschooling was women’s work and was closely tied to mothers’ identities. The challenges they experienced, such as stigma from outsiders, and the concerns they expressed, such as unmanageable workloads, were filtered through their maternal identities, which influenced how they felt about themselves as mothers, progressed through 4 > 5 view emotions much like they view the self: as interpretive and socially derived. Our feelings are not purely innate or instinctual but rather depend on how we define situations and internalize cultural beliefs about particular emotions. That is not to say that emotions are divorced from biological processes. Indeed, our physiological responses are important elements in experiencing our emotions, but they do not constitute emotions in and of themselves. Instead, we experience emotions “on the template of prior expectations .”8 Through socialization, we learn to interpret these physiological responses by assessing the situation and drawing on our cultural knowledge about emotions. Sociologists are interested in the meanings we create around particular emotions—how we assign value (e.g...