ESTABLISHMENT
CRITICISM of homeschooling these days tends to avoid--with
good reason--questioning its academic quality. On average,
homeschooled students score at the 77th percentile on standardized
tests such as the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills according to the Home
School Legal Defense Association. Instead, the critique more
usually hits a supposed failure to "socialize" the
students--to teach them how to interact in society.
The December issue of the American Psychological Association's
publication Monitor, for instance, features a report by
Monitor staff reporter Bridget Murray that points to a new
"wariness" among psychologists about parent-directed
homeschooling. After first listing several benefits homeschooling
provides, Murray turns to concerns raised by a small number of
professional psychologists. There is, Murray writes, "an
enormous need for outcomes research" in the area of
"social development." Talking with psychologists, Murray
reports, elicits such questions as whether homeschoolers are
"trying to protect children from becoming adults?" Will
their children be misfits with mainstream life when they are
older? Will they be sheltered completely from diversity in our
culture? Will they go against what society values as proper
behavior? (We should all be reaching for our Politically Correct
dictionaries about now.)
It isn't as though APA believes cultural norms should set every
standard for child rearing. On the contrary, the December Monitor
also includes articles titled: "Raising children to resist
violence: What you can do" and "What makes kids care:
Teaching gentleness in a violent world." In addition, in
another publication on its Web site ("Answers to your
questions about sexual orientation and homosexuality"), the
APA does not hesitate to argue, with little regard to society's
conventions and traditions, that homosexuality is pre-determined,
unchangeable, and healthy. But when it comes to homeschoolers,
suddenly APA registers deep worries about the possibility of
failure to conform with societal norms.
THE
PSYCHOLOGISTS' CONCERN for shaping our children's social
development did not appear out of the blue; it has a long history.
Turn-of-the-century psychologists were notorious for writing
novels sketching Utopian schemes controlled by
"professionals" in which family life would be replaced
by social engineering and traditional religion run out of town.
The discipline has a long tradition of using the public schools to
direct personality development quite apart from the academic goals
the public assume are pursued.
In 1983, noted UCLA education historian Professor Sol Cohen
wrote an article published in the History of Education
Quarterly that recounted the "mental hygiene
movement" that began with small committees of intellectuals
and professionals during World War I. John Dewey, who at the time
was considered the world's foremost educational psychologist, was
a guiding influence and leader of the movement. In the 1920s,
these individuals established the new child guidance clinics and
their ideas took hold in teacher education textbooks in the '30s.
Personality development became a key priority for public
education.
Just as physical hygiene had proven crucial for the urban
public health crises of the late 1800s, they argued, so should a
mental hygiene program of psychoanalytic and behaviorist
psychologies be implemented to prevent schizophrenia and juvenile
delinquency. In 1950 the summary statement of a White House
Conference on Children announced that the public education system
was indeed the primary agent for socialization of the
nation's children. John Dewey's dream that social development
should replace academics as the dominant concern of American
education had arrived.
AS A
GRADUATE STUDENT at U.C. Berkeley in the mid-1970s, I was
the beneficiary of a National Institute of Mental Health
fellowship for the study of "mental health consultation in
the public schools." Seemed like a good idea at the time, but
there were two problems. First, theoretical textbooks
notwithstanding, I found that no specific, measurable,
agreed-upon, realistic, timed, operational definition of mental
health existed. Second, every minority group on campus had
developed its own "wariness" about how "the
man" would interpret mental health and what measures would be
used to ensure that everybody was "helped." Thus, elite
professionals were attempting to impose their idea of
mental health on the rest of us without either defining what they
meant by that phrase or even asking the opinions of (never mind
showing any respect for) those whose mental health they proposed
to achieve.
Nothing has changed for either the engineers or the engineered
in the 20 years since I left Cal except that now a two decade-long
record of failed programs for social development wasting billions
of dollars has been accumulated. A precise summation of it all was
provided by psychologist Dr. William Coulson, partner of the late
Carl Rogers and former proponent of the principles of the mental
hygiene movement: "What we helped achieve was an educational
system which brought kids down, rather than up."
In one sense the psychologists are right: instruction involves
more than academics. It is inescapably ethical, which is what all
the concern over "socialization" is about. The question
is, whose ethics will define proper "socialization?"
Many homeschoolers and private Christian schools want their
children's "socialization" to be guided by the
Scriptures--and they are no more interested than APA is in
tailoring their beliefs to fit the culture's current dictates. One
thing the Scriptures say is that primary responsibility for
education-socialization resides with parents, with the church
adding some oversight (to insure the parents do not neglect their
children's religious instruction) and the state (to insure the
parents commit no crimes against their children). Even Bridget
Murray, in her Monitor article, cites survey research
showing parental disengagement correlates strongly with low
academic achievement and drug and alcohol abuse by teens.
For almost two centuries, American education achieved great
success without tax-funding or compulsory attendance. Parents, to
borrow contemporary phrasing, were empowered to fulfill their
God-given destiny of directing the "socialization" of
the next generation. Besides homeschooling, a variety of school
reform ideas have been proposed and, to varying degrees, are being
tested around the country: alternative unions, charter schools,
public vouchers, private scholarships, proprietary schools,
religious programs--all innovative ways to cope with the largely
acknowledged failure of government (i.e., public)
education. The wisdom they all share is knowing that education
improves in direct relation to the degree to which parents are in
charge.
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