Away with All Teachers: The Cultural Politics of Home Schooling

In the US & a number of nations, the movement toward home schooling is stimulated by the circulation of antistatist discourses & the continuation & expansion of claims about school failure. In these accounts, sources of educational problems are multiple: (1) Teacher education institutions produce teachers who are unprepared academically & unskilled in teaching the basics. (2) State-funded (public, in the US sense of the word) schools have been taken over by "progressive" teaching models that are unworkable. (3) These schools do not teach "traditional" cultural & religious knowledge, beliefs, & values. (4) Public schools do not listen to conservative parents & are much too bureaucratic. Supporters of home schooling are usually religious fundamentalists who have increasing power. They have formed a national coalition & have joined in a tense rightist hegemonic alliance with neoliberals & neoconservatives that seeks to reconstruct common sense about education & all things social. Shown here is how the movement toward home schooling has become more extensive & more dangerous than has usually been thought. In the process, home schooling is situated in the larger conservative & authoritarian populist ideological, religious, & social movements that provide much of its impetus. Connections are suggested with other protectionist impulses, & links are made to the history of & concerns about the growth of activist government. How it may actually hurt many other students who are not home schooled is indicated. 35 References. Adapted from the source document.