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We are proud to welcome you to our special series, Quality Education, brought to you by Bro, where we talk about improving our current education systems for the radically changing 21st century global society. I'm your host, Lee Jung-Recko. Today we're speaking with Dr. Jameson Brewer.
He's an assistant professor of social foundations of education at the University of North Georgia. His book is Home Schooling, a guide book of practices, claims, issues, and implications. Dr. Brewer, thank you so much for sitting down with us today.
When it comes to demographics, what does homeschooling look like? And why has homeschooling grown in popularity over the last 20 plus years? Yeah, that's a great question. Here in the United States, historically, and also in contemporary terms, the majority of families who homeschool from a racial demographic background are white families.
And a little bit we may discuss this sort of financial context of homeschooling. And here in the United States, those two things, racial privilege of being white and wealth do go hand in hand. But across the board, there has been a growth. In homeschooling, over time, one of the fastest growing groups is within the Black community.
They have different rationales and reasons for homeschooling. A lot of families, Black families, will cite concerns of safety in schools for their children. And that's an important conversation to be had, both in terms of what it means for those homeschool families, but also what it might mean for public schools. There has, so prior to the pandemic, there were approximately two and a half to three million, roughly students being homeschooled in the United States.
If we want to say we're post-COVID, and of course, with the caveat that COVID is not over, but as we've begun to move back into more traditional forms of schooling after the lockdowns, the number of homeschool families is approximately doubled of what it was prior to the beginning of COVID. And so we've seen that massive increase, but prior to COVID, there have been a steady increase over time still to date, white families do make up the majority and to the previous point about finance. Not all families who homeschool are affluent or wealthy, of course, they're always exceptions to the rule. But generally speaking, families who homeschool tend to come from stronger financial backgrounds.
And that's easily understood when we know that, generally speaking, it does require one parent and stereotypically, but it's often the case, a mother to forego having a job and staying at home. And in the work that I've done in compiling some of the research, we know that homeschool families, their income from a demographic, an economic demographic is approximately three times higher than the median personal income in the United States and about 50% higher in terms of a household. And so demographically, they tend to be more affluent and they are far and away tend to be white. And so I'm curious, where does homeschooling fit into this larger debate over school choice?
Yeah, that's a great question. So my research broadly conceptualized is interested in understanding the impacts of privatization and marketization of schools. And of course, part of that conversation is school choice. And it takes on many forms, school vouchers for students to attend private schools with public money, charter schools, which are sort of a hybrid mix of a public and private delivery of education, but then homeschooling.
Homeschooling is the quintessential example of both school choice, but the more fundamental underpinning of what it means, or for those who are interested in school choice, is conceiving of education as an individualistic good or an individualistic commodity. And in the case of homeschooling, it is often individual based, but understanding that that process of education and schooling is not something attached to a conception of the common or the public good, but something that should be done with only one or a couple of individuals in mind, a family has siblings, which is often the case in homeschool families. But very much within the disposition of parents believe, or rightly understanding that it is their children, but it does raise significant questions about the context of school choice, particularly with homeschooling, because parents who may choose to send their child to a private school or a charter school through those school choice mechanisms are still relying on some semblance of professional educators or experts to provide pedagogy and teaching to their children. Whereas in homeschooling, that the artifact of school choice, or that the conception of choice manifested is not just that a child will be educated at home or that the parent has the right to make that choice, but they are also making an active choice that professional educators are not needed and that anybody by virtue of being a parent is qualified to teach a child and they express that choice by keeping them at home.
You know, for me, I'm an educator. I currently teach future teachers and I'm a former K-12 teacher. My wife, partner, she is currently a K-12 teacher and we have two children, two young children. I think that we, given our training and experience arguably would be considered qualified in some ways to homeschool our children, but we don't because even or despite of our expertise and experience and education, we recognize that we are not experts in all things pedagogy and specifically all of the content areas.
You know, this actually happened during COVID, unrelated to COVID, but my daughter was riding her bike and she fell off of her bike and skin for me. And I had the wherewithal and understanding and the parental expertise as it were to know, to clean the wound and apply a bandage and everything was fine. In that case, I did not need any outside expertise or intervention. My parental sovereignty provided me with a no-how of how to attend to her minor straight that she had underneath.
But had it gone differently, had she broken a bone? For example, when she fell off of her bike, I think that we can all agree that regardless of the context or the geography, it would be very difficult for a parent to make the argument that they themselves are capable and able and qualified to reset a bone and suture wounds and things such as that. We recognize as a society that we need expert medical intervention when it's important. And parents who do not do that can potentially face consequences for neglect, for failing to seek medical attention.
So for me, when I think about how this applies to homeschooling, it raises the question of how is it done that we as societies and communities will conceive of education? Is it and is the process of children learning? Is that important enough that we would need to have experts? Is it vital enough for the development of a child that we seek out trained educational professionals to provide those services for 13 or more years?
Or is education no more important than a minor scrape on the need in which somebody with no experience in medicine can attend to? This should raise some concerns across all societies of families who homeschool and what that means for how they conceive of the importance. Or in many ways, the lack of importance of formal education for children who will, regardless of what the parents want to do or regardless of the extent to which they hope to shelter them or replicate their own political or religious worldviews in them, these children will become adults and they will venture into broader society. And that society in that community has a vested interest in ensuring that the children who will become the adults of society moving forward are capable of operating within that world.
And the only way that we really can do it, it seems to me, is to ensure that we provide quality, expert education and pedagogy from teachers in public schools. What are some of the political rationales for homeschooling? Is it always aligned with a libertarian view or the sense of rugged individualism? Yeah, nothing is ever all one thing or another.
There are certainly families who choose a homeschool who do so from the political left of the political spectrum. So it's not always one thing, but by and large, a significant portion of homeschool families who do so, either solely because of or partly because of political dispositions often do embody the sort of libertarian disposition of rugged individualism. Again, homeschooling is the epitome of conceptualizing education and schooling as an individualistic process and an individualistic good or commodity. But also very much built into the culture of homeschooling is not just a general distrust of government or the collective public, but actively disengaging from that.
Homeschooling is one of the, or the homeschooling culture in communities, one of the hardest areas to do research on, particularly from publicly available data, simply because the data that we have is self-reported from that population. There is a lot that we simply do not know about that population because they, by political design, are disconnected from the government. And whether that is from a distrust of that or making political statements about a conception of a small government versus a big government. And just about every aspect of homeschooling, there are political implications for it.
But yes, most of them, again, whether they are actively choosing to do so from a libertarian disposition or ideology, the very practice of homeschooling embodies a conception of disconnect from a government or disconnect from local community and local oversight. You write about how COVID has changed perceptions around homeschooling. Do parents feel differently about homeschooling now? So as I mentioned earlier, that there has been a very large increase in the number of children who are homeschooled post-COVID.
And again, I'm not suggesting COVID is over, but certainly in this era where we are moving back into traditional forms of schooling. During lockdowns and during digital learning, there were lots of media reports and conversations about children across the globe were being homeschooled. And that was obviously a bit of a misnomer. The majority of students who were at home for distancing and quarantine while they were with parents, they were still being educated by educators via the computer.
And there's a different conversation to be had about the benefits of that, the downfalls of digital learning, but that was schooling at home, not homeschooling. And I think that the increase that we have seen as we begin to move into a truly post-COVID world is that the increase in traditional homeschooling will likely wane for myriad reasons. One, parents are slowly being called back into work to be there physically as opposed to working at home. And for some that may never change, but we do see an increase in that.
And so from a logistical standpoint, it's becoming harder for many families to perform homeschooling. If the parent who normally be at home is being called back into work, my sense of it is that there are a certain portion of families who are currently doing homeschooling and did so because they falsely understood homeschooling as a continuation of the schooling at home, where professional educators were providing curriculum and assessment for their children. And it gave a false sense for many parents of, hey, I could do this. And of course, a lot of them are being met with the reality that homeschooling is different than schooling at home and anecdotally in the counties in which where I live, that's around me, I do know that there's an increase of students who began the school year as a new homeschool student, but have since moved back into the public school.
And I think some of that represents a reality check for some of those families. And especially as schools begin to lift some COVID mitigation factors, such as distancing, mask mandates and things like that, I think we'll likely see even more of those families who are currently choosing to homeschool because of policies such as a mask mandate, obviously, or again, making political decisions that expresses some sense of government overreach in some way. And so I do see that COVID obviously created the opportunity for many to experiment or try to do this thing called homeschooling and whether it's because they were newly afforded that opportunity because they could work from home or because they were expressing a political ideology, anti-mask, anti-science, these sorts of things. Things are slowly moving in the other direction and the dominoes as it were, will continue to quickly fall.
And I suspect that the number of homeschool students will begin to move back towards pre-COVID levels. Dr. Brewer, thank you again so much for taking the time to sit down with us. Dr.
James Simberer, he's an assistant professor of social foundations of education at the University of North Georgia. His book is homeschooling, a guide book of practices, claims, issues and implications. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast. You can find more podcast episodes on the Apple Podcast, Spotify and Google podcast.