Home schooling.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)

I read Milton Gaither's fine piece on home schooling ("Home Schooling Goes Mainstream " features, Winter 2009) as I was preparing for an evening meeting of the board of directors of the South Carolina Association of Independent Home Schools (SCAIHS). Gaither's essay reminded me of how much this part of the education landscape has changed since the mid-1980s, when my wife and I began teaching our children at home. Police officers now seldom serve truancy citations to home schoolers (in 1990 in our case). Indeed, home-schooling families now enjoy a high level of public support and admiration as well as generally positive press.

Though these "Anabaptists of American education," as I called parents who have opted for home-based schooling in The Dissenting Tradition in American Education, are certainly an increasingly diverse lot, they are united by a common commitment to the proposition that parents, not the state, have the primary right and responsibility to direct the upbringing and education of their children. They are, in columnist David Brooks's words, "more spiritually, emotionally, and physically invested in their homes than in other spheres of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do."

As Gaither points out, the growth of home-based education has added to the increasing diversity of educational options. The "hybridization" of home schooling has, along with other choice mechanisms and recent Establishment Clause interpretation, blurred the line between government and private educational spheres. As these characteristics were features of education in our colonial period, home-schooling families are reclaiming what was once a primary function of the household.

JAMES C. CARPER

Department of Educational Studies

University of South Carolina

Milton Gaither correctly notes that the variety of people practicing home schooling and their pedagogical practices has notably broadened. And he is correct in saying that home schooling is, in many ways, mainstream. He does, however, miss a few key points.