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Homeschoolers on to College: What Research Shows Us
Journal of College Admission, Fall 2004 by Ray, Brian D
These home-educated adults' degree of community and civic involvement supports some ideas Patricia Lines, formerly a researcher with the U.S. Department of Education, expressed about homeschoolers a decade earlier (1994). She asked whether homeschooling parents and their children were withdrawing from the larger public debate about education and, more generally, from social discourse that was an integral part of a liberty-loving republic. In a sense, she addressed whether these children and youth were being prepared to be a significant part of society. Lines concluded:
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"Although I homeschool parents] have turned their backs on a widespread and hallowed practice of sending children to a school located in a particular building, adhering to a particular schedule and program, they have not turned their backs on the broader social contract as understood at the time of the Founding [of the United States]... Like the Antifederalists, these homeschoolers are asserting their historic individual rights so that they may form more meaningful bonds with family and community. In doing so, they are not abdicating from the American agreement. To the contrary, they are affirming it."
The data on the degree of community involvement and civic engagement of adults who were homeschooled are not shocking. After all, researchers Smith and Sikkink (1999) found that homeschool parents, the main models for their children, were highly civically engaged. In a survey examining the rate at which parents were engaged in public civic activities, Smith and Sikkink used data from the 1996 National Household Education Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, which differentiates between students educated in public, Catholic, non-Catholic church-related, and nonreligious private schools, and homeschool students. Parents were asked about the extent of family involvements in a variety of civic activities. The researchers concluded:
"Far from being privatized and isolated, home schooling families are typically very well networked and quite civically active. The empirical evidence is clear and decisive: private schoolers and home schoolers are considerably more civically involved in the public square than are public schoolers, even when the effects of differences in education, income, and other related factors are removed from the equation. Indeed, we have reason to believe that the organizations and practices involved in private and home schooling, in themselves, tend to foster public participation in civic affairs... the challenges, responsibilities, and practices that private schooling and home education normally entail for their participants may actually help reinvigorate America's civic culture and the participation of her citizens in the public square."
Findings on homeschoolers in New Mexico (Ray, 200Ia) and Ohio (Ray, 200Ib) are consistent with those of Smith and Sikkink. The aforementioned recent study of adults who were home-educated, therefore, implies that the modeling of their parents with respect to civic activity is having a long-lasting impact on homeschool children and youth.
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