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Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement
More than one million American children are schooled by their parents. As their ranks grow, home schoolers are making headlines by winning national spelling bees and excelling at elite universities. The few studies conducted suggest that homeschooled children are academically successful and remarkably well socialized. Yet we still know little about this alternative to one of society’s most fundamental institutions. Beyond a vague notion of children reading around the kitchen table, we don’t know what home schooling looks like from the inside.
Sociologist Mitchell Stevens goes behind the scenes of the homeschool movement and into the homes and meetings of home schoolers. What he finds are two very different kinds of home education — one rooted in the liberal alternative school movement of the 1960s and 1970s and one stemming from the Christian day school movement of the same era. Stevens explains how this dual history shapes the meaning and practice of home schooling today. In the process, he introduces us to an unlikely mix of parents (including fundamentalist Protestants, pagans, naturalists, and educational radicals) and notes the core values on which they agree: the sanctity of childhood and the primacy of family in the face of a highly competitive, bureaucratized society.
Kingdom of Children aptly places home schoolers within longer traditions of American social activism. It reveals that home schooling is not a random collection of individuals but an elaborate social movement with its own celebrities, networks, and characteristic lifeways. Stevens shows how home schoolers have built their philosophical and religious convictions into the practical structure of the cause, and documents the political consequences of their success at doing so.
Ultimately, the history of home schooling serves as a parable about the organizational strategies of the progressive left and the religious right since the 1960s. Kingdom of Children shows what happens when progressive ideals meet conventional politics, demonstrates the extraordinary political capacity of conservative Protestantism, and explains the subtle ways in which cultural sensibility shapes social movement outcomes more generally.
Sociologist Mitchell Stevens goes behind the scenes of the homeschool movement and into the homes and meetings of home schoolers. What he finds are two very different kinds of home education — one rooted in the liberal alternative school movement of the 1960s and 1970s and one stemming from the Christian day school movement of the same era. Stevens explains how this dual history shapes the meaning and practice of home schooling today. In the process, he introduces us to an unlikely mix of parents (including fundamentalist Protestants, pagans, naturalists, and educational radicals) and notes the core values on which they agree: the sanctity of childhood and the primacy of family in the face of a highly competitive, bureaucratized society.
Kingdom of Children aptly places home schoolers within longer traditions of American social activism. It reveals that home schooling is not a random collection of individuals but an elaborate social movement with its own celebrities, networks, and characteristic lifeways. Stevens shows how home schoolers have built their philosophical and religious convictions into the practical structure of the cause, and documents the political consequences of their success at doing so.
Ultimately, the history of home schooling serves as a parable about the organizational strategies of the progressive left and the religious right since the 1960s. Kingdom of Children shows what happens when progressive ideals meet conventional politics, demonstrates the extraordinary political capacity of conservative Protestantism, and explains the subtle ways in which cultural sensibility shapes social movement outcomes more generally.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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100 people want to read
About the author
Mitchell L. Stevens
6 books2 followersA sociologist who studies higher education, and the inaugural Director of the project Futures of Learning, Occupations, and Work (FLOW). An associate professor at Stanford.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 1, 2009
I read this book as background material for a class, and really enjoyed learning about some history of the homeschooling movement in the US and how different camps were created and went their separate ways over the years of trying to get homeschooling legitimized in all 50 states. Nice mix of academic material and first-person accounts of homeschooling on the ground. I don't think you would necessarily read this book if you were interested in homeschooling for your family or deciding to homeschool, but I think it's valuable if you are trying to make some sense of what homeschooling is about and who some of the players in the field are.
September 6, 2020
Stevens identifies two main roots of Modern homeschooling and the sometimes strange ways they intersect.
Stevens suggests that the Christian fundamentalist strain became dominant over time because of its ability to organize and mobilize evangelical and fundamentalist parents to follow specific policy agendas and buy curriculum by a handful of Christian publishers.
The alternative school strain arising from 60s and 70s counterculture became less prominent specifically because of its individuality and unwillingness to institute hierarchies and formal organizations.
I liked that Stevens spent so much time with the families he interviewed and prioritized quoting the parents' own rationales.
Stevens suggests that the Christian fundamentalist strain became dominant over time because of its ability to organize and mobilize evangelical and fundamentalist parents to follow specific policy agendas and buy curriculum by a handful of Christian publishers.
The alternative school strain arising from 60s and 70s counterculture became less prominent specifically because of its individuality and unwillingness to institute hierarchies and formal organizations.
I liked that Stevens spent so much time with the families he interviewed and prioritized quoting the parents' own rationales.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 22, 2016
This will read like a book report... because it is. I'm in grad school now, what do you expect? This was a fine reading for a sociology class, but ultimately, I can't really see how it would be useful outside of being an assigned text. It's an interesting capture of the American homeschool movement during the 1990s, but isn't a how-to guide if you're wanting to join the movement. Thus, I think I could only recommend this book to someone interested in/studying sociology, but I don't think it has mass appeal.
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Homeschooling emerged as a social movement in response to the demands for school reform of the 1960s and 1970s. The actual components of how caregivers conceive of homeschooling activities and requirements vary from family to family, but two distinct strands of homeschooling were apparent in the 1990s when Mitchell Stevens, then a PhD student at Northwestern University, conducted an ethnography of the American homeschool movement within the greater Chicago area. Stevens utilized mixed methods for his analysis, including a series of individual and group interviews with 40+ families, observations of group meetings and support groups (from at least 10 different organizations), and print materials, such as magazines, bylaws for joining groups, and organized mailings circulated to families involved with the homeschooling movement. Kingdom of Children is Stevens’s account of homeschooling as a social movement and an analysis of the relationship between the movement and its cultural context.
During Stevens’s research, two distinct strands of homeschooling emerged: the believers and the inclusives (these are the most mentioned terms; a table of the other terms for these groups can be found at the end of this review). The believers and inclusives diverge as separate entities in regard to their organizational structures, political influences, access to support systems, missions, household and organizational hierarchies, chosen curriculum, and the path that led families to choosing homeschooling. Despite their differences, the two groups are largely unified by they choose to enact and what motivated them to pursue homeschooling: 1) the educators within both strands are largely full-time mothers who are financially dependent on fathers (all but one of the families Stevens interviewed fit this dynamic); 2) they shared a desire to individualize education for their children in a way they weren’t finding adequately supported in the traditional public school system.
Believers, or conservative Protestants, often frame their choice to homeschool their children as being divined by God. Conservative Protestants, by far the largest faction within the homeschool movement, form their own strand because of the exclusionary nature of their group. Protestant mothers view homeschooling as an amenable social system to their deeply held values of full-time domesticity. Homeschooling allows these mothers to go beyond their expected role of the mother and hold substantial household power, while still following the household and religious hierarchy of her marriage and faith. The respect of hierarchies by conservative Protestants facilitates easy following of hierarchical organizational structures within the larger group. During a politically heated moment for the movement, the structural organization and unity of conservative Protestants expedited the quick spread of relevant information and instructions for action to the believer network. When the group reacted uniformly and intensely, they successfully shaped the public perception of the homeschool movement as one cohesive group with the shared agenda of the believers.
However, the two strands of the homeschool movement did not overlap in their religious beliefs, their organizational methods, or their inclusivity. Inclusives, or members of the homeschool movement who practiced other or no faiths, including different veins of Christianity, were precluded from believer membership by bylaws and other enforcement devices which prevented inclusives from following the curriculum of and participating in the support groups intended for believers. Aside from being excluded from the group of believers, the inclusives largely lack other markers that would unify them. Because of this, they seek group consensus on major decisions and don’t enforce a strict hierarchy of power, a contrast to believers who frown upon dissent. While this theoretically allows all voices to be heard, it often means that group decisions are reached slowly and inclusive members often aren’t accountable to the larger group. Organizationally, the inclusives are not as structurally sound as the believers.
Because of these differences in organizational structure between the inclusives and the believers, the believers have been largely able to define the public opinion of homeschooling. Stevens clearly tries to devote equal space to describing the two different strands, but it is ultimately obvious that believers have been able to shape homeschooling as a social movement and how homeschooling is perceived publicly.
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Homeschooling emerged as a social movement in response to the demands for school reform of the 1960s and 1970s. The actual components of how caregivers conceive of homeschooling activities and requirements vary from family to family, but two distinct strands of homeschooling were apparent in the 1990s when Mitchell Stevens, then a PhD student at Northwestern University, conducted an ethnography of the American homeschool movement within the greater Chicago area. Stevens utilized mixed methods for his analysis, including a series of individual and group interviews with 40+ families, observations of group meetings and support groups (from at least 10 different organizations), and print materials, such as magazines, bylaws for joining groups, and organized mailings circulated to families involved with the homeschooling movement. Kingdom of Children is Stevens’s account of homeschooling as a social movement and an analysis of the relationship between the movement and its cultural context.
During Stevens’s research, two distinct strands of homeschooling emerged: the believers and the inclusives (these are the most mentioned terms; a table of the other terms for these groups can be found at the end of this review). The believers and inclusives diverge as separate entities in regard to their organizational structures, political influences, access to support systems, missions, household and organizational hierarchies, chosen curriculum, and the path that led families to choosing homeschooling. Despite their differences, the two groups are largely unified by they choose to enact and what motivated them to pursue homeschooling: 1) the educators within both strands are largely full-time mothers who are financially dependent on fathers (all but one of the families Stevens interviewed fit this dynamic); 2) they shared a desire to individualize education for their children in a way they weren’t finding adequately supported in the traditional public school system.
Believers, or conservative Protestants, often frame their choice to homeschool their children as being divined by God. Conservative Protestants, by far the largest faction within the homeschool movement, form their own strand because of the exclusionary nature of their group. Protestant mothers view homeschooling as an amenable social system to their deeply held values of full-time domesticity. Homeschooling allows these mothers to go beyond their expected role of the mother and hold substantial household power, while still following the household and religious hierarchy of her marriage and faith. The respect of hierarchies by conservative Protestants facilitates easy following of hierarchical organizational structures within the larger group. During a politically heated moment for the movement, the structural organization and unity of conservative Protestants expedited the quick spread of relevant information and instructions for action to the believer network. When the group reacted uniformly and intensely, they successfully shaped the public perception of the homeschool movement as one cohesive group with the shared agenda of the believers.
However, the two strands of the homeschool movement did not overlap in their religious beliefs, their organizational methods, or their inclusivity. Inclusives, or members of the homeschool movement who practiced other or no faiths, including different veins of Christianity, were precluded from believer membership by bylaws and other enforcement devices which prevented inclusives from following the curriculum of and participating in the support groups intended for believers. Aside from being excluded from the group of believers, the inclusives largely lack other markers that would unify them. Because of this, they seek group consensus on major decisions and don’t enforce a strict hierarchy of power, a contrast to believers who frown upon dissent. While this theoretically allows all voices to be heard, it often means that group decisions are reached slowly and inclusive members often aren’t accountable to the larger group. Organizationally, the inclusives are not as structurally sound as the believers.
Because of these differences in organizational structure between the inclusives and the believers, the believers have been largely able to define the public opinion of homeschooling. Stevens clearly tries to devote equal space to describing the two different strands, but it is ultimately obvious that believers have been able to shape homeschooling as a social movement and how homeschooling is perceived publicly.
November 21, 2011
Mitchell takes a hunch that I had about homeschooling and religion and politics and spins it out into a wonderful book. He crafts a fair analysis of the history of homeschooling as an American movement, as a casestudy for organizational politics, and as an expression of cultural metaphors about childhood.
Before homeschoolers divide themselves into one camp or another, they share a common and very American belief about the nature of children. Children are valuable individuals who deserve every opportunity possible to develop themselves, to be all that they can be. But there is a philosophical divide after that initial belief in individuality is granted. Are children inherently excellent with all they need for ultimate happiness and success inside them like a seed, and their parents are simply the gardeners whose job is to get out of the way and let the excellence emerge? Or are children innately valuable but essentially formless, with the capacity for good or evil, depending on outside influence and exposures?
These two different visions of the nature of the child divide the homeschooling community, even if the problem is not explicitly stated in those terms. People who believe in sin and man's fallen nature, tend to homeschool their children in order to teach them correctly. In our garden metaphor, they plant the seed, but then train the plant up the trellis, fertilize it properly, bag the fruits, trim the sick leaves, and cull the bad fruit. On the other side are the unschoolers, who don't believe in sinful natures as such, and garden their children like wild flowers, letting them grow in the wildest, freest way, with the gardener's primary responsibility being establishing a wonderful environment in which the plant can flourish.
These two camps have organized themselves differently-- into explicitly Christian groups with top-down hierarchical structures and swift and powerful political machinery-- and into loose, fluid, consensus-based inclusive groups that are personable but politically ineffective on the large scale.
His discussion of the role of mothers in the movement was fascinating. In both political wings, mothers do all of the work. In the Christian camp, the role of mothers as teachers and disciplinarians is culturally applauded, recognized, and encouraged. Mothers are told that they are not only doing the best thing for their children (those little individuals who deserve the best) but also for themselves as daughters of God. They get the cultural support they need for their own roles as homeschooling mothers. On the other side of things, mothers who believe that children need to grow unencumbered work as hard and sacrifice as much as the Christians, but without the cultural applause that recognizes their role. Instead they are told that they can wreck their kids by interfering with their growth. Their role is not recognized, and the pain and sacrifice of their impossible choice between being true to their authentic selves and giving their all to their kids is never recognized.
Mitchell's examination challenged me to note my own beliefs about the nature of childhood, the role of parents and the purpose of education. I was able to understand with a little more nuance the Christians' practices that have always just seemed bigoted and fear-based. And I nodded vigorously at the confusion of Lefty feminist moms who, on the one hand want to give their kids every opportunity, but on the other hand, feel the need to have recognition and success as an important contributing member of society.
The Christian wing of the homeschooling movement has, because of its philosophical belief in authority, taken over as the most influential homeschooling voice, politically, economically and culturally. And it has created mechanisms for sustaining the mothers who adopt the role of homeschooling parents by coopting the language of feminism when Christian women talk about fulfillment, economic success and intellectual challenge in the homeschooling project.
I would recommend this book to both homeschooling insiders and outsiders, to folks interested in political movements and organizations, and for people considering the implications of our metaphors for children and childhood.
Before homeschoolers divide themselves into one camp or another, they share a common and very American belief about the nature of children. Children are valuable individuals who deserve every opportunity possible to develop themselves, to be all that they can be. But there is a philosophical divide after that initial belief in individuality is granted. Are children inherently excellent with all they need for ultimate happiness and success inside them like a seed, and their parents are simply the gardeners whose job is to get out of the way and let the excellence emerge? Or are children innately valuable but essentially formless, with the capacity for good or evil, depending on outside influence and exposures?
These two different visions of the nature of the child divide the homeschooling community, even if the problem is not explicitly stated in those terms. People who believe in sin and man's fallen nature, tend to homeschool their children in order to teach them correctly. In our garden metaphor, they plant the seed, but then train the plant up the trellis, fertilize it properly, bag the fruits, trim the sick leaves, and cull the bad fruit. On the other side are the unschoolers, who don't believe in sinful natures as such, and garden their children like wild flowers, letting them grow in the wildest, freest way, with the gardener's primary responsibility being establishing a wonderful environment in which the plant can flourish.
These two camps have organized themselves differently-- into explicitly Christian groups with top-down hierarchical structures and swift and powerful political machinery-- and into loose, fluid, consensus-based inclusive groups that are personable but politically ineffective on the large scale.
His discussion of the role of mothers in the movement was fascinating. In both political wings, mothers do all of the work. In the Christian camp, the role of mothers as teachers and disciplinarians is culturally applauded, recognized, and encouraged. Mothers are told that they are not only doing the best thing for their children (those little individuals who deserve the best) but also for themselves as daughters of God. They get the cultural support they need for their own roles as homeschooling mothers. On the other side of things, mothers who believe that children need to grow unencumbered work as hard and sacrifice as much as the Christians, but without the cultural applause that recognizes their role. Instead they are told that they can wreck their kids by interfering with their growth. Their role is not recognized, and the pain and sacrifice of their impossible choice between being true to their authentic selves and giving their all to their kids is never recognized.
Mitchell's examination challenged me to note my own beliefs about the nature of childhood, the role of parents and the purpose of education. I was able to understand with a little more nuance the Christians' practices that have always just seemed bigoted and fear-based. And I nodded vigorously at the confusion of Lefty feminist moms who, on the one hand want to give their kids every opportunity, but on the other hand, feel the need to have recognition and success as an important contributing member of society.
The Christian wing of the homeschooling movement has, because of its philosophical belief in authority, taken over as the most influential homeschooling voice, politically, economically and culturally. And it has created mechanisms for sustaining the mothers who adopt the role of homeschooling parents by coopting the language of feminism when Christian women talk about fulfillment, economic success and intellectual challenge in the homeschooling project.
I would recommend this book to both homeschooling insiders and outsiders, to folks interested in political movements and organizations, and for people considering the implications of our metaphors for children and childhood.
November 1, 2015
An academic work on homeschooling in the US, an ethnographic study by a sociologist working in the 1990s. Stevens illustrates the divide between what he terms the "believers" (explicitly Christian conservative Protestant homeschoolers) and the "inclusives" (a grab bag of other homeschoolers, particularly those influenced by unschooling and democratic consensus-building). He explores the gender politics of homeschooling, and the organizational implications of the different belief systems of the two camps. My mind wandered a bit amongst the acronyms when he was writing about the different organizations, but it was good to see this phenomenon getting academic attention. 3.5 stars.
November 30, 2008
Completely different from other books I have read about homeschooling, this book is a sociological study of homeschoolers and the homeschooling movement. From it I gained an understanding of the history of the homeschooling movement in America and the controversy between homeschoolers as they try to agree on political issues. I also came to understand that parents gain as much or more from homeschooling as their children do. In my opinion, this is essential reading for anyone involved in homeschooling advocacy.
July 29, 2011
In Kingdom of Children, Stevens offers a sociological overview of homeschooling as a social movement. Steven's book is readable and does an excellent job of discounting many of the myths of homeschooling. Unfortunately, as a scholarly work, his book would be more valuable if it contained more statistics that supported his opinions, and also examined homeschooling in light of the sociological theories of social movements.
April 18, 2009
Interesting enough. Very academic, and I just don't have the patience to deal with that style of writing right now, so I kind of lost steam reading this about halfway through. Referring to the subtitle, I would say it was a lot more about culture than controversy. Probably only interesting to sociology types or people who are really interested in homeschooling.
January 27, 2016
Excellent sociological review of the homeschool movement in the 1980s and 1990s. Although more recent works like Joseph Murphy's "Homeschooling in America" have eclipsed this one, I still enjoy Stevens' work.
September 19, 2012
Enjoyed reading this sociological look at the homeschool movement. I agree there is a split, and the secular side offers something very different than what the stereotypical religious side shows.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews