Читать книгу The Homeschool Choice - Kate Henley Averett - Страница 10

Homeschooling also provides a window into contemporary changes in the meaning of childhood in general, and of childhood gender and sexuality specifically. Understandings of childhood are historically and culturally situated. At least in the West, the very concept of childhood, as distinct from both infancy and adulthood, only emerged beginning in the fifteenth century.9 In Pricing the Priceless Child, sociologist Viviana Zelizer argues that the movement to end child labor and move children from factories and into schools through compulsory education laws was largely an ideological dispute between two opposing views of children: the “sacred child,” who is in a special part of life and in need of nurturing and protection from adults, and the “productive child,” who can contribute to the family economically like any other family member. Ultimately, the sacred child won, and compulsory education is now the norm in the United States.10 The concept of childhood as a distinct, special stage of life has thus always been intimately linked to ideas about the role of public schools in children’s lives. Recent changes in the provision of education, and particularly beliefs about the purpose of this education, beg the question of whether our societal beliefs about childhood have also changed. Homeschooling offers fresh insights into the ways in which dominant beliefs about childhood are shifting alongside these shifts in education.

Debates about what is “sacred” about childhood often revolve around gender and sexuality. Are children innocent and asexual, and in need of protection from sexuality, or are they sexual beings who can and do exercise agency? These debates have deeper roots, and more far-reaching consequences, beyond how we understand childhood. They are really debates about sexuality more broadly; the concept of “childhood” serves as a container within which society expresses anxieties about sex, gender, and sexuality.11 As the narratives of Sharon and Maura at the start of this chapter indicate, debates about childhood gender and sexuality are central to competing framings of homeschooling in the United States. These narratives are a microcosm of broader societal anxieties about gender and sexuality.

Institutional context matters to how children experience and understand gender and sexuality,12 and education is one context in which childhood gender and sexuality are especially salient.13 The environment of the school—and the perceptions of that environment by parents—are highly gendered,14 and academic instruction in public schools contains both explicit and implicit lessons about gender and sexuality.15 Parental concerns about peer influence at school tend to be formulated in racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized terms: that is, parents construct racial, class, and gendered “others” as potentially dangerous influences on their own (assumed-to-be) innocent, impressionable children.16 In this book, I explore the ways in which homeschooling parents’ critiques of public education are tied to their beliefs about childhood gender and sexuality. How are the homeschool environments they create themselves gendered and sexualized spaces? And how do homeschooling parents resist—or reproduce—popular notions of gendered childhoods?