Homeschooling: The History and Philosophy of a Controversial Practice by James G. Dwyer and Shawn F. Peters, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019

The ongoing worldwide experiment in homeschooling brought about by the COVID-19 shutdown makes this an interesting time to review Homeschooling: The History and Philosophy of a ControversialPractice, the eighth volume in the magisterial History and Philosophy of Education series from the University of Chicago Press. In each volume, an eminent historian partners with a philosopher to address a major issue or theme in American education from an illuminating interdisciplinary perspective. Here, philosopher James G. Dwyer and historian Shawn F. Peters offer an approach to the regulation of homeschooling predicated on the duties of the State as parens patriae and the corresponding rights of children. Their claims and conclusions are reasonable, respectful, and consistent with American jurisprudence. If I had the skill and courage of Dwyer and Peters combined, I might have written a book very much like this one. The authors acknowledge from the start that homeschooling has become so ideologically fraught that reasoned discourse is all but impossible. Many people simply want to know whether you agree or disagree with them (p. 4), and anyone who would deign to defend or even acknowledge the duty of the State to regulate the custodial authority of parents in the interests of children may see their work and their names excoriated by ideologues aligned with, or sympathetic to, the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). In an exquisite irony, the release of Homeschooling coincides with a global pandemic which has–for the moment, at least–made home-based education the only form of schooling available to the vast majority of American children. This situation will surely illustrate some of the problems associated with consigning the education of children to their parents or guardians alone. For a start, the quantity and quality of instruction children receive while confined to their homes will be a function of the willingness and ability of the adult(s) in their lives to provide it, coupled with whatever access to public knowledge and diverse formative influences their particular family circumstances and resources might permit. Children whose family circumstances qualified them for free and healthy meals at school may go hungry. And children who were born or adopted into wealthy or otherwise privileged families will have better outcomes than those who were not in terms of their welfare and development. Like Dwyer and Peters, I have claimed that it is in no child’s interest to consign his or her fate to one or two people, in part because individuals cannot be trusted to make reasonable decisions in the interests of dependent persons who are not fully competent to make decisions for themselves without public oversight and support (Blokhuis, 2010: 201; see also Curren & Blokhuis, 2011: 7). This is precisely why, in common law jurisdictions throughout the world, the State as parens patriae regulates fiduciary relationships, including the custodial authority of parents and other guardians. Surprisingly, Dwyer and Peters seem to have assumed that readers of Homeschooling are either deeply familiar with their previous work or otherwise well-acquainted with the parens patriae doctrine and its implications for the legal relationship between parents, children, and the State. For the benefit of those who aren’t, I refer to the latest edition of American Jurisprudence, perhaps the most authoritative and up-to-date treatise on the subject, which explains: As Jeffrey Shulman (2014: 3) puts it in The Constitutional Parent, which is likewise a joy to read for its solid jurisprudential claims and soaring literary allusions, “What is deeply rooted in our legal traditions and social conscience is the idea that the [S]tate entrusts parents with custody of the child, and the concomitant rule …