Fresh Air - The Home Schooling Surge

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

Home schooling is now America's fastest growing form of education, but Washington Post reporter Peter Jamison tells Dave Davies, "It's remarkable how little oversight there is of home-schooled children." Also, we remember TV critic Tom Shales.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. There are plenty of battles raging in public education today over textbooks, treatment of transgender students, equitable funding, and more. But there's another trend that's kind of gone under the radar, and that's a surge in parents opting for homeschooling rather than traditional school. Our guest today is Washington Post reporter Peter Jamison, who's led a team of Post reporters looking into the rise of homeschooling. Their analysis found that homeschooling parents today are far more diverse

and that homeschooling is surging in urban, rural, and suburban areas among struggling schools and schools with high graduation rates and test scores. Regulation of homeschooling is up to states. Reporters found it varies widely and is often lax, leading to criticism from some advocates that homeschooled kids are being shortchanged academically and are more vulnerable to child abuse. Peter Jamison is an enterprise reporter at The Post, where he was part of a team of journalists awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Before writing for The Post, Jameson worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Tampa Bay Times. Peter Jameson, welcome to Fresh Air.

Peter Jameson Thanks for having me. Trevor Burrus You know, we, at least I think of homeschooling as kind of rooted mostly among Christian conservatives. But is it true that American homeschooling really began in the 70s and kind of grew out of the counterculture left? Yeah, that's right. So, you know, homeschooling essentially does begin on the left in the 1960s and 1970s in America. One of the early proponents of homeschooling is a man named John Holt, who develops a concept called unschooling, which is essentially a philosophy that seeks to liberate children from any structure of formal education that, you know, a child should be free to learn what they want, when they want to. And Holt, who is someone who himself was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy

and Yale, comes to turn against the whole concept of formal education. And this notion is embraced by a lot of parents, as you noted, Dave, on the countercultural left. But what happens is that beginning in the 1980s, this whole philosophy and this practice is really sort of co-opted and then taken over by people on the right who have, you know, an aversion to public schools specifically for very different reasons. Trevor Burrus Right. It's interesting. I grew up – I went to public schools in South Texas in the early 60s. I didn't know anybody who taught their kid at home. Was it clear back then that it was even legal to keep your child home and teach them yourself? Peter Robinson No.

Sometimes in reciting the history of homeschooling, people say that homeschooling was once illegal in much of the country. And in some cases, that was technically true. But really, it's less of a case of homeschooling being illegal in much of the United States by the time it begins to take off widely in the early 1980s, so much as that it's just not a concept that's really contemplated by the law in many states. So the reaction of school district officials and even of police and prosecutors in much of the country when homeschooling really begins to come into its own 40 years ago is to view it, you know, unless a parent happens to have a teaching certificate, if they're certified by their state as a professional educator, anyone else who wants to teach their kids at home, they basically view that as either a form of truancy or as a form of educational neglect, which leads to this whole series of extensive battles in courts and legislatures over the legal status of homeschooling, which is really where this new faction of

homeschooling parents and activists on the conservative religious right kind of comes into its own. Right. You know, we should note that, you know, regulation of education generally is decentralized. I mean, it's done by the overall rules are set by the 50 states. And then, of course, there are in most states, hundreds of individual school districts which promulgate their own policies about it. So it's kind of decentralized. So how did the Christian conservative movement take this on and normalize, if you will, homeschooling? This was a time when groups like the moral majority are beginning to rise to prominence. And for parents who are concerned about what they view

as the secularization of American society, a trend that they perceive particularly in what is being taught and sort of the values that are being communicated to children in the public schools, homeschooling becomes a very powerful tool for sort of fighting back against that trend. And you've got parents in this period who have a number of concerns about things that are being communicated in the public schools. This could be anything from the teaching of evolution by natural selection to anything else, but homeschooling is viewed by people on the religious right at this time as sort of a powerful means of shielding their children from what they believe to be a malign secular influence in the public schools. And that's why it's really adopted by this group. And with their adoption of it is truly the beginning of what we know as the modern homeschooling movement and the kind of energy and activism that really

changed the regulatory landscape of homeschooling across the United States. And organization emerges the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, which has been around for decades, still around, right? I mean, what was its role in all this? So HSLDA, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, is a group founded in 1983. It took on the cases of parents who found themselves in various forms of legal peril in the early days of homeschooling when its legality was not well established and would take their cases in court, would represent them, give them legal advice on how to deal with local school district officials and local law enforcement officials. But HSLDA comes to embody much grander political ambitions, both in homeschooling and other policy areas as well, and plays a very decisive role in sort of changing the regulatory

landscape of homeschooling in America. And one of the figures who's very much at the center of that story is a man named Michael Ferris, who is one of the co-founders of HSLDA. Michael Ferris is still a very influential figure. I read that he speaks of creating a Joshua generation in part through homeschooling. What does he mean? So Michael Ferris is a really fascinating figure, and he is arguably the most prominent and influential leader of the modern homeschooling movement. Ferris is an attorney originally from Washington State. He begins his career working for conservative groups such as the Moral Majority and Concerned Women for America.

You know, as he comes to the helm of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, what's so interesting about him is in Ferris's work and in his activism in public statements, you can really perceive the twin ambitions of what is taking shape in this period in the 80s and 90s as the conservative Christian homeschooling movement. So there is this desire to free homeschooling parents from regulation, really to the furthest extent possible. You know, I actually recently did an interview with Jim Mason, who's the current president of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, asked him if there had ever been a homeschooling regulation that they had supported, and he said he couldn't think of one. But in addition to that effort education system, which the Homeschool Legal Defense Association finds many problems with. But Ferris and others, from the very beginning,

have ambitions to change what's happening inside the public schools that they're deserting. And what do they want to change? So the overall critique of the conservative Christian homeschooling movement of the public education system in America, and, you know, there are many different facets to it. But, you know, if you want to summarize it, I think it lies in the conviction among people like Michael Ferris, and this is something he himself has stated repeatedly, that there is no values-neutral form of education. That any form of education, you are bringing a child up in certain values, perhaps even certain political beliefs, that this is an unavoidable thing. And that if you don't do it with an explicitly religious bent, that what happens is that you are then educating a child with an explicitly secular bent.

And so if education is an inherently values-laden act, which Michael Ferris believes it is, then by sending a kid into the public schools, you are sort of turning your child over to a certain secular, liberal form of education and worldview to which people like Ferris are very hostile. And this is why a lot of their activism revolves around being able to make choices for children either to educate them with an explicit religious dimension outside the public schools or to allow more of that into the public schools themselves, you know, in cases where it's not constitutionally problematic. and your colleagues have reported that this Homeschool Legal Defense Association, led by Michael Ferris, was effective over decades because they and their followers were passionate, committed, and relentless. If they failed in the legislature, came up short one year, they'd be back in the next session. And over time, they had enormous impact, didn't they? How did they change the face of the legal status of homeschooling?

So South Dakota is a great example of the larger trends that you see in homeschooling activism and regulation. So in 1993, South Dakota repeals a law which at that time requires that for homeschooling families, school administrators actually have to make home visits. This is something that today is really the nightmare scenario for a lot of homeschooling parents when they think of intrusive government regulation. But back then it was considered normal, at least in this state, that a local school administrator or superintendent would actually come to the child's home to, you know, make sure it's a safe environment, make sure that the parents have some idea of what they're doing. But that law is repealed. And then three years after that, home educators in South

Dakota are granted greater leeway in selecting the standardized tests they use to assess their children. Again, after that, 2011, there's a requirement that homeschools receive approval from local school boards in South Dakota that's dropped. And then in 2021, you know, amidst this huge surge in homeschooling the pandemic, you know, this sort of movement to eliminate or reduce regulation in South Dakota really finds its ultimate fulfillment and legislators eliminate any requirement that children in that state take standardized tests, homeschooled children take standardized tests and submit them to education officials there. So it's kind of a remarkable trend. You can see just between 1993 and 2021, you've gone from a situation where school administrators are actually going

into the homes of South Dakota families to a situation in which those families have to provide a one-time notice that they're homeschooling their kids, but otherwise essentially face no oversight at all. So we were talking about how the Christian conservative movement over many years worked in courts and state legislatures to restrict or remove government regulations on parents who want to do homeschooling. Let's see where we stand today. I mean every state is a little different or regulations in states vary.

Is it pretty lax? Are there places where basically parents can do whatever they want, don't even have to notify a district if they pull their kid out of school? Yeah, I think the current state of homeschooling regulation in America, and I think both advocates of increasing regulation and advocates of decreasing regulation would probably agree on this, is lax. And there are various dimensions of regulation we could talk about, whether that's ensuring children are free from abuse in homeschooling environments or making sure that they're free from educational neglect, that they're learning and staying on par with their peers in conventional school settings. But if you take one measure, which is just children's academic success, especially when you compare it to the kind of battery of academic assessments that children in traditional schools face in the United States in 2024, it's remarkable how little oversight there is of homeschooled children. So in a majority of U.S. states, homeschooled kids are not subject to any form

of academic assessment. Parents can still assess their kids if they want. They can give them a standardized test and see how they're doing. But in terms of what is actually sent into a local school district or to state officials to ensure that children are progressing, the answer is nothing. And in 11 of those states, parents aren't even required to take the fundamental step of informing anyone that they're homeschooling their kids. So, you know, if I'm a parent in a state like Texas or Illinois or Connecticut and I decide I want to begin homeschooling, all I have to do is keep my kid home from school. You know, there's no paperwork you're required to file or anything like that. But even in the states that have academic assessments or assessment requirements of some form, it's not at all what people think of in terms of a traditional, rigorous, objective

academic testing regimen that you might see in, for instance, a public school. So what we found in our analysis is that in only three states, New York, Pennsylvania, and Hawaii, are all homeschooled children required at some point to submit standardized test results to a government agency. And so in the remaining states that do require some form of assessment, there are a number of different ways you can do it. But, you know, there are various ways for parents to sort of avoid an objective academic assessment of the kind that you might think of with the standardized test if they want to. They could do a portfolio review. They could

submit student work samples. And so, again, even in states where homeschooling academic oversight does exist, it looks very different from what you might imagine based on, you know, the experience of a conventional school setting. You've also discovered that the composition of parents who are keeping their kids home for their education has changed. It used to be dominated by Christian conservatives. It used to be three-quarters white even as recently as 2019. That has changed. If it's true that Christian conservatives are a smaller percentage of homeschooling families, what have you learned about other motivations for parents who want to keep their kids home and educate them? So what we found in our survey is a number of motivations that indicate both the

diversification of the homeschooling population, but also some of the ways in which the debates that we as a society are having over what's taught in schools generally are playing out, you know, the ways that's affecting the decisions of parents to homeschool. So one thing we heard from a lot of parents, this was actually, you know, nearly half of the parents in our survey said that they felt that local public schools were too influenced by liberal viewpoints. So these are parents who are often reacting against school teachings or school policies on subjects like race or gender who are deciding because of that to homeschool. But what's also very interesting is that we found that roughly one in four parents are actually choosing to homeschool because they feel like their local public schools are too influenced by conservative viewpoints. So, you know, in our reporting following up with these parents, we find these are often people who live in conservative states. You know, Florida is

sort of the paradigmatic example here, where the state legislatures have placed certain restrictions on what can be taught on certain subjects, such as America's history of racism or gender identity. And parents are leaving their public schools out of concern over those new laws. And this is something that I think is really worth emphasizing because, you know, to someone who studied homeschooling 10 years ago or 20 years ago or even five years ago, the idea that fully a quarter of parents would be choosing to homeschool because of a concern about conservative bias in the public schools is, you know, really a remarkable development. And so that's part of what we, you know, have seen in our survey results. The other thing that you note is that

parents who'd make this decision to homeschool don't have to do all of the teaching now, maybe compared to parents 20 or 30 years ago. How has that changed? Yeah, it's changed enormously. And my colleague, Laura Meckler, who worked on this series with me, did a great story about this, looking at the rise of micro schools. For a long time, some form of communal home education has been common. So I think the typical example of this in years past was the parent co-op, where if you have a group of homeschooling parents who live in a certain area, maybe one parent is stronger in math, another stronger in science, other, you know, maybe knows something about literature. They each take turns teaching the kids once a week. But what we've seen over the last few years is the rise of

something that's very different. And these entities, we sort of refer to them with the blanket term micro schools, but they often exist in sort of a legal gray area in many states. I mean, in many cases, these are essentially unaccredited and unregulated private schools. But, you know, there are places where, like one place that Laura visited in New Hampshire, where parents drop their kids off for the day. They study online there kind of under the supervision of someone who's not actually a certified teacher. You know, the technical term this person used to refer to herself as a guide. And they just sort of work on their own and their parents pick them up later.

And it's a very different environment from a typical private school. But what the rise of organizations like this has done is essentially to remove some of the logistical hurdles for parents who would find homeschooling very challenging in other circumstances. I mean, it's an enormous sacrifice of time and oftentimes an enormous financial sacrifice to homeschool in the conventional way that many people think of where it's a parent sitting at the kitchen table with their child and teaching them things. But the rise of these micro schools, some of which are sort of organized and run through very large Airbnb-like companies, has sort of made it possible for parents who work full-time,

who oppose their traditional school options for whatever the reason might be, but also don't want to spend all their time teaching their kid at home to have another option. And so, you know, this is another one of the interesting developments in homeschooling over the last few years is that for many homeschooled children, their parents are no longer their teachers, which again was not something that was really contemplated in homeschooling or in the laws governing homeschooling in earlier decades. We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Peter Jamison. He's an enterprise reporter for The Washington Post. He'll be back to discuss the stories he and a team of Post reporters have written on the expansion of homeschooling in America after a short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.

This is Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Baldonado. If you're already a Fresh Air Plus supporter, you may have heard Terry talking about the first daily national broadcast of the show in 1987. It was still like making a national debut both to the audience and to program directors because we weren't on that many stations to start with. Dave Davies talking about his job driving a cab. This is a fascinating city of many diverse neighborhoods. It was fun to just tool around in a cab all day. Or archival interviews with people like

Arthur Miller, Nina Simone, and Audrey Hepburn. Timing you can't rehearse. It's an instinct. Especially comedy. I mean, that's what made Carrie unique.

That's why there haven't been a whole lot of Carrie Grants. Are you not a Fresh Air Plus supporter yet? You could be. Subscribe on plus.npr.org or on Apple Podcasts. We're speaking with Washington Post Enterprise reporter Peter Jamison. He and a team from the Post have written a series of stories about the dramatic expansion of homeschooling in the United States. While homeschooling was long dominated by

Christian conservatives, the Post reporters found that parents opting for homeschooling are now more diverse and motivated by a variety of factors. Before we begin, I just want to advise our listeners that in our conversation, we will discuss one or two cases of child abuse. We won't dwell on them graphically, but be advised that there will be some discussion of a couple of cases. One of the questions raised about homeschooling is whether students who are taken out of public school are not subject to the same routine checks for child abuse and neglect. You know, The law typically says that there are certain mandated reporters, educators, guidance counselors, doctors, who if they see a sign of abuse or

neglect are required, legally required to report it. Obviously, a kid in a home setting is different. You wrote about a tragic story of an 11-year-old kid from Michigan named Roman Lopez. You want to just describe what the rules in Michigan were when he was being homeschooled? Yeah. So it's a simple answer. There are none. Michigan is one of the 11 so-called no-notice states in this country where parents are not even required to tell anyone they're homeschooling, let alone submit to any form of regulation by state officials. And situations of this kind are ones that activists often point to as sort of the worst

case scenarios for what can happen with America's current lack of regulation of homeschooling in many states. And, you know, Roman, as you said, he was 11 years old when he died. You know, several years before that, he was removed from school by his stepmother, a woman named Lindsay Piper. And Roman and his siblings were homeschooled. Again, because of the rules in Michigan, there was not a requirement to actually fill out any paperwork, submit any instructional plans, or even tell anyone that they were homeschooling. And when you look at his case, and I examined the court documents in this case really extensively, I also spoke to two of Roman's surviving stepbrothers. What they say is that this really was a ruse that their mother employed to prevent the type of scrutiny

that would have come in a normal public school setting, that the abuse of Roman, and Roman was subject to very severe forms of abuse, including starvation, including close confinement, that these are things that would have been noticed by a teacher. And both of his stepbrothers said this in interviews with me and also in victim impact statements they submitted to the court that homeschooling was something that essentially, you know, shielded them from the type of scrutiny that could have perhaps not have prevented the abuse in the first place, but at least could have prevented it from escalating to the extent that it did to the point where Roman ultimately was found

in a storage container in his family's basement in early 2020 dead. And his stepmother and father both pled guilty to second-degree murder, right? His stepmother pleaded no contest to second-degree murder. She's currently serving a 15-year life sentence in state prison in California, which is where they had moved shortly before Roman was murdered. His father has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing. It is a particularly painful story to read because the other kids at home at the time were actually enlisted to join in the abuse of little Roman. And the truth is that although the mom had a lot of kids at home, there was actually literally no homeschooling going on, was there, as far as you could tell? Yeah, what they said is that for a few weeks, there was sort of a semblance of homeschooling that went on.

You know, their mom got them some laptop computers. They signed into some online education programs. But that after a couple of weeks, that pretense of education was completely dropped. And their mom, their ostensible home educator, just sort of lay in bed watching TV crime procedurals all day. And they played Xbox or were kind of left to their own devices. And that's literally what they did for years, up until the time Roman was murdered and their situation changed. But this is an example of, again, the type of worst case scenario that can unfold

in the absence of any homeschooling regulation. And, you know, it's noteworthy, and it's not an accident that this happened in Michigan, because, you know, it's noteworthy and it's not an accident that this happened in Michigan because, you know, Michigan is a no-notice state, but Michigan is also a state that occupies sort of a special place in the story that the homeschooling movement and homeschooling activists tell about themselves. In 1993, the Michigan State Supreme Court struck down, is unconstitutional, the requirement that only state-certified educators can homeschool. And the Homeschool Legal Defense Association and conservative Christian homeschooling activists generally consider this to really be kind of a milestone moment and arguably the greatest

courtroom victory that the movement has had. Now, there were efforts in the legislature after some of these earlier cases of child abuse to change some of the rules that govern homeschooling. And after you wrote your story about the death of Roman Lopez, this 11-year-old boy, there is again a renewed push for changing some of the laws that relate to homeschooling. What kind of reaction has it gotten from the homeschooling advocates? Yeah, so back in 2015, one of the earlier efforts to regulate that you refer to, then Michigan State Representative Stephanie Chang, she attempted to establish what I think many would agree is just a very minimum baseline level of regulation, which is that she proposed a bill requiring that homeschoolers have to register with the state and also that homeschooled children have to check in, you know, at least twice a year. They have to be seen by some form of mandated reporter of child abuse, whether that's a teacher or a doctor, psychologist. Now, again, for comparison's sake, a child who attends a

public or private school, they interact every day of the school year with a mandated reporter in the form of teachers and school officials. What you saw in response to that effort in 2015 was really characteristic of how homeschooling activists, at least in the past, respond to any efforts to re-regulate homeschooling or roll back the absence of regulation that they've established. Chang's office got hundreds of calls. Angry homeschoolers began showing up to her fellow legislators' constituent coffee hours. And the bill never got a hearing in committee. So as you said, Michigan is now contemplating some form of homeschooling regulation again. This comes after both our story on Roman Lopez, also after the attorney general in Michigan, Dana Nessel, announced charges against foster parents who she said were using or taking advantage of the state's lax homeschooling regulations to abuse their children. There's not a bill yet in that state, so we don't know what it's going to look like, but already homeschooling activists are mobilizing in opposition to it,

essentially trying to do the same thing over again that they did in 2015. So the Homeschool Legal Defense Association has put out an alert to its members saying that they need to talk to their legislators to oppose this bill. They provided talking points about why efforts to register homeschoolers will not succeed in preventing child abuse. And I think, you know, what we're going to see in Michigan, if and when a bill is introduced, this session is really kind of an early test case for what efforts to regulate homeschooling might look like and how they might fare with this dramatically expanded and sort of demographically more diverse homeschooling population.

So, you know, the big question will be now that homeschooling is, again, more diverse, not as dominated by conservative Christian activists who are sort of inherently opposed to government regulation of homeschooling. Will efforts to regulate be potentially more successful? Could there even be homeschoolers who themselves welcome efforts to regulate saying, you know, hey, it's not a big deal if I have to tell someone once a year I'm homeschooling my kid or have to take them to see a doctor twice a year just to show that they've been seen by an adult outside their household who can confirm they're not being abused. We're speaking with Peter Jamison. He is an enterprise reporter for The Washington Post.

We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is Fresh Air. You know, you have a lengthy story about a couple in Virginia, the Beals, Aaron and Christina Beal, who decided to send their six-year-old daughter to public school, even though they themselves had grown up being homeschooled in a conservative Christian family. Tell us a bit about their background and the kind of educational environment they grew up in and expected to raise their kids in. Aaron Ross Powell So Aaron and Christina really grew up at kind of the white hot core of the conservative Christian homeschooling movement.

And they both grew up in conservative evangelical families. Christina attended Patrick Henry College, which is a college founded by Michael Ferris, specifically catering to the homeschooling population. Aaron did not actually attend college, but they both came from a background in which homeschooling was practiced as a way of life and in which it was never really thought about that they would do anything other than homeschool their kids. And, you know, to kind of get the sense of the magnitude of their decision ultimately not to homeschool, you know, one thing that Aaron told me is that he thought it was actually harder to tell his parents that he wasn't homeschooling than it was to tell them that he'd become an atheist when he had to convey that news to them. But Aaron and Christina, their reevaluation of homeschooling was part of sort of a broader

reevaluation of the religious beliefs with which they'd been raised. But they, for a number of reasons, were having some issues with how homeschooling was going for one of their children, their daughter Amy. And they live in Round Hill, Virginia, near a very reputable public elementary school. And they just sort of decided after kind of much soul searching and much discussion that they would try sending her there for a year to see how it went. And that decision sort of led to this complete reevaluation of everything they'd been raised to believe. You know, they'd been taught that public schools are terrible places, places children should not enter, where, you know, kids are bullied or sexually assaulted or where there's explicit anti-Christian teaching. And what they found is that their daughter actually really thrived in this environment

and that none of the kind of more exaggerated fears that had been conveyed to them when they were children about the public education system were actually true. And so they're now sending all three of their school-age children, they have a fourth who's not school-age yet, to the public school. And that's caused them both to kind of embrace public education, but also to kind of reevaluate and think much more critically and have much more kind of a negative perspective doubt, at least as I read the story, in part involved them being schooled in using corporal punishment to raise their kids. Pretty detailed instructions about that, which they rebelled at. Was that sort of what began to unravel their commitment to the way of life that they'd known? Aaron Ross Powell That was a very large part of it. Yeah. You know, Aaron and Christina, and again, for them, corporal punishment was, as they described to me, sort of anal has actually, she saves a lot of things,

and she saved some documents that she showed me, one of which was a worksheet that she and Aaron got at a parenting seminar they attended, actually before they were married. But, you know, this says something about how they conceived their family life before they got married, that they attended a seminar on parenting and marriage at a church. And one of the kind of instructional units was about how to hit your children. You know, it cited biblical verses in support of corporal punishment on the use of the rod and breaking the child's will. And there's this sort of remarkable back and forth they have that was captured and that I could see years later because they were writing notes to each other in the margins of this worksheet, you know, literally about how to beat your children, saying, you know, I'm

not sure I can do this. It sounds like being a parent, you have to be very stern and harsh. And I don't know if I want to follow through with this. And I think certainly for Aaron, this played a big part. I mean, for both of them eventually, but probably more so for Aaron at first, this played a big part in their reevaluation of their own childhoods, is that when it came time for them to do to their kids what had been done to them, essentially when it came time to hit their children as they'd been taught they should,

he found he couldn't do it. And so, yeah, as you put it, that sort of is the first tug at this thread that ultimately unravels his entire way of looking at the universe and his place in it. You know, most of the stories in the series that you and your colleagues have written are about the movement toward homeschooling, more people adopting it. The Beals here are exactly the opposite. They're abandoning homeschooling and sending their kids to public school and feeling good about it. Are they representative of a trend of Evangelica Christians abandoning homeschooling? They are representative of a trend. I think there's no question of that. And you can see this in, you know, some figures from popular culture

like Ginger Duggar, who was homeschooled under a very controversial, the teachings of a very controversial figure named Bill Gothard and the conservative Christian homeschooling movement. It is called the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. That was actually founded by homeschooling alumni who came out of families like Christine and Aaron Beal and came out of the conservative Christian homeschooling movement. But I think regardless of how many of these kids there are, one reason we did a story that extensive about Aaron and Christina is that I think the voices of these kids should be accorded a certain amount of weight because this is really these now young adults who are in their late 20s, 30s, early 40s.

This is sort of the first generation to come of age within the American homeschooling movement. When you say the kids in this case, you're referring to the parents, right? There were kids who were homeschooled and grew up to be these parents. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, there are kids who are now parents. And this is really, you know, I don't want to describe them in this sort of clinical sense, but these are sort of kind of the first people who can, they're like the early results of America's nationwide experiment

in home education. So, you know, this is the first generation of now matured adults who can reflect back on their homeschooling experience and what it meant for them, what it meant for their lives, what it meant for their, you know, educational and professional prospects. So I think the perspectives of those children who have now become adults are very important. And, you know, educational and professional prospects. So I think the perspectives of those children who have now become adults are very important. And, you know, it's worth saying that they're not all negative, you know, I mean, there are many people who, unlike Christine and Aaron, felt that they had very positive homeschooling experiences, have gone on to tremendous success in whatever field they chose. In many cases, we've even chosen to stay and perpetuate

the conservative Christian homeschooling movement. But whatever their point of view, I think that generation of homeschoolers and its perspective on homeschooling is very important, as homeschooling is now embraced much more widely across the United States. Well, Peter Jamieson, thanks so much for speaking with us. Thanks for having me. Peter Jamison is an enterprise reporter for The Washington Post. You can find the stories he and a team of Post reporters have written on homeschooling on The Post's website. Coming up, we remember Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic Tom Shales. This is Fresh Air. Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic Tom Shales, known for his biting wit and for never holding back in expressing his strong opinions, died on Saturday from complications of COVID. He was 79.

In an appreciation published in The Washington Post, where Shales made his professional home for nearly 40 years, opinion columnist David Von Draley wrote, this singular man struck terror in the greedy hearts of TV executives, while delighting countless dazzled readers. For more than a quarter century, Shales was the preeminent analyst of America's cultural juggernaut. Shales was neither highbrow nor lowbrow. Instead, he vigorously enforced the principle that television owed its viewers a modicum of respect. Shales was also known to public radio listeners, reviewing films on Morning Edition for two decades. When Terry interviewed Tom Shales in 1989, he'd just published a collection of columns he'd written over the years to TV and film stars, columns written right after their deaths.

Actually, it's sort of a Polaroid of me, not to sound egocentric about it, but it's my reactions, my emotional response more than anything to the deaths of these people who I held dear, if not near. And so most, about two-thirds of the book is authentic, sort of immediate period of mourning stuff. Of the people who you write about in Legends, who had the greatest effect on you? It's hard to say. The first one I ever did, and we made it the first one in the book,

was Bing Crosby. And why did Bing Crosby have such an effect? I mean, I don't know. I always admired not only his singing. I found his voice just terribly comforting and comfortable. But I liked the way he carried himself in public. I liked his jaunty, blithe kind of attitude. I loved the kidding that would go on in the Hope and Crosby pictures.

I just thought he had a wonderful, apparent outlook on life. And nothing I've learned about him since, you know, has really changed that impression I have of him. So that meant a lot to me. John Belushi, I remember being quite broken up. I was at home and they called me to say he had died and I had to drive in for the purpose of writing about him, and I was very, very sad in the car. And I had a tape in the tape player, and it just happened to be some rather mournful Welsh music. Not that John was Welsh, butilda's death made me so sad is that we thought of these people as stars who would be around for all of our lives. They were going to be our stars, you know, our generation.

Sort of our bid to have people join these legends and these semi-immortals. And when Belushi died, it was just a very... It was a bucket of cold water on all of our high hopes, I think. Do you remember getting your first television? Television set. I like to have it called a television set. I don't know why. Because I think of television as the medium. Yeah, I sure do.

I sure do. In fact, little Johnny Knights, who lived next door, gave away the secret. I was on my way home from the grocery store. Is this sick that I remember this now? Oh, no, no. Oh, okay. Is this pathetic? And I was on my way home from the grocery store, with groceries, no doubt, and little Johnny Knights gave away the fact that we had a new RCA mahogany 14-inch console television set. And, of course, I couldn't race home fast enough. And there he was, howdy-doody, in all his black and white splendor. Yes, I remember that well. So what was your first impressions when you first watched TV in your home? That this was a miracle. That this was the second coming. And Nirvana all rolled into

one. It was wonderful. And of course, kids today would think I was just out of my mind talking like this. But you have to imagine that I lived in a small town. And to me, this was an electronic link to New York and not so much to Hollywood then, but to New York and to Chicago as well, where there was some great local TV coming out, including Kukla, Fran and Ali and things like that. So it was opening a world, it was opening a window to me. It was giving me access to like theater and the world of New York theater that I otherwise wouldn't only have been able to read about. And there were great things on TV in the 50s, live drama, of course, we've all heard about that. But there were shows like Omnibus and Sunday Afternoon. Then there were not football games. There were cultural shows put on as public services by all the networks. Shows like The Seven Lively Arts and NBC Experiment in Television. Can you imagine an experiment in television? We don't have those anymore.

Were there any shows that irrationally scared you? They left you terrified, and looking back, you can't imagine why. Well, no, I can't imagine why. The Honeymooners scared me as a child. It did? Uh-huh. The idea of a husband and wife fighting with this kind of frenzy. This didn't happen in our house, and it was shocking to me.

And a little bit scary. It was in later years that I began. I liked the other parts of the Gleason show when I was a kid. I thought Reginald Van Gleason III, a guy who would look at his own mother and say, boy, are you fat? To me, that was just the height of irreverence. This was wonderful, to be a wealthy playboy and do exactly as you pleased. I thought that was hilarious as a kid. That just thrilled me no end. But The Honeymooners scared me a little. So what do you have to watch today? Well, I've already, I just watched

the two-hour return of Beauty and the Beast on CBS, which is on December 12th. Are you curious about that? Uh, not very. Well, pardon me for mentioning it then. What might interest you, pray tell? Next week's news? I haven't seen that yet.

No, I'm just curious how much you watch each day. Oh, oh, oh. Well, I watch, I try to watch one of the morning shows, like the second hour. And then I watch an old I Love Lucy rerun. And then I watch, I see who's on Donahue and who's on Oprah and who's on that other guy, Geraldo maybe sometimes. And then I watch an old movie

maybe or something and then I go to work. And then I get some serious watching in. Tom Shales, thanks a lot for talking with us. Thank you. Tom Shales speaking

with Terry Gross in 1989. Shales died Saturday at the age of 79. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman,

Teresa Madden, Seth Kelly, and Susan Yakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper, the challenger directed today's show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.