Dixie Dillon Lane is a homeschooling mother of four. She also happens to be a historian of homeschooling in America, an editor, and a prolific essayist. In this interview, she updates us on her life juggling all of these variables, and tells us about her book project, newly under contract with Eerdmans.
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When you did an Ideas in Progress interview about 18 months ago, you were still somewhat new-ish to the routine of freelance writing and editing alongside your main occupation as a homeschooling mom. How are things looking these days? What thoughts come to mind as you reflect on this past year and a half?
When I started writing again a couple of years ago after a long hiatus, I was working out of high passion and creative overflow. I had made the decision in 2022 to quiet my activity levels as a mother and an adjunct professor, and as I gradually stepped back from teaching and some of my social commitments, I was surprised to find myself gripped with a desire to write. The first few months of pursuing that desire were a whirlwind; at the time we did the Ideas in Progress interview in the spring of 2023, I was only just starting to organize my thoughts about where I wanted this writing to go.
A year and a half later, I find myself more clear-headed about what I seek from my writing and what I am trying to do. I’ve honed in a little more on the topics that are currently of most interest to me and have found a few places around the internet where I have been able to publish with some regularity. It’s been really delightful to be writing for the Arena (and Current more generally), for example! I’m also a contributing editor at Front Porch Republic and have enjoyed writing at other thoughtful, engaging sites such as Public Discourse and the Institute for Family Studies blog. Finally, I’ve gotten deep into editing work as an associate editor at the online journal and print quarterly Hearth & Field, which has been an outstanding opportunity for my growth not just as an editor, but also as a writer and thinker.
In terms of our daily routine, the main impetus for change has been that my children are a bit older now. Our routine seems to shift every few months these days! This year my eldest is doing most of her homeschooling independently as she straddles the 8th and 9th grades, while my youngest is far more interested in workbooks and seatwork than any of the others had been at the age of four. My in-betweens, too, are growing. So we adapt, adjust, and refresh as needed! And now that I have a deadline for my book, there’s even more back-and-forth throughout the day in terms of Mom’s professional work and kids’ schoolwork and other things. It’s not perfect, but it is integrated, and that’s wonderful for someone for whom compartmentalized work is almost out of the question.
I am really excited about your book project in progress–here you are, a trained academic but also a homeschooling mom writing specifically about the history of homeschooling! I think you may be one-of-a-kind in this particular combination! Can you tell a bit more about this project?
Thank you! I’m so delighted to share that my book, Skipping School: Finding the Roots of Modern Homeschooling in the American Past, is now under contract with Eerdmans. I’m currently in the process of revising the manuscript.
My goal with this book is to provide a narrative and an argument that connect homeschooling to broader trends in American life without losing sight of the elemental diversity of homeschooling. It’s an intriguing thing to attempt, for how can we really speak of something like homeschooling generally? As a family-based activity, it is so very personal, so ultra-local. And yet there are shared characteristics within homeschooling that help explain its rise and its place in American life, both historically and in the present day.
A conservative Catholic homemaker and a liberal, secular Hollywood producer may both homeschool their children, for example, and their homeschooling practices may look radically different. Yet at the same time, they may homeschool for the same reasons – they may both believe that parental rights should be paramount in education, or that public schools are academically unsound. Alternatively, they may actually homeschool in the very same way, looking very much the same in their day-to-day academic activities – but their motivations may be quite different (she homeschools because she feels it is a calling from God, and he homeschools because it means his children can come with him when he is filming on location).
The challenge is to bring together a variety of kinds of sources, including primary source interviews, questionnaires, etc. from homeschoolers themselves, and figure out what motivates and characterizes homeschooling as a social practice and educational movement without flattening it out. For we must speak about it generally if we want to understand it; and yet it is not a “general” sort of thing.
One way I address this problem is by focusing my primary source research in on a single, unusually diverse region (Los Angeles County, and California more broadly) and then widening out from there. This allows me to examine a variety of homeschooling perspectives up close while also identifying commonalities and building a cohesive narrative.
On a related note, when you first started this research for your dissertation at Notre Dame, you were not a homeschooling mom yet. What interested you in this topic to begin with? Did your research play a role in convincing you to homeschool or do you think of it as a separate journey?
I’m sure it was connected, although I don’t think that it would be accurate to say that my research convinced me to homeschool. I spoke a little bit about this with historian Chris Gehrz over at his Substack recently, but suffice it to say that I have always been fascinated by education and I had read quite a lot about pedagogy, child development, and related topics by the time I became a parent.
I think that this background prepared me to think about schooling as something about which I should make deliberate choices, rather than something that we should simply send our children into by default – as you yourself have so perceptively noted recently, Nadya, it can be good for parents to approach matters such as this with questions rather than with pre-determined answers. My husband and I were both educated in public schools for K-12 and we were open to public, private, and home schooling. Our particular situation and our particular children have led us to choose homeschooling most years, and we are now teaching all four of our kids at home.
As for choosing the topic, as I mentioned, my interest in all things education has always been high. In terms of history, I had begun graduate school with a strong interest in American religious history and so had been toying around with dissertation ideas that brought together religious history, history of the family, and history of the American West. My dissertation advisor helped me land on the study of homeschooling as a way to bring these varied interests together in a single topic.
You have written eloquently about the Washington Post anti-homeschooling campaign–a series that, frankly, has no basis in facts, and yet the argument has been circulating widely. Why do you think some people have been so eager to believe the WaPo coverage?
Well, I don’t want to speculate too much, but I will say that I think that some of this goes back to the problem of reconciling the diversity within homeschooling with its status as a category or even a movement. Although homeschooling comes in many, many different forms, ordinary people do not usually encounter it as diverse. Locally, homeschoolers of certain types have often clustered together, so a person in Alabama may think of homeschooling as primarily a white conservative Protestant or even Quiverfull type of activity, totally missing the huge numbers of secular liberal homeschoolers out there or the dramatic rise in homeschooling among African Americans in recent years.
Homeschooling is so local and so personal (and for a long time, was so hidden) that we tend to think of homeschooling anecdotally, for good or for ill, and generalize from there. So if you hear a story about a homeschooler who was also abusive, for example, it’s likely to alarm you about homeschooling in general, as you may not have a lot of other experiences to make you think through the story carefully.
Thus, the Washington Post’s choice to capitalize on a small handful of negative homeschooling experiences to characterize homeschooling negatively overall was smart marketing, as was their decision to almost completely ignore existing homeschooling research. A single negative story or quote from an Ivy league anti-homeschooling lobbyist can effectively stain the reputation of the entire homeschooling movement, whatever might actually be going on in most home schools. In terms of other media outlets and individuals being so willing to believe the series, I will say that as a nation, we rely heavily on our public schools for childcare and education. Many of us are unwilling to see the elephant in the room, which is the well-documented reality that vast numbers (not all!) of public schools are not educating their students well even from a merely academic standpoint.
But if we can cast homeschooling as abusive or educationally neglectful, then we don’t have to consider it as an alternative. We don’t have to rock the boat, anger any unions, or change our lifestyles. We can remain comfortable where we are.
Historians aren’t prophets, but they sure can fake it occasionally. So, we won’t hold you to this if your predictions don’t come true absolutely, but just for fun: what do you think the future of homeschooling in America might look like in the next decade or so?
Many readers will remember that during the initial school lockdowns of 2020, there was an outpouring of admiration for homeschoolers on social media. Faced with supervising their children’s virtual schooling, many parents suddenly realized how hard homeschooling could be. Celebrities were tweeting admiration for homeschoolers left and right.
Of course, homeschoolers at the time were quick to mutter to each other that what these parents were doing was not homeschooling – it was just being the enforcers of the conventional school in the virtual learning context. (Which was, of course, very hard! But lacked many of the benefits of homeschooling).
Given this upswell of appreciation and then the remarkable increase in actual homeschooling – to above 10% of American schoolchildren for the first time ever – I thought that homeschooling was going to have a longterm boom in public appreciation. I was wrong. Within a year, mainstream media seemed to have become engaged in a campaign to raise alarm about homeschooling. As I said above, I can only speculate as to why, but the mood of the media certainly changed, and it seems likely that it was in response to the public’s growing warm fuzzies for homeschooling.
I guess I have been a little bit naĂŻve, because even with all my research in my back pocket I did not anticipate how controversial homeschooling would still be in 2024, even though most Americans do seem to consider homeschooling reasonable. It sounds a bit over-the-top, but the practice does have enemies.
So I am very wary of making predictions for the years to come. Sorry! I do think that homeschooling will likely continue to grow; we have seen some evidence of the numbers growing again in 2023-2024 after a dip from the 2020-2021 high. But in the political realm, there are those who would like to see the practice regulated out of existence. Things can turn on a dime – take the case of the German homeschooling Romeike family (learn more, noting that this is a pro-homeschooling website, here), whose legal status in the United States seems to suddenly change every few years without explanation. This family has been in the United States since 2008 and yet their residency is still vulnerable to the political winds.
So we shall see.
If someone is just thinking about getting started homeschooling, what is one thing you want to tell them to encourage them on this journey–whether from your perspective as a historian and/or from your perspective as a homeschooling mom?
I always come back to the idea that a homeschooling parent must be both diligent and relaxed (and if possible, joyful) in their homeschooling.
One of the realities of homeschooling is that it can be challenging, amidst all the other duties of life, to get up each morning and “do school,” whatever that looks like for you. It can be hard work, and you will be tired at times! But you do need to discipline yourself about this; you need to learn what you need to learn in order to lead you kids in their education, and you need to get up every morning (well, most mornings!) and do whatever it is that you need to do to support their learning.
But on the other hand, this doesn’t have to be well, so terrifically draining and hard. The thing is, you get to decide “whatever it is that you need to do to support their learning.” You just need to decide wisely! Acquire the self-discipline to accept that this is your task, and then dive in with enthusiasm. You have so much flexibility before you, and there is so much potential to have lots of fun and lots of really rewarding experiences!
So take a breath and don’t stress so much about doing everything and doing that everything just right. I would encourage parents to look for the best way for their own family to “do school” and not to be limited to transferring the conventional classroom model to their living room. My friend Catherine Oliver has a series at her Substack on this very topic – how do different homeschooling families do school? I encourage you to check it out, to talk to real-life homeschoolers that you know, and to experiment and go easy on yourself and your kids as you begin to find your way. It may take some time, and that’s okay – you’ll be doing well enough in the meantime.
Don’t let the hard days get you down: throw in some popsicles or a field trip and just push forward, reevaluating periodically as needed. You can do it!