Homeschool and religiosity
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Research on 6 Apr 2009.
Milton Gaither’s HOMESCHOOL RESEARCH NOTES blog posted comments and reviews on new research examining religiosity in adolescent kids in the US. The 3-year survey was recently released in January 2009 as a report titled “Religion and Spirituality on the Path Through Adolescence,” and you can view or download here.
Gaither’s post reviews Jeremy E. Uecker’s own extrapolation of the above report and draws some interesting observations. Note that my own post here is selective and merely zooms in on points of interest to me, a homeschooling parent. But do track the whole report-review down for an interesting look at how schools and parental influence impact or don’t impact religiosity.
An extract of Uecker’s review asks this question:
Everyone knows that parent religious commitment is the most important predictor of a child’s own religious life. Is this influence direct or indirect? Does the child learn directly from the parent or does the parent merely choose the environment to which children are exposed–schools, churches, friends, mentors, etc.?
If we remove (control for) parental religiosity, does where a child goes to school affect his or her religious commitments? Uecker looks especially at Catholic schools, Protestant day schools, and homeschooling, though he also makes some comments about non-religious private schools and public schools. He wants to know both about communal religious behaviors like church attendance, religious education attendance, and youth group participation, and about private religious behaviors like prayer and devotional scripture reading.
With this as a leading question, what does it say about the type of schooling the adolescent undergoes – here my interest is limited to homeschool – and their influence on the young person’s faith?
For homeschooling the results are very interesting. Homeschoolers with irreligious parents are less likely to have a public or private religious life than are adolescents with similarly inclined parents in the public schools or in private religious schools. Why? Perhaps because they are not exposed to the religious elements (peers, teachers, etc.) of these schools. But what of homeschoolers with very religious parents? “Homeschoolers with extremely religious parents are not statistically different” in communal or private religiosity “than public schoolers with extremely religious parents.” (p. 579) Homeschooling parents of course have a huge impact on their children, but the act of homeschooling itself seems to have “very little effect on any aspect of adolescents’ religious lives.”
What Milton Gaither says about Uecker’s conclusions:
Though it wasn’t the original focus of his research, Uecker found that secular private schooling actually has a documentable negative effect on religiosity. Religious parents who send their kids to secular private schools end up with slightly less religious kids, perhaps because kids in these environments “encounter intellectual cultures, expectations, or ideas that undermine religious commitment.” (p.581)
Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, public schooling “is neither detrimental to nor beneficial for adolescent religiosity.” (p. 581)
The take home messages of this article are obvious. Parents play by far the greatest role in fostering (or not fostering) the religious habits of their children, even into adolescence. No other factors, from the school students attend, to their friends and mentors, to the degree to which they are closed off from other influences, seem “to attenuate the role of parents at all.” (p.581)
More provocatively, Uecker’s findings suggest that parents who pull their children out of public schools for fear that the schools will lead them religiously astray are worried unnecessarily. Parents who do so and place their children in Christian schools are making a move that will likely have a modest spiritual impact on their children, at least as long as they continue to go to school there. Similarly, parents who choose homeschooling are making a decision that may have all sorts of other benefits or costs. But speaking just of the religious behaviors and commitments of their children, such parents might just as well have left their kids in public schools.
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