This research aims to develop a sociological perspective on homeschooling. It starts from the puzzling fact that this phenomenon is increasing globally (mainly in Europe, North America and Oceania). In this proposal, I attempt to understand homeschooling as a possible symptom of a larger, global, dynamic of risk perception involved in parents’ educational choices.

In order to establish the sociological ground for this research, I first briefly review sociology’s understanding of how global society relates to knowledge, uncertainty and risk. In contrast with early modernity, where institutions (such as schooling and the Nation-State) were given a predominant, self-evident, character, late modernity sees its institutions undermined and challenged by the development of new scales of reflexivity, both on the part of individuals and of modernity itself (Beck, 1992). Indeed, the multiple ways modernity develops in order to observe itself produce a shift towards a “society of knowledges” where, although (or perhaps because) knowledge is flowing, it can no longer be trusted or taken for granted (Mangez & Vanden Broeck, 2016). « What was previously accepted as self-evident and, as it were, «life-worldly», is now made visible as a peculiarity of a certain way of observing» (Luhmann, 2002: 59). Knowledge and information flows produce new and unanticipated spaces of ignorance and indeterminacy, leading, in turn, to the loss of former axiomatic norms and ever-increasing uncertainty (Mangez at al., 2017). Such uncertainty affects individual’s decision-making processes, as she now bears the inevitable responsibility to make her own choices throughout scores of possibilities - every possibility creating its own risks (Beck, 1992).

In short, with the advent of late modernity, the paradoxical overload of knowledge resulting in ever more uncertainties leads to a process of individualization: precisely because the answers are no longer given, people become obliged to make choices, that is: to take risks, which turns them into “individuals”. The impossibility to rely on established certainties makes people responsible for their own choices in the face of undecidable possibilities, every choice relating (both avoiding and leading) to different risks.

For parents, having to choose a school can indeed be understood as a risk: that of making the wrong choice and ending up in a school that does not meet their expectations, that fails to recognize their children as they feel they should, or – more perniciously –  that includes them only to exclude them from within. Indeed, as function systems seek to expand and thus to allow participation extensively, the education system comes up with the trick of creating ever-new spaces for students who do not meet regular expectations. In this way they become included-as-excluded (Luhmann 2008; see also Hilt, 2016). The simple fact of participating in the education system creates the risk of becoming “included-as-excluded” within the system.

The fragmentation of the educational system – ie. schools developing their own, specific, orientation and becoming increasingly different from one another – aggravates risk perception for two reasons : (1) it makes the risk of choosing all the more apparent, and, in this way, increases the probability of preferring to take back control over children’s education and inclusion; (2) it specifies expectations pupils are supposed to meet, which can lead one to anticipate the risk of failing to meet these expectations and to become included-as-excluded. Thus, together with new possibilities comes the awareness of the contingent and contradictory consequences and risks associated with the very fact of participating in function systems. By renouncing to participate in the education system, homeschooling is “risking not taking the risk”.

The objective I am currently pursuing is to develop a sociological framework capable of accounting for the global character of homeschooling’s expansion. In order to meet this first objective, I work in an iterative way, going back and forth from sociological theory to analyzing a first set of interviews I conducted in Belgium. This first empirical inquiry investigated the motives and rationales that lead more and more parents to remove their children from school, through in-depth interviews with parents from 15 homeschoolers families. Parents’ discourses revealed indications of great reflexivity and acute risk perception regarding the education system’s development, and especially regarding schools’ alleged inability to meet their expectations. One could have expected that the fragmentation of education, by diversifying the range of possibilities made available to parents, would help meet a more diverse number of parental expectations, and thus reduce, rather than increase, the rate of homeschooling. The opposite seems to be happening: education is becoming more diverse and fragmented and, at the very same time, the number of homeschoolers increases globally. In order to understand this, one must reflect more thoroughly on the relationship between fragmentation and the dynamic of risk perception. Literature specifically devoted to homeschooling tells us that homeschooling can be viewed as a risk itself (Bhopal & Myers, 2018), as a form of “communautarism” threatening social cohesion (Apple, 2000) and children’s welfare (Reich, 2002). But it fails to provide a framework for understanding the global growth of homeschooling. Indeed, it is essentially concerned with identifying different types of homeschoolers (left/right; progressive/conservative; expressive/traditional), failing to consider they could have something in common. It has also barely attended to the development of the phenomenon in other contexts than North America (notably its recent emergence in Europe) (Kunzman & Gaither, 2013), and still less to the possibly global character of its expansion. To fill these gaps and better understand the increasingly global nature of the phenomenon, one has to go beyond the literature devoted to homeschooling and mobilize a more fundamental sociological literature that can help us understand how this practice fits into the experience of advanced modernity. In this proposal, I draw on the education system’s fragmentation understood as a consequence of functional differentiation, which Luhmann (but also Giddens and Habermas) considers to be the very ground for the advent of modern global society.

In conclusion, this research endeavor aims at understanding homeschooling as a global phenomenon by focusing on larger dynamics of risk perception and growing uncertainty in late modernity. In this proposal, I suggest that linking the question of inclusion and exclusion to the increasingly reflexive perception of risks associated with participation in the education system can foster understanding of the homeschooling movement as resulting from and reinforcing the fragmentation of education. Indeed, schooling no longer appears “self-evident”. Expectations pupils have to meet in order to be, and to remain, included become more specified which, in turn, creates new fears of being included-as-excluded. In other words, internal differentiation of the education system increases risks of “exclusion from within” (Stichweh, 1998). At the same time, “parents are invited to manage themselves responsibly and rationally through the proliferation of ever-greater forms of choice making and calculated risk in their navigation of and access to education provision” (Wilkins, 2018). This arisen responsibility not only encompasses risks regarding educational exclusion, but also risks of subsequent exclusions from other function systems (Luhmann, 2008). Indeed, “as education enables inclusion in other systems as well, educational exclusion may be the start of a domino effect entailing a cascade of exclusions” (Hilt, 2016). Thus, with modernity and the ensuing fragmentation of education, as parents become reflexive about bearing the responsibility to navigate risks, emerges the possibility of withdrawing from participating in the education system, in order to avoid the risk of exclusion. Naturally avoiding such risk is, also, a risk.

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