Homeschooling, Children’s Rights, and Religious Freedom: Differing Ideals for Muslims and Conservative Christians

This paper examines the ways in which Muslim and conservative Christian homeschooling practices in the US promote or impede widely held civil ideals. The rapid growth of homeschooling in the wake of COVID-19, combined with increased activism by powerful homeschool advocacy organizations, has led to greater public and scholarly scrutiny of the practice, and ensuing debates reflect the increasing divisiveness of political discourse and radically different visions of children’s rights and religious freedom. By comparing data from my ethnographic research among Bay Area Muslim homeschoolers to the body of literature on conservative Christian homeschoolers, I have uncovered critical, unaddressed differences in these groups’ practices. In this paper I argue that, because Muslim homeschooling parents seek to foster a faith-based identity that values critical analysis and intellectual curiosity without isolating their children from competing ideas, their practices are much more in line with pluralistic civil ideals than those of conservative Christians.