A Sense of Self: Listening to Homeschooled Adolescent Girls by Susannah Sheffer

This is the 9th post in my series about books related to teaching, learning and homeschooling.

(See my earlier post for a description of the series.)

"Many reports claim adolescent girls' self-esteem fades in their teenage years. But girls interviewed in this book do not experience this loss of a sense of self. The difference is they are homeschooled girls, girls who learn at home and in the community rather than by going to school."—Susannah Sheffer, A Sense of Self

I read A Sense of Self: Listening to Homeschooled Adolescent Girls when my eldest daughter was entering adolescence and thinking about attending high school. Around the same time, I also read Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher. What a different picture these two books painted of growing up female in our society! One describes how homeschooled girls feel about themselves and their lives when they are given significant levels of choice, autonomy, and control over what, when and how they learn. The other describes how difficult it can be for girls who attend school full-time to develop a sense of self when they are continually pressured to give up what they know and feel, to mold themselves to suit the needs of others. I read both books because I wanted to know whether sending my daughter to high school would be likely to have a negative impact on her. (A few years later, my younger daughter would also wrestle with the to-school-or-not-to-school decision.) Regardless of where my daughter opted to learn,  I wanted her to believe in herself and her ability to decide what was in her own best interest. I didn't want her to think she had to rely on others to dictate who she should be.

As I read Reviving Ophelia, I recalled my own adolescence and how I had felt unsure of myself, pressured to consider what other people would want me to say or do before I acted. Back then, I claimed I didn't care about anyone else's opinion of me, but it wasn't really true. I looked to teachers to tell me I was "good," boys to tell me I was "pretty," and people in general to tell me whether I had worth. I'm embarrassed to admit it now—as a fifty-something adult, I no longer feel the same way—but Reviving Ophelia brought back all those old feelings of insecurity and questionable self-esteem. The book described who I had been when I was a teen attending a public high school. But, oddly enough, it didn't describe my daughters or their homeschooled female friends very well. Not that these girls didn't have growing pains—of course they did—but their experience was quite different from what schooled girls go through.

As teenagers go, the homeschooled girls I knew were remarkably at ease in my company, unusually comfortable in their own skins, and very interested in being faithful to their own idiosyncratic selves. They were inner-directed, and it showed. I loved their authenticity and individuality, their courage and assertiveness. I wanted to understand what had allowed them to reject cultural pressures. How had they avoided becoming compliant, hyper-sexualized, and self-deprecating—the supposed "norm" for the adolescent girls described in Reviving Ophelia? Were they simply anomalies, or had homeschooling actually made it easier for these girls to form their own opinions and make their own decisions?

It's hard to say, but Sheffer's research indicates that it certainly helps to be free of the educational structures that diminish opportunities for making meaningful choices.

"If we want girls to be able to look to their own authority, we have to structure school in such a way that it is not always the external authority that holds the answers or determines when something is completed or learned or done well enough. If we want girls to identify with the goals they are pursuing, we have to give them the opportunity to choose goals with which they do identify and then to pursue those goals with our help."

But what happens when a girl in her teens who has been homeschooled transitions into a school setting? Are all the previous gains from homeschooling lost at that point? That's what I wanted to know. The answer seems to be "no."

In Chapter 5: Acts of Resistance, Sheffer considers this homeschool-to-school scenario. She writes:

"Simply being able to choose whether to attend school puts these young people in a very different position from most American teenagers. It's an opportunity to think seriously about what kind of person they are and what kind of life they want." 

I discovered the truth of this when my daughters decided to go to school after a lifetime of homeschooling. My eldest began attending an early college at age 16, and her younger sister attended our local high school starting at age 14. I saw how having the option to opt-out of school,  but choosing to opt in, was an empowering experience for both of them. To reach a decision, they had to consider what was important to them, what they wanted, what they believed would be in their own best interests. This one pivotal decision added to their understanding of who they were and what really mattered to them, and that in turn gave them the self-confidence to continue asserting themselves once they were in school.

Of course, as Sheffer points out, "homeschooled girls do face challenges to their sense of self, and they have to figure out whether and how to resist these challenges . . . [but] homeschooling gives them certain kinds of tools that help to make healthy resistance possible."

I'm not saying that all girls should be homeschooled, but I do think it's worth taking a look at what works, whatever the learning context might be, so that we can empower all young women and help them to develop a strong sense of self.