As a U.S. History teacher, I enjoy following cultural trends and trying to read larger historical patterns into them. This month, I’ve been particularly interested in a Gallup Poll which shows that for the first time in the eighty-year history of that survey, fewer than half of Americans currently belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque. (The survey only asked about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.) I wonder if this development reveals anything about a larger process of de-institutionalization going on for young people in our country, and if so, whether it may indicate anything about the future of schooling.
As a teacher, I often taught about Anne Hutchinson, who was banished from her Puritan community in Massachusetts in the 1600s because she had the audacity to believe she could interpret the bible and lead discussion groups for other women and that she could pray and connect to her God in a spiritual way outside of church. While many 14-year-olds missed the inspiring and controversial position of Anne Hutchinson, I would exclaim in class, “Imagine that! A woman thinking that she could pray outside of church without the help of a minister! What’s next, one of you kids thinking that you can learn things outside of school without a teacher?” I sometimes generated a bit of amusement and even serious conversation with such analogies.
What strikes me most about this poll regarding modern religious institutional membership is the dramatic drop off in the past twenty years. The chart shows that membership stayed more or less steady at about 70% throughout the 1900s, but has sharply fallen to below 50% since 2000. The article says there are two main reasons for this decrease: 1) more young people identifying with no religion, and 2) young people who do identify with a religion choose not to join an institution.
I don’t know if a decrease in religious membership and attendance means that young people are less spiritual than their parents and grandparents. I know many young people who are interested in the unanswerable questions and seek to have faith in some larger truth. Many young people have their own practices and rituals, including some that they continue from their families’ traditions. However, it seems quite believable to me that young people are less likely to pursue their spirituality through membership in a congregation than their parents and grandparents.
I also recognize some people may be concerned about this development. I know religious institutions have been strong sources of community and social organization in addition to being centers for faith and prayer. I expect that the loss of regular in-person gatherings to sustain a congregation may be a source of worry for many people in our communities.
This survey makes me wonder if this shift away from institutional religion is part of the broader de-institutionalizing of our culture. For example, most young people no longer anticipate lifelong employment at one workplace. Young people are less reliant on single institutions and centralized authority in many fields, not just religion and spirituality.
Which brings me to schooling, and some similarities between the institutions of religion and schooling in our country. First, both religion and schooling are central pillars of family life and commitment. Where one goes to pray and have spiritual community is a central identity for many people, much as where one goes to school. We have faith that both institutions are pivotal for living a good life. We often consider people who choose not to attend church or school as lost, or even “doomed.” Even the mythical (or real) “permanent record” of school ranks up there in our psyche as comparable to a spiritual judgment upon our lives.
There is one major difference: since the Puritan communities of the 1600s, church attendance has not been compulsory; school attendance is indeed mandated. Choosing to opt-out of religious membership or attendance may invoke judgment from family or friends, but it does not bring on social workers. I suspect that people are more certain that opting out of school will harm us in this life than choosing not to go to religious services (even if the latter poses a risk to our eternal souls.) We respect people’s choices about religion as a private decision, but we sometimes use a child’s poor attendance or performance in school as a basis for legal intervention. In general, I am suggesting that choosing to live without attending a school may be more difficult than choosing to live without joining a religious congregation.
I don’t know where we stand with any real movement away from conventional schooling in 2021. Most young people still attend public or private schools, with perhaps up to 3% of students homeschooling prior to the pandemic. There is indeed controversy and movement towards charter schools, school choice, and other formal school options, but most of those programs involve school as we know it. These are not “Anne Hutchinson praying on her own” or “learning without schools” type challenges to the premise of school-based learning.
Most homeschooling children are in the K-8 grades, and many older, independent homeschoolers use conventional curricula as part of their approach. Even though I work in a world in which it is normal to question the authority of the schooling paradigm, and I make it possible for young people to opt-out of that model, I don’t know that schooling is on the cusp of the deinstitutionalization process that seems to have occurred in organized religion. I don’t yet know if the pandemic will lead to a sustained spike in families, and teens in particular, who choose homeschooling and independent learning over schooling. Perhaps. I am certainly doing my part to make that happen.
I find making sense of trends to be quite difficult. On the one hand, I think that some cultural shifts are the sum of millions of individual choices. On the other hand, I think that some cultural changes are beyond our control, impacted by unforeseen events, technological changes, group psychology, and some amount of sheer luck.
I expect that as we wind our way out of the pandemic, much of schooling will resume as “normal” by Fall 2021. Even as schools reopen, however, the historical movement of people relying less on institutions across our society will continue. I think our current work in the field of Self-Directed Education offers powerful examples to those dissatisfied with committing their lives to all-encompassing institutions, and in that sense, I think the homeschooling movement is bound to grow in the coming decade or two. I will be interested to see if by 2050 there is a similar chart for schooling attendance 2000-2050 as there is for religious membership 1940- 2020.