Interview with Samantha Field on Home Education
As summer comes to a close and children are headed into a new school year, we wanted to take this month to focus on education and the intersection with evangelicalism and spiritual abuse.
Homeschooling has been on the rise particularly within evangelicalism since the eighties, and with the COVID-19 pandemic, homeschooling has become even more popular across the board. What once was a rare practice is now an education choice affecting millions of students.
Even though home education can have a positive impact on many children, all too often the lack of regulation and oversight has resulted in various forms of abuse within the community (including spiritual abuse) going unnoticed and unchecked. But as homeschool alumni from the early days of the movement have grown up, they have begun advocating for safer home education laws and practices. The Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) is a nonprofit organization addressing these issues. According to responsiblehomeschooling.org, their mission and vision are as follows:
“Our Mission: The Coalition for Responsible Home Education empowers homeschooled children by educating the public and advocating for child-centered, evidence-based policy and practices for families and professionals. Our Vision: Homeschooled children’s right to a comprehensive and empowering education and a safe and supportive home environment is affirmed and protected by laws, stakeholders, and society as a whole.”
We reached out to CRHE about home education and the issue of spiritual abuse affecting homeschooled children and were able to interview Samantha Field, CRHE’s government relations director, about her own experience with homeschooling and her work with the nonprofit.
First, here’s a little bit about Samantha:
Samantha Field was homeschooled—by the legal definition—for ten years. She was raised in the Stay-at-Home-Daughter movement, but escaped as a young adult and spent the next fourteen years fighting for her right to an education. In 2013 she began writing and speaking about her experiences, before ultimately moving into policy advocacy. Today she works with the Coalition for Responsible Home Education to make sure no more girls grow up the way she did.
Cait West: How would you describe your experience being homeschooled?
Samantha Field: The first three to four years were—from an education standpoint—positive. I’d attended a Department of Defense (DoD) school previously, but I don’t think I was doing very well when we were stationed in Iceland, so my parents withdrew me. At first, homeschooling allowed me to follow my own (slightly faster) pace, and my parents were able to bring in a lot of interesting electives that I wouldn’t have had the chance to experience at a DoD school. The overseas homeschool community had variety in the group you don’t usually see at homeschool co-ops, and I have many great memories of the activities we did together.
However, after we moved back stateside and my mom had some negative experiences at our church in New Mexico regarding her decision to homeschool, we were later stationed in Florida where finding a pro-homeschooling community was a higher priority. That’s when the education problems started because at that point we were introduced to broader homeschooling culture. My parents were heavily influenced by what was considered normal, and the most significant was that it’s fairly standard practice for homeschooling parents to buy their high school-age children textbooks and expect them to complete the material on their own. This means that my education functionally stopped by ninth grade. The only reason I was able to get any sort of college education is because Pensacola Christian College accommodates homeschooled students. I have had to spend every day since I became an adult fighting for the education I should have received as a child.
CW: What is the mission of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE)?
SF: CRHE is a homeschool alumni-led nonprofit founded in 2013 to advocate for the safety and well-being of homeschooled children. Because we are alumni with an array of both positive and negative experiences, we know what homeschooling looks like when it succeeds as well as what happens when it fails. We exist to educate and advocate for what homeschooled children need to be educated in a safe home environment that prepares them for an open future.
CW: What is your role at CRHE?
SF: I’ve volunteered since our founding but fully stepped into the role of government relations director in 2019. I oversee our policy advocacy, as well as help homeschooling families and students interact with government resources. I do everything from explaining what homeschool law looks like in all fifty states, to helping homeschool alumni secure their identification documents, pursue adult remedial education, and access other resources.
CW: How does your experience being homeschooled inform your advocacy work?
SF: There’s a saying from disability rights advocacy: nothing about us without us. For the last several decades, homeschooling advocacy has been directed by people with no personal experience with it themselves: the home educators who have no idea what it’s like to have to teach yourself high school subjects without any assistance, or to enter the workforce at 18 without having spoken to any person not a member of your family for years.
As a homeschool alumni, I can speak with authority and authenticity about my homeschooling experience. I can see where we did well and where we went wrong. I can hear a legislator propose an idea, and understand whether or not that would help or harm homeschooled children—as well as explain in detail the unintended consequences a well-meaning politician might not see. I can speak with my own mother about what sort of policies would have substantially changed our lives for the better.
I also know that homeschoolers, even after the pandemic surge, are still at most roughly 5% of the school-age population. While for many people we’re either ignorable or a punchline, I can’t look away from what’s happening. Homeschooled children are being neglected, abused, starved, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. It’s on me to care enough to do something to stop it.
CW: How have you witnessed spiritual abuse occurring in the homeschool community?
SF: Two examples:
When we were in Iceland and joined the homeschooling community, one of the leaders became my parents’ primary mentors. Up until that point, my parents had used commonly acceptable discipline techniques like “time-outs.” However, compared to the mentors’ extremely meek, quiet, and cowed children, I was too spirited. This led to them telling my parents that if they did not adopt corporal punishment with me, that we would be ostracized from the community. My parents were incredibly young (they had me at 18), in a foreign country, isolated from their support networks, and the leader told them to beat me or they would lose all social and emotional support. While threatening them with excommunication, they also told my parents a beautiful lie: my parents come from truly nightmarish childhoods that they were desperate not to repeat with me and my sister. Do everything these mentors said, and they were promised that nothing bad would ever happen to their children. God wanted my parents to hit me, and if they hit me often enough and well enough, God would protect us. I was beaten almost daily, usually multiple times a day, for the next seven years.
Much later, when it was obvious I was not learning algebra, my mother asked another parent her opinion about enrolling me in a math course at a local community college. She warned her against it, but also knew my mother well enough that she might enroll me against their advice. Instead of minding her own business, however, she convinced the other parents in our homeschooling circle to all independently and privately frighten me. They told me about all the horrible things that would happen to me if I ever set foot on a college campus—rape, demonic possession, kidnapping, bullying, being injected with heroin—everything they could possibly think of. When my mother did in fact broach the idea with me, I reacted predictably: with absolute terror. She decided to drop it. I didn’t learn math.
CW: Why are homeschoolers particularly vulnerable to abuse, including spiritual abuse?
SF: Isolation is the single greatest risk factor in any kind of abuse, and homeschooling culture was built from the ground up to be isolating. It’s an extremely insular subculture, despite even the recent shifts in who decides to homeschool and why. Homeschooling is quickly tied to a person’s identity, and things that threaten any person’s sense of self aren’t tolerated well, no matter the ideology. This defensiveness means they’re vulnerable to spiritual abuse because seeing the world as “us. vs. them” is one of the key ways spiritual abusers isolate victims. Homeschooling has been painted as the only godly option, and parents will be condemning their children to sin and wickedness if they don't homeschool. When I was growing up, it was fear of "secularization" and "evolutionary worldviews." Today this looks like painting traditional school as nothing more than "grooming" and "indoctrination."
Also, while the genesis of the modern homeschooling movement had an ideological spectrum, it wasn’t long before it was pretty much entirely taken over by men like Bill Gothard, Doug Phillips, Brian Ray, Douglas Wilson, Voddie Baucham, Michael Pearl, C.J. Mahaney… all of those men have been credibly accused of horrific abuse, actively teach parents to see their children as no better than animals, or have covered up abuse in their communities—including sexual abuse of minors. Homeschooling culture—and law—was designed by these men in a way that shelters and disguises abuse.
CW: For homeschooling parents who are learning about safe and responsible home education, what red flags of spiritual abuse should they be aware of when joining co-ops or purchasing curriculum?
SF: In my experience, there are too many red flags to make for a helpful list, but I do have one very solid green flag. In my work, the homeschool parents I trust, the ones who I know are educating responsibly, are always the ones who are actually open to the idea of public school if that choice was the best one for their child. Homeschooling can be necessary, even amazing. But that can vary from child to child and year to year. Parents should be continuously open to the idea that maybe homeschooling isn’t working for them at the moment and they should consider other options. It should be a decision they revisit regularly, and seriously.
CW: How have you found healing from spiritual abuse?
SF: Short answer: therapy and seminary.
I found my therapist through the Secular Therapy Project, and she actually has a lot of experience with clients who experienced religious trauma or were homeschooled. I’m extremely fortunate to have found her and to have health insurance. My seminary is extremely progressive: our chaplain was Buddhist, many of my classmates weren’t even religious let alone Christians, and it fostered an atmosphere open to questioning. I’m still a Christian, but 15-year-old me would be horrified by how far I’ve “backslidden.” Being the queer feminist I was told to be afraid of has been pretty cathartic.
CW: What resources can survivors of spiritual abuse in the homeschooling community find at CRHE?
SF: One of the consistent problems we’ve found in our work are homeschooled children entering adulthood completely unprepared, especially girls. In response to this systemic failure, we’ve created “Chart Your Own Course,” which is an extensive online resource to help guide people through career and education options, financial literacy, etc.
We also believe in the power of story. Something I see a lot are homeschool alumni who feel incredibly unheard and dismissed. At CRHE, though, we have multiple ways for alumni to share their story in an empowering way, even anonymously. It doesn’t matter what your experience was like, we want to hear it. Are you doing well? Tell us what worked. Were you neglected, abused? Show us how it happened, where the failures were.
CW: What would you like survivors to understand? Do you have any words of advice as they heal?
SF: My advice to anyone starting to heal is to try to become who you were when you were six, just with better impulse control.
But the most important truth I want homeschool alumni who are suffering because of the neglect, isolation, or abuse they suffered to know is this: you were a child. It was not your job to educate yourself, and you did not fail because you couldn’t.
