Does Homeschooling or Private Schooling Promote Political Intolerance? Evidence from a Christian University Albert Cheng University of Arkansas axc070@uark.edu EDRE Working Paper No. 2013-06 Last Updated August 21, 2013 Please Do Not Cite Without Author Permission Abstract Political tolerance is the willingness to extend civil liberties to people who hold views with which one disagrees. Some political theorists argue that the traditional primary and secondary public school system is the ideal institution for instilling political tolerance in children while private schools and homeschooling propagate political intolerance. Both private schooling — in particular, religious private schooling — and homeschooling have been viewed as institutions that propagate political intolerance by fostering separatism, religious fundamentalism, and an unwillingness to consider alternative worldviews or values. I empirically test this claim by using Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus’s (1982) content-controlled political tolerance scale to measure the political tolerance levels of undergraduate students who (a) attend a fundamentalist Christian university but (b) have varying levels of exposure to different types of primary and secondary schooling (i.e., public schooling, private schooling, or homeschooling). I compare political tolerance levels between students with differing educational backgrounds by using ordinary least squares to regress political tolerance on years of private schooling and years of homeschooling, along with a rich set of demographic and ideological control variables. I find that (a) greater exposure to private schooling is not associated with any more or less political tolerance and (b) students with greater exposure to homeschooling tend to be more politically tolerant — a finding contrary to the claims of many political theorists.