Synopses & Reviews
Homeschooling is a large and growing phenomenon in American societybetween 1999 and 2007 it grew at
twelve times the rate of public school enrollments, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Current estimates suggest that about two million kids are homeschooled, but information about this booming population is terribly incomplete. Nearly a fourth of states dont even require parents to notify authorities if they homeschool their children, much less offer any sort of verification that they are doing so.
Of all the diverse groups of homeschooling families in the United States, conservative Christians are the largest subset, and it is this group that most influences public perception of and rhetoric about this movement. In Write These Laws on Your Children, Robert Kunzman uses his unprecedented access to six conservative Christian homeschooling families to explore this elusive world, from the day-to-day lives of its adherents to its broader aspirations to transform American culture and politics. Drawing from hundreds of hours of interviews and observations of parents and children, their churches, movement leaders, and related activities, Kunzman offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into one of the fastest-growing education movements of the last twenty years.
With Kunzman we visit homeschoolers in urban Los Angeles, central Vermont, rural Tennessee, northwest Indiana, and central Oregon. The families we meet range in size from one child to ten, and include parents who are professional teachers with advanced degrees as well as those who never finished high school. Their reasons for homeschooling are as varied as their families, and Kunzman takes on the invaluable task of showing us what their homeschooling experiences look like firsthand, what their political and religious beliefs are, and what their kids learn. This extraordinary access allows us to see conservative Christian homeschooling families not only as part of a larger political phenomenonwhich is how theyre usually discussedbut also as unique entities with fascinating stories to tell.
The growing popularity of homeschooling raises important questions about the value of ethical diversity, what it means to think for oneself, how we prepare our young people to be democratic citizens, and what role (if any) the state should have in the education of children. Beyond competing visions about the proper aims of education, Kunzman shows, lies a complicated relationship between faith, freedom, and citizenship.
Review
“Home schooling is under-researched and often misunderstood. Helen Lees' excellent
Education without Schools goes a long way to remedying this. It combines insightful empirical work with rigorous conceptual analysis. It makes a major contribution to defining the field."
Review
“This important and thought-provoking book makes a sustained case for an alternative to the ‘educationalist paradigm. . . . Above all, this is a hopeful book and one I would thoroughly recommend to anyone who understands (or could be persuaded to understand) education as, ‘a plurality of possibilities.”
Review
“Thoughtful and interesting to read. . . . Lees has gone further than most other writers on home education in her efforts to theorize the movement such that it becomes a coherent and viable option for twenty-first-century families.”
Review
“This study is a valuable and welcome contribution in an area of education which has so far received little attention from researchers in the United Kingdom.”
Synopsis
Homeschooling is a large and growing phenomenon in U.S. society—the National Center for Education Statistics recently reported that in the last decade it grew at
twelve times the rate of public school enrollments. Yet information about this population is terribly incomplete. In this groundbreaking book, Robert Kunzman uses his unprecedented access to six conservative Christian homeschooling families to explore the subset of this elusive world that most influences public perception and rhetoric about the homeschooling movement, from its day-to-day life to its broader aspirations to transform American culture and politics.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Synopsis
Education without Schools explores what happens when parents learn that there are legal alternatives to conventional schooling. Based on an empirical case study of families in England who discovered the possibility of elective home education, this book offers a globally relevant analysis of the state’s relationship to education, parental choice, and related human rights issues. Underscoring the fact that education occurs in many different contexts around the world, Helen E. Lees argues that schooling’s dominance has ultimately limited our ability to imagine the full range of educational possibilities.
About the Author
Robert Kunzman studies the intersection of education, religion, and citizenship in the United States, and spent ten years as a high school teacher, coach, and administrator. He is currently an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Education and the author of
Grappling with the Good: Talking about Religion and Morality in Public Schools.
Table of Contents
List of abbreviations
Notes on author
Acknowledgements
1 Setting the scene
2 Against educationism
3 Why is elective home education important?
4 The theory of the gateless gate of home education
5 Moments of discovery
6 Against discovery of education without schools
7 School exit and home education
8 Understanding discovery differences
9 Concluding remarks
Appendix
References
Index