A Young Troubadour Encounters Homeschooling

This post reviews Philip Brand, The Neighbor’s Kid: A Cross-Country Journey in Search of What Education Means to Americans (Capital Research Center, 2010).

Brand, a young staffer at the Capital Research Center, a conservative non-profit best known for its opposition to labor unions and environmentalists, here recounts his experiences during the 2008-2009 school year when he and his brother took a road trip that led them across the entire United States four times.  In route he visited dozens of different kinds of schools, including several homeschools.

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The Cardus Education Survey and Homeschooling

This post reviews Ray Pennings, et. al.,  Cardus Education Survey (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 2011)  [available here]

Phase 1 of the Cardus Education Survey was released a few weeks ago and has garnered significant national attention for its insights into private Christian schooling.  Though not the report’s major emphasis, it also includes some very interesting information about homeschooling. 

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Why are so many Homeschoolers Fundamentalists?

This post reviews Robert Kunzman, “Homeschooling and Religious Fundamentalism” in International Journal of Elementary Education 3, no. 1 (October 2010): 17-28. [Available here]

Kunzman, author of Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling and many articles on American homeschooling, here tries to explain why so many religious fundamentalists have found homeschooling an attractive educational option.

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John Holt and GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING

Just a quick note that today on the anniversary of John Holt’s death, Pat Farenga and associates have updated and improved their longstanding website chronicling Holt’s unschooling work.  You can find the site’s homepage here.

In addition to many other wonderful historical resources, the site has every back issue of every year of Growing Without Schooling, the first national newsletter about homeschooling and the most important historical resource extant for the early years of the homeschooling movement.  If you’ve never read through any of it I highly recommend doing so–Holt’s writing is lively and compelling, and many of the issues with which he was wrestling in the late 1970s continue to have resonance today.  Issue 1 begins in August of 1977, and the final issue takes you to December of 2001.  Most remarkably, it’s all free, just as Holt would have wanted it to be.

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Can Germany Loosen Up about Homeschooling?

This post reviews Franz Reimer, “School Attendance as a Civic Duty vs. Home Education as a Human Right” in International Journal of Elementary Education 3, no. 1 (October 2010): 5-15.

This is the first article in a special issue of the International Journal devoted entirely to homeschooling.  Over the next several weeks I’ll be reviewing each of the articles in the issue.  They are all available for free here.

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Constitutional Principles and Homeschooling

This post reviews Linda Wang, “Who Knows Best? The Appropriate Level of Judicial Scrutiny on Compulsory Education Laws Regarding Home Schooling” in Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, 25 (Winter 2011); 413-448.

Wang, a recent J.D. from St. John’s University School of Law, here seeks to make sense of the conflicting and hazy Constitutional principles at play in cases regarding homeschooling law and liberty.

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