HOMEWARD BOUND: A Journalist Chronicles Hip Domesticity

Record: Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).

Matchar is a freelance journalist who has written for many prominent publications.  This is her first book.

Summary:

Matchar’s book is a lively look at several trends among mostly middle class, white, politically progressive young women in the United States.  These trends, which range from cooking from scratch with local, organic food, to handicrafts, to at-home businesses, to homeschooling, are all illustrative of a larger movement among these young women toward what Matchar calls “the New Domesticity.”

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LATIN IN THE HOMESCHOOLING COMMUNITY: Results of a Large-Scale Survey

Record:

Christine Hahn, “Latin in the Homeschooling Community,” in Teaching Classical Languages 4, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 26-51. [Available Here]

Hahn is a homeschooling mother and owner of Latin for Homeschoolers, an online tutoring service.

Summary:

To date there has been very little research on the very popular form of homeschooling known as classical education.  Peter Leithart has explained the growth of the classical movement at the macro level.  Anthony and Burroughs have provided a careful study of four families associated with one classical cooperative.  Hahn’s study here goes well beyond anything that has been published in the past, giving us our first quantitative look at classical homeschoolers.

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INFORMAL HOME EDUCATION: A Philosophical Rationale for Liberated Pedagogy

Record:

Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison, “Informal Home Education: Philosophical Aspirations Put Into Practice” in Studies in Philosophy and Education 32(2): 141-154 (2013) [Available Here]

British researchers Thomas and Pattison are frequent collaborators, most significantly on the 2008 revision of Thomas’ book How Children Learn at Home.  In this article they draw on some of their earlier empirical research to make several normative claims about informal home-based learning.

Summary:

Thomas and Pattison begin by noting that all children start out as informal, or what they call “osmotic” learners, mastering such complex tasks as learning to understand and speak language and to interpret social cues without any sort of formal, structured curriculum.  Many children go on to learn to read this way as well.

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Two Brief Articles on Homeschooling and Child Abuse

Records:

Daniel Pollack, “Homeschooling and Child Protection” in Policy and Practice 70, no. 1 (February 2012): 29, 35. [abridged version available here]

Meggan Goodpasture, V. Denise Everett, Martha Gagliano, Aditee P. Narayan, and Sara Sinal, “Invisible Children” in North Carolina Medical Journal 74, no. 1 (February 2013): 90-94 [Avaliable here]

Summary:

Pollack is a social work professor at Yeshiva University.  Goodpasture et al. are all medical professionals affiliated with North Carolina schools of medicine (Wake Forest, UNC Chapel Hill, and Duke).  As such all of these authors come to this issue as professionals concerned for the welfare of other people’s children.

Pollack’s article is very brief.  He cites the results of studies that have shown that the the most frequent source of referrals of abused children to Child Protective Services (CPS) are professionals, especially teachers.  Homeschooled children by definition do not have such outside surveillance.  He has no hard data that homeschooling increases the risk of abuse, but he does cite the horrific story of Washington, D.C. resident Banita Jacks, who “homeschooled” her four daughters, all found dead in her home in early 2008.

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