HOME SCHOOLED CHILDREN ARE THINNER: A Nutrition Comparison between Public and Home Schooled Children

Record: Michelle Cardel et al., “Home-Schooled Children are Thinner, Leaner, and Report Better Diets Relative to Traditionally Schooled Children” in Pediatric Obesity 22, no. 2 (February, 2014): 497-503.  Abstract Here.

Summary:  In this piece 11 authors compare the diets of 47 home schooled children in the Birmingham, AL area with 48 demographically similar children from the same region who attend public schools.

Going into the project the authors wondered, given that both homeschooling and childhood obesity have grown markedly since the 1970s, if homeschooled children might be more prone to obesity. 

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Recent Developments in Home Education Law in Spain

Record:  María J. Valero Estarellas, “The Long Way Home: Recent Developments in the Spanish Case Law on Home Education” in Oxford Journal of Law and Religion (2013): 1-25. [Available here].

Summary:  Estarellas, a professor at Centro Universitario Villanueva, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, here summarizes recent case law pertaining to home education in Spain.  In 2010 the Spanish Constitutional Court handed down a major decision that is having a transformative impact on home education cases around the country.

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Michael Apple on Gender, Religion, and Homeschooling

Record:

Michael W. Apple, “Gender, Religion, and the Work of Homeschooling” in Zehavit Gross, Lynn Davies, and Al-Khansaa Diab, eds., Gender, Religion and Education in a Chaotic Postmodern World (Springer, 2013). Abstract Here.

Summary:

Apple, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is one of the nation’s best-known education scholars and a long-time observer and critic of conservative educational efforts.  Readers of his 2006 book Educating the Right Way will find the contents of this new chapter very familiar.

Apple begins with a basic orientation to the homeschooling movement, noting its left-wing origins but stressing its dramatic growth among conservative Christians in the 1980s and 90s.  His preferred term for these conservative Christian movement activists is “authoritarian populists,” a phrase that acknowledges both the grass-roots nature of the movement and its long-term goal of restoring the vision of Godly and Patriarchal authority it embodies in the home to the broader American culture.

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DOMESTIC EDUCATION IN 19TH CENTURY BRAZIL

Record: Caria Celi Chaves Vasconcelos, “Domestic Education in Nineteenth Century Brazil: Aspects of European Influence on the Performance of Tutors and Private Teachers” in Social and Education History 2, no. 1 (2013): 1-22.

Summary:  Vasconcelos, a professor of History of Education and Educational Policies at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and the Catholic University of Petrópolis, here describes female tutors who worked in the homes of well-to-do 19^th century Brazilian families.

Vasconcelos looks at advertisements both of tutors offering their services and families seeking tutors in Brazilian newspapers between 1839 and 1899, along with other documentary sources, to make generalizations about who these tutors were and what they did.  Before 1850 men were as desirous as women, but after 1850 the strong preference was for women, especially older women, and an increasing emphasis was placed on qualifications. 

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