HOMESCHOOLING STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS: Research Review

Record: Kathleen B. Cook, Katie E. Bennett, Justin D. Lane, and Theologia K. Mataras, “Beyond the Brick Walls: Homeschooling Students with Special Needs” in Physical Disabilities: Education and Related Services, 32 (2), (2013): 90-103. [Available Here]

Summary: Kathleen B. Cook, Katie E. Bennett, Justin D. Lane, and Theologia K. Mataraswere all students in the Department of Communication Sciences and Special Education at the University of Georgia. In this article they summarize the research related to homeschoolers with special needs, a population that has increasingly recognized the viability of homeschooling in recent years.

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LEARNING FROM HOME: Visual Domestic Education in Early Modern Italy

Record: Silvia Evangelisti, “Learning from Home: Discourses on Education and Domestic Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy” in History 98, no. 333 (December 2013): 663-679 [Abstract Here]

Summary: Evangelisti, a Reader in History at the University of East Anglia in the UK, here uses pedagogical and artistic advice literature composed in 16th and 17th century Italy to make claims about the use of images and other forms of material culture as education in early modern Italian homes.

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HOME SCHOOLING: A CQ Researcher Report

Record: Marcia Clemmitt, “Home Schooling: Do Parents Give their Children A Good Education?” CQ Researcher 24, no. 10 (7 March 2014), pp. 217-240. [Available Here]

Summary:

The CQ Researcher has long been an influential publication, especially among politicians and others connected to the United States Congress.  Clemmitt is a veteran journalist who has provided in-depth analysis of several educational issues in the past.  She brings her wide experience and the publication’s resources together here on the topic of homeschooling.

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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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Charlotte Mason on Teaching History

This post reviews Hilary Cooper, “Looking Backwards to Move Forwards: Charlotte Mason on History” in Curriculum Journal 23: 1 (2012), pp. 7-18.

Cooper, a member of the education faculty at the University of Cumbria, Carlisle, UK, here uses Charlotte Mason’s views of history education to critique trends in the British government’s approach to the issue.

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A New Book that Surveys almost all Extant Homeschooling Research

This post reviews Joseph Murphy, Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2012).

Murphy, Associate Dean at Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University and author of many, many books and articles on a wide range of topics, here provides a remarkable synthesis of nearly the entire corpus of homeschooling research published from the 1980s to the present.

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A Philosophical Argument Against Homeschooling, Part 1

This is the first of a two-part review of Randall Curren and J. C. Blokhuis, “The Prima Facie Case Against Homeschooling” in Public Affairs Quarterly, 25, no. 1 (January 2011): 1-19.

Curren, a distinguished philosopher of education, and Blokhuis, a recent graduate student of Curren’s who is now Assistant Professor of Education at Renison University College in Canada, here build on earlier work, especially Blokhuis’ doctoral dissertation, to argue that in the abstract common schools do a better job of preparing children for public life than do parents.  The term prima facie in the title is crucial for this argument.  It means that they are not claiming that public schools are actually better or that homeschooling parents are actually incompetent to teach.  They’re just saying that in principle a common school with professionally trained teachers at first blush seems like a better set up than homeschooling.  

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A Book Chapter on Homeschooling

This post very briefly reviews William Jeynes, “Chapter 5: The Rise of Homeschooling as a Modern Educational Phenomenon in American Protestant Education” in the International Handbook of Protestant Education (2012), co-edited by Jeynes.

Jeynes is a professor of education at California State University Long Beach, and this is not the first time on the blog I’ve found work with his name on it to be substandard and poorly edited.  This book chapter is very weak.  It is basically a summary of the literature on homeschooling, but it’s not a very good one. 

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A Book that Explains the Culture Wars

This post reviews David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).  Sehat is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University.

Let me start off by saying that I absolutely loved this book.  It’s my favorite kind of history.  Sehat takes one idea and traces its history from the American founding to the present, giving his readers a deep understanding of the concept even as we are disabused of some common misperceptions along the way.  The concept here is American religious freedom.  The misperceptions are these.  Liberals often speak as if from our founding the United States has been a secular nation and that Christian efforts to impose Christian morality on everyone else are out of step with this history.  Conservatives often speak as if the United States has always been a Christian nation, and that Christianity is in fact the basis of the religious freedom we all hold so dear.  Both are wrong.

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Condoleezza Rice on her Childhood Homeschooling

Condoleezza Rice was Secretary of State from 2005-2009 under president George W. Bush and is currently a professor of political science at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.  Her 2010 memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family,is a fine account of her life, including lots of great information about her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950s and 60s, especially (for us) her year as a homeschooler.

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