Homeschooling in Wendy Mass’ EVERY SOUL A STAR

This post reviews Wendy Mass’ children’s book Every Soul A Star (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2009).

Wendy Mass is a popular author of a fast growing catalogue of children’s books (nine so far).  Every Soul a Star joins a growing list of recent children’s books that include homeschooled characters.  I read it this week-end, which was not easy to do because two of my daughters kept stealing it from me to read it themselves.  For this post I’ll begin by talking about how Mass uses homeschooling and then turn the post over to two guest bloggers, my daughters Rachel (age 13) and Susanna (age 8). 

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Laats on A Beka, Bob Jones, and ACE Curricula

This post reviews Adam Laats, “Forging a Fundamentalist ‘One Best System’: Struggles over Curriculum and Educational Philosophy for Christian Day Schools, 1970-1989” in History of Education Quarterly 50, no 1 (February 2010): 55-83. [Read the first page here]

Laats, a professor at the Binghamton University School of Education and respected colleague, here continues a line of research he’s been working on for a good while.  Laats has published several articles about the history of Evangelical Protestants and education, and he has a book coming out soon that explains the long term impact of the Scopes trial on modern America.

The article under review here is a wonderful study of the three most widely used curricula in the world of conservative Protestant schooling from the 1970s to the present, both among Christian day schools and among homeschoolers.  Laats does not stress the homeschooling application, but his history of these curricula applies just as well to homeschoolers as to the Christian day schools for which they were first developed.

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Jones on Religious Schools and Homeschools

This post reviews Steven L. Jones, Religious Schooling in America: Private Education and Public Life (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).

Jones, Associate Professor of Sociology at Grove City College, here offers a fascinating book about the history of private religious education in America.  It’s not a straightforward chronological history but rather a thematic look, showing in chapter after chapter how common themes have animated the Catholic school movement of the 19th century, the Jewish day school movement of the mid 20th century, and the Protestant day school and homeschool movements of the more recent past. 

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