“YOU CAN’T RELY ON SOMEBODY ELSE”: How Homeschooling Dads Think

Record: Lee Garth Vigilant, Lauren Wold Trefethren, and Tyler C. Anderson, “‘You Can’t Rely on Somebody Else to Teach Them Something they Don’t Believe’: Impressions of Legimitation Crisis and Socialization Control in the Narratives of Christian Homeschooling Fathers” in Humanity and Society 37, no. 3 (2013): 201-224. [Abstract Here]

Summary: Vigilant, a father of homeschooled children who is also a sociology professor at Minnesota State University Morehead, here joins with two non-homeschooling colleagues to present one of the first studies ever of homeschooling fathers.  Vigilant and his wife, who are African American, turned to homeschooling upon moving to Minnesota, which in his words ranks “among the worst states in the nation for the achievement gap between black and white students in mathematics and reading.” (p. 202)  Noting that the sociological literature on parental motivation focused nearly exclusively on mothers, Vigilant wanted to learn what fathers were doing and thinking about homeschooling.

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Kunzman on Christian Homeschoolers, Part 2

This post continues my review of Robert Kunzman, Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling(Boston: Beacon, 2009).

In part one I summarized the book’s contents and offered a few tepid critiques.  Here I’d like to draw out a few generalizations from Kunzman’s rich data about Christian homeschoolers.

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Tough on Replicating Middle Class Homes for the Poor

This post reviews Paul Tough, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).

Tough, an editor at the New York Times Magazine and widely published journalist, here pens a fascinating book chronicling the reform efforts of Geoffrey Canada, an African American visionary who has been working for many years to transform Harlem.  The book is an engaging blend of first person reportage of Canada’s efforts among the urban poor with research reviews of some of the most significant scholarship on urban poverty, child-rearing, and education.  In this review I’ll briefly summarize Canada’s approach in Harlem and then focus on what this book has to say about the importance of home life for a child’s educational success. 

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Malcolm Gladwell’s OUTLIERS and Homeschooling, part I

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success(New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2008 ) aims to debunk the common mythology of self-made greatness, arguing instead that behind every great man or woman is a host of factors we often don’t think about that made his or her success possible.  The book is not directly about homeschooling at all, but many of its examples and insights are highly relevant to homeschooling.  

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Neil Gilbert on Motherhood, Capitalism, and Feminism, part 1

This is the first in a series of posts reviewing Neil Gilbert’s new book A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Gilbert, a professor at U.C. Berkeley, has a long and distinguished track record working in many fields related to social policy, welfare, and family issues.  This, his latest book, turns his considerable experience and acumen to the vexing issue of the choices women make about motherhood and paid employment.  He argues that the shift over the past forty years away from motherhood and toward paid employment is not the result of women now having the freedom to go to work nor is it a matter of economic necessity.  Rather, he argues that three factors have conspired to undervalue motherhood: 

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