PARENTS’ RIGHTS AND EDUCATIONAL PROVISION: An Argument for Abolishing all Private Schooling

Record: Roger Marples, “Parents’ Rights and Educational Provision” in Studies in the Philosophy and Education 33, no. 1 (January 2014): 23-39.

Summary:  Marples, a Principal Lecturer in Education at University of Roehampton in London, here makes a spirited argument against the legitimacy of non-government schooling in all but the most extreme circumstances.

Marples begins by asserting that the claims of parental “rights” go back to Lockean notions of property rights and to claims by philosophers like Robert Nozick and Charles Fried that the child is an “extension” of the parent.  Marples disagrees.  For him, “treating children as mere appendages to their parents is both to disrespect and undermine their moral status.” (p. 24)

Read Full Post »

How Homeschooling Disrupts the Legal Definition of Public Education and What that Means for Government Regulation

This post reviews Robert Kunzman, “Education, Schooling, and Children’s Rights: the Complexity of Homeschooling” in Educational Theory 62, no. 1 (February 2012): 75-89.

Kunzman, as readers of this blog know very well, is one of the leading scholars currently working on homeschooling.  He is author of the important book Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling; he’s written many articles on homeschooling; and he maintains a helpful site that catalogs homeschooling research here.

A couple of years ago I reviewed an earlier piece by Kunzman on government regulation of homeschooling that dealt with some of the same themes he addresses here.  Back then Kunzman argued against various kinds of government regulations, concluding that only tests evaluating a homeschooler’s grasp of basic literacy and numeracy should be mandated.

This current article is a bit more theoretical.  It aims not so much to set out an explicit policy proposal as to argue for why certain domains should be considered legal rights (and thus be scrutinized by the government) while other, perhaps equally important domains, should not.

Read Full Post »

Joyce on Patriarchal Homeschooling, Part 2

This post continues my review of Kathryn Joyce, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.

In my last post I summarized Joyce’s book.  Here I will offer three criticisms and then try to generalize a bit from her data.  In my next post I’ll offer some predictions for the future of the Patriarchy movement.  First for the critique:

Read Full Post »

Jackson on Homeschoolers’ Transition to Formal Schools

This post reviews Glenda Jackson, “Home Education Transitions with Formal Schooling: Student Persspectives” in Issues in Educational Research 17 (2007) (Available fulltext here)

Jackson, a doctoral candidate at Monash University in Australia, here conducts three case studies of homeschooled students transitioning to and from formal schools. 

Read Full Post »

Glanzer responds to Reich

This post reviews Perry L. Glanzer, “Rethinking the Boundaries and Burdens of Parental Authority over Education: A Response to Rob Reich’s Case Study of Homeschooling” in Educational Theory 58, no. 1 (2008): 1-16

Glanzer, an education professor at Baylor University best known for his work on moral education in U.S. colleges and in Russia, here offers a rebuttal to Rob Reich’s argument for increased government regulation of homeschooling, which I discussed in a previous post, and offers his own proposal for ideal government policy. 

Read Full Post »