This post reviews Lizebelle van Schalkwyk and Cecilia Bouwer, “Homeschooling: Heeding the Voices of Learners” in Education as Change 15, no. 2 (December 2011): 179-190.
van Schalkwyk and Bouwer, both professors at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, here try to attend to the voices of actual homeschooled children to get a sense of what they think about the practice.
Since 1997 homeschooling has been legal in South Africa. But research on homeschooling, assert van Schalkwyk and Bouwer, has very seldom paid any attention to what the children being homeschooled think about the experience. What little information there is on childhood experiences is typically gleaned from impersonal surveys. To correct this gap the researchers attempt a qualitative study that attends to the thick family context of beliefs, habits, and interactions. (more…)
A second, fully revised edition of my 2008 book Homeschool: An American History, was published in March of 2017. 
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Homeschooling Research Notes 