Michael Apple on Gender, Religion, and Homeschooling

Record:

Michael W. Apple, “Gender, Religion, and the Work of Homeschooling” in Zehavit Gross, Lynn Davies, and Al-Khansaa Diab, eds., Gender, Religion and Education in a Chaotic Postmodern World (Springer, 2013). Abstract Here.

Summary:

Apple, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is one of the nation’s best-known education scholars and a long-time observer and critic of conservative educational efforts.  Readers of his 2006 book Educating the Right Way will find the contents of this new chapter very familiar.

Apple begins with a basic orientation to the homeschooling movement, noting its left-wing origins but stressing its dramatic growth among conservative Christians in the 1980s and 90s.  His preferred term for these conservative Christian movement activists is “authoritarian populists,” a phrase that acknowledges both the grass-roots nature of the movement and its long-term goal of restoring the vision of Godly and Patriarchal authority it embodies in the home to the broader American culture.

Read Full Post »

RELIGION, VOLUNTEERING, AND EDUCATIONAL SETTING: How Does Homeschooling Impact Civic Engagement?

Record: Jonathan P. Hill and Kevin R. Den Dulk, “Religion, Volunteering, and Educational Setting: The Effect of Youth Schooling Type on Civic Engagement” in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52, no. 1 (2013): 179-197 [Available Here]

Summary:

Hill and Den Dulk, both professors at Calvin College, here present results drawn from the massive National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) directed by Christian Smith and Lisa Pearce.  Read my summary of an excellent earlier study by Jeremy Uecker using this data set here.

In the piece before us today Hill and Den Dulk want to know whether the type of schooling a child receives goes on to have an impact on that individual’s habits of volunteering in young adulthood, and if so, why.  As the NSYR was a multi-stage longitudinal study of a representative sample of the American population, it can answer this question.

Read Full Post »

WHY WE NEED HOMESCHOOLING: Perry Glanzer Critiques Democratic Education

Record: Perry L. Glanzer, “Saving Democratic Education from Itself: Why We Need Homeschooling” in Peabody Journal of Education 88, no. 3 (2013): 342-354.

Summary: Glanzer, an education professor at Baylor University, here argues that homeschooling provides a helpful corrective to reductive definitions of education fostered by some advocates of public schooling.

His fundamental point is that many public school advocates have raised the concept of education for political citizenship to such a high level that it has become something like an established religion. 

Read Full Post »

Uecker on Homeschooling and Religious Commitment

This post reviews Jeremy E. Uecker, “Alternative Schooling Strategies and the Religious Lives of American Adolescents” in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, no. 4 (December 2008): 563-584 [Abstract available here].

Uecker, a Ph.D. candidate at the U of Texas at Austin and author of many interesting articles on young adult religion and sexuality, here examines data from the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) to determine whether Catholic schooling, Protestant schooling, or homeschooling have any impact on the religious lives of American teens. 

Read Full Post »

Review of Heidi Williams, ed., AT ISSUE: HOMESCHOOLING, part 1

This 2007 release by Thomson Gale is a convenient anthology of articles all previously published elsewhere covering a range of topics and points of view on homeschooling.  The aim of the collection is to provide a sort of point/counterpoint on the topics covered.  In my next few posts I will provide brief summaries of and commentary on the articles included.  Today I will talk about the first two. 

Read Full Post »