HOMESCHOOLING AND SOCIALIZATION REVISITED

Record: Richard G. Medlin, “Homeschooling and the Question of Socialization Revisited,” in Peabody Journal of Education 88, no. 3 (2013): 284-297.

Summary:

Medlin, a psychology professor at Stetson University, here continues a line of inquiry he began in one of the landmark articles of the original 2000 Peabody Journal homeschooling special issue.  Since that article he has published several pieces in the journal Home School Researcher, all of which find very positive results for homeschoolers’ social and academic development.  In this piece his goal is to review research on homeschooler socialization that has appeared since his 2000 article.

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Three Lawyers Praise Homeschooling

This post reviews Tanya K. Dumas, Sean Gates, and Deborah R. Schwarzer, “Evidence for Homeschooling: Constitutional Analysis in Light of Social Science Research” in Widener Law Review, 16, no. 1 (September 2010): 63-87. [Abstract available here]

The authors here are all lawyers who homeschool their children.  Schwarzer particularly is well-known in California as a member of the Board of Directors of the Gifted Homeschoolers Forum and especially through her work with the Homeschool Association of California’s efforts to overturn the In re Rachel L. decision that caused such consternation back in 2008.

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Aasen Summarizes Homeschooling in 3 pages

This post briefly reviews Susie Heumier Aasen, “New Followers of an Old Path-Homeschoolers” in Educator’s World 32, no. 4 (January 2010): 12-14. [Available Here]

Aasen, veteran homeschooling mother of five in Washington State, here summarizes the basics of homeschooling research.  She leads off with the 2007 NCES data that estimated there to be around 1.5 million homeschoolers in the U.S.  She describes the diversity of motives, pedagogies, and types of people who homeschool.  She cites Brian Ray’s NHERI research to show that 

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Merry and Howell on How Family Intimacy is a Good Argument for Homeschooling

This post is the first in a series reviewing the recent articles published in the November 2009 issue of Theory and Research in Education.  The article under review is Michael S. Merry and Charles Howell, “Can Intimacy Justify Home Education?”

Merry, professor of philosophy of education at the University of Amsterdam and author of an important recent book on Islamic schooling, and Charles Howell, a philosopher of education at Northern Illinois University who has published many articles on homeschooling (most of them in Brian Ray’s Home School Researcher), here team up for a vigorous argument for intimacy as a guiding value in homeschooling that can justify the practice.  Here’s the argument in a nutshell: 

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