HOME SCHOOLING IN CANADA: A Fraser Institute Report

Record: Deani Neven Van Pelt, “Home Schooling in Canada: The Current Picture–2015 Edition.”  Barbara Mitchell Center for Improvement in Education (June 2015).  [Available Here]

Summary: Van Pelt, who has published occasional studies of home education since 2003, is director of the Barbara Mitchell Center for Improvement in Education at theFraser Institute, a libertarian think-tank based in Canada with a long history of advocating market-based policies drawn from libertarian economists like Friedrich Hayek, Edwin G. West, and George Stigler.  This report updates a 2007 update of the widely cited 2001 report the Fraser Institute published called Homeschooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream.  The 2001 report was written by Patrick Basham, who has since moved on to be a prominent voice at the Cato Institute, another libertarian think-tank based in the United States.

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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.

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AMERICAN GRACE and Homeschooling

This post reviews Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

This book has been on my pile for a while and I finally got the chance over the holidays to crack it.  Putnam is widely known as the author of the landmark 2001 book Bowling Alone, which is largely responsible for making the phrase “social capital” as popular as it has become.  This new book, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, is every bit as interesting and based on better data.  It ably synthesizes a vast array of surveys and other sources to provide a reliable and fascinating look at trends in American religion from the 1950s to today.

There’s nothing explicit in it about homeschooling, but chapter five, entitled “Switching, Matching, and Mixing” provides evidence to help elucidate one of the most important questions homeschooling research can ask, and one of the hardest to answer.  The great majority of homeschoolers choose the practice at least in part to stack the deck in favor of their children turning out like themselves, especially in terms of religious belief and moral standards.  Does it work?

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