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Posts Tagged ‘Postmodernism’

This is the second of a two-part review of Randall Curren and J. C. Blokhuis, “The Prima Facie Case Against Homeschooling” in Public Affairs Quarterly, 25, no. 1 (January 2011): 1-19.

In my previous post I argued against the historic backstory Curren and Blokhuis provide as the underpinning of their argument.  Today I will look at the argument itself.  In general they make two basic claims.  First, they claim that all children are entitled to equal public protection of their educational interests, which means that all forms of education, including private schooling and homeschooling, must provide equal educative opportunities.  Second, they claim that the nature of knowledge is such that, especially at the secondary level, parents (or any other citizen) can be presumed to lack competence to teach, and that anybody who wants to teach must overcome this presumption of incompetence by proving their merit.

Curren and Blokhuis elaborate on these claims through a three-part argument.  I will first summarize their argument and then offer some critiques. (more…)

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This post reviews Emma Stroobant, “Dancing to the Music of Your Heart: Home Schooling the School-Resistant Child” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Auckland, 2006).  (Available fulltext here)

Stroobant, a doctoral candidate at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, here offers as her Ph.D. thesis a challenge to the dominant medical model that pathologizes the phenomenon of “school resistance”–the overwhelming fear of school and refusal to attend by some children.  Rather than medicating such children and forcing them to attend school, Stroobant looks at homeschooling as an alternative therapy.  (more…)

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