DISTURBING THE DATA: Gender and Family Size Matters with Evangelical Homeschooling

Record: Melissa Sherfinski and Melissa Chesanko, “Disturbing the Data: Looking into Gender and Family Size Matters with US Evangelical Homeschoolers” in Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 7, no. 14 (2014): 1-18. [Abstract Here]

Summary: Sherfinski is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction/Literacy Studies at West Virginia University. Chesanko is a doctoral student in the same department. In this qualitative study, the authors examine gender matters in Evangelical homeschooling families of various sizes.

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HARO 2014 INSTALLMENT TWO: Demographics

Record: Coalition for Responsible Home Education, “A Complex Picture: Results of the 2014 Survey of Adult Alumni of the Modern Christian Homeschooling Movement, Installment Two” Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (1 February 2015). [Available Here]

Summary: This post reviews the second installment of HARO’s survey of homeschool alumni. For the other installments in the series please click on the following links:

1. Installment 1: Background and Summary
2. Installment 2: Demographics
3. Installment 3: Academics and Non-Academics
4. Installment 4: Food and Health
5. Installment 5: Religion

Installment two discusses the impact that variables such as age, gender, and parental education level had on the respondents’ experiences with homeschooling.

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How do Homeschoolers do in College?

This post reviews Alexa Wood, “From the Kitchen Table to the Lecture Hall: Reaching an Understanding of the Lived Experiences of Home-School Students in Institutions of Higher Learning” (M.A. Thesis, North Carolina State University, 2011).  Available fulltext here.

Wood, who tells us that she herself had been homeschooled for nine years, attending a two-year institution during high school as preparation for college, here seeks to neither provide “an endorsement or criticism of an individual’s choice to participate in a home-school” but merely to provide an accurate account of what it is like to do so and then go to college.

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A Christian Romance Novel Featuring Homeschooling

A few months ago a reader of this blog recommended to me Meg Moseley’s When Sparrows Fall.  It’s the first Christian romance novel–the first romance novel of any kind really–that I’ve read.  I loved it.

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Two Recent Custody Cases involving Homeschooling

This post links to and briefly summarizes two recent child custody cases where homeschooling plays an important role.  The topic is important for several reasons.  First, these are the kind of cases that homeschooling advocacy groups like HSLDA know better than to get involved in, so they don’t.  Because of this lack of involvement they are not the kind of cases that are generally publicized in the homeschooling community, which is a shame because they get at some important and often painful realities.  Second, these cases help explain why the debate over the competing rights of parents, state, and child is not going to go away.  Third, they offer a window into the real world of homeschooling that one never reads about in the how-to books.  Of course we must be quick to note that the stories recounted in these court cases are by no means typical or normal.  It would be a terrible mistake to generalize about the entire world of homeschooling from these troubling and sordid examples.  But it would be an equally terrible mistake to pretend that such things are not going on as we work out public policy.  These are not isolated instances, as this post from Roscommon Acres and the related posts at the end of it make plain.  Here are the cases:

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West on the Harms of Homeschooling

This post reviews Robin L. West, “The Harms of Homeschooling” in Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly 29, no. 3/4 (Summer/Fall 2009): 7-11 [Available here]

West, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, here provides perhaps the most blistering attack on homeschooling to be published in a reputable source in many years.

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Veronica Chater’s WAITING FOR THE APOCALYPSE

This post briefly reviews Veronica Chater, Waiting for the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Faith and Family (New York: Norton, 2009).

Chater here pens an amazing memoir of her childhood years as one of (eventually) 11 children in a super conservative Catholic family.  There’s no actual homeschooling in the book (Veronica’s mother threatens her kids with homeschooling to keep them in line) but I mention it on this blog because Chater’s family is precisely the sort of family that a few years later would have taken up homeschooling.  Chater’s parents are devotees of the Fatima revelations and understand all of the changes made to the Catholic Church in the wake of Vatican II to be harbingers of The Great Chastisement foretold by the Virgin to the Fatima youth.  Chater tells of her father’s quest for a true Catholic community, a quest that led him to move his family from California to Portugal, only to be disappointed that the same modernist trends that had been afflicting the American church were present even there.  So the family moved back to the United States and joined various fringe Catholic elements, thinking of themselves as a faithful remnant awaiting the end of days.

Chater’s writing is wonderful.  She brings her crazy family to life with humor and pathos, making this the sort of book one doesn’t put down until the last page has been turned.  The reason I want to include it in this blog, however, is because of what happened to the children of this very conservative, very religious family.  Of the eleven children born to Veronica’s parents, only one remains Catholic as an adult.  Recently I devoted several posts to Kathryn Joyce’s, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. One of the points I made about the book is that I don’t think all of the children who grow up quiverfull will ultimately embrace their parents’ convictions. Then last week I noted how Rob Kunzman’s, Write These Laws on Your Children finds that the children of the Christian homeschoolers he interviews are usually quite a bit more tolerant and politically ambivalent than their parents.  Chater’s memoir provides a remarkable case study of how the religious and political views of conservative Christian parents can sometimes alienate their children profoundly.  It’s also delicious reading.

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Modern Girls, Pioneer Spirit, and Patriarchy

This post reviews Susan A. Miller,Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organizations in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007)

Miller, a lecturer in the history department at the University of Pennsylvania, here writes a detailed and fascinating account of organizations created in the early 20th century to help girls maintain continuity with the frontier past even as they prepared them for the modern future–organizations like Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts, Girl Pioneers, and many more. 

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Joyce on Patriarchal Homeschooling, Part 3

This post is the final installment of my treatment of Kathryn Joyce, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.

In my first post I summarized the book’s content.  In my second post I offered a few critiques and generalizations.  Here I’d like to offer some speculations about the movement’s future, drawing on a few personal experiences in the process. 

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Joyce on Patriarchal Homeschooling, Part 2

This post continues my review of Kathryn Joyce, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.

In my last post I summarized Joyce’s book.  Here I will offer three criticisms and then try to generalize a bit from her data.  In my next post I’ll offer some predictions for the future of the Patriarchy movement.  First for the critique:

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