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Posts Tagged ‘Robert Kunzman’

Record: Kathleen B. Cook, Katie E. Bennett, Justin D. Lane, and Theologia K. Mataras, “Beyond the Brick Walls: Homeschooling Students with Special Needs” in Physical Disabilities: Education and Related Services, 32 (2), (2013): 90-103. [Available Here]

Summary: Kathleen B. Cook, Katie E. Bennett, Justin D. Lane, and Theologia K. Mataraswere all students in the Department of Communication Sciences and Special Education at the University of Georgia. In this article they summarize the research related to homeschoolers with special needs, a population that has increasingly recognized the viability of homeschooling in recent years.

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This is the second of two posts dedicated to Jennifer Lois’ new book Home Is Where the School Is: The Logic of Homeschooling and the Emotional Labor of Mothering(New York University Press, 2013).  In the first, which you can read here, I summarized the contents of the book.  Today I will share some of the thoughts I had as I was reading it.

First, a general comment about the quality of homeschooling scholarship.  Before I published my book in 2008 there was only one really good book on homeschooling in print, Mitchell Stevens’ Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement.  Now there are five.  In addition to Stevens’ and mine, all researchers should read Kunzman’s Write These Laws on Your Children, Murphy’s Homeschooling in America, and now Lois’ Home Is Where the School Is.  The field is in a much better place now than it was when I first got started, and Lois’ book adds significantly to our overall understanding.  Here I’m going to discuss two insights I found particularly compelling and conclude with a few criticisms.

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A few months ago I reviewed Joseph Murphy’s excellent book that synthesizes nearly all of the literature on homeschooling into a convenient, coherent, and literate volume titled Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement.  A couple of years before Dr. Murphy’s book came out Rob Kunzman and I decided that we wanted to do the same thing.  I’ve been reviewing homeschooling literature since 2008 on this blog, and Dr. Kunzman has compiled an exhaustive bibliography, which can be accessed here.  Our article summarizing and synthesizing all of this literature came out a few weeks ago and I asked Dr. Murphy if he would review it for me.  He graciously agreed to do so, and here are his comments: (more…)

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This post reviews Robert Kunzman, “Life as Education and the Irony of School Reform” in Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives 1, no. 1 (2012): 121-129. [Available here]

Kunzman, whose work is well known to readers of this blog as we have had many occasions to comment on it, here hints at some possible relationships between home education and public school reform in the United States.  He does this in the inaugural issue of the new journal Other Education, whose goal is to explore all sorts of alternatives to the conventional public school.

Kunzman begins by critiquing the trend in education reform toward faddish new programs or curricula, often sponsored by private foundations with vested interests in the next big thing.  (more…)

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This post reviews Robert Kunzman, “Understanding Homeschooling: A Better Approach to Regulation” in Theory and Research in Education 7, no. 3 (November 2009): 311-330

Kunzman, well known on this blog as the author of the excellent study Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling, here engages explicitly the aspect of his work that has caused the most controversy.  Kunzman’s book is an in-depth profile of several Christian homeschooling families.  He only briefly mentions government regulation in it, but that small part of the book has been the near exclusive focus of homeschoolers, many of whom now see him as just another critical academic who wants to take away their freedoms.  In this article Kunzman offers a more complete presentation of his position on homeschool regulation.  Here’s what he says:  (more…)

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It’s always a welcome development when a notable journal decides to devote an entire issue to homeschooling.  This has been done only a very few times.  Back in 2000 the prestigious Peabody Journal of Education devoted Volume 75, Issue 1/2 to homeschooling, (more…)

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The cerebral evangelical bimonthly Books and Culture just published a nice review of my book by Rob Kunzman.  You can read it here.

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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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This post continues my review of Robert Kunzman, Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling(Boston: Beacon, 2009).

In part one I summarized the book’s contents and offered a few tepid critiques.  Here I’d like to draw out a few generalizations from Kunzman’s rich data about Christian homeschoolers.

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This post reviews Robert Kunzman, Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).

Kunzman [see his wonderful homeschooling research website here], Associate Professor of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington and author of many works on religion, ethics, and education, here gives us one of the most important books on homeschooling ever written.  (more…)

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