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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Kunzman on Christian Homeschooling, part 1

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. 

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