Michael Apple on Gender, Religion, and Homeschooling

Record:

Michael W. Apple, “Gender, Religion, and the Work of Homeschooling” in Zehavit Gross, Lynn Davies, and Al-Khansaa Diab, eds., Gender, Religion and Education in a Chaotic Postmodern World (Springer, 2013). Abstract Here.

Summary:

Apple, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is one of the nation’s best-known education scholars and a long-time observer and critic of conservative educational efforts.  Readers of his 2006 book Educating the Right Way will find the contents of this new chapter very familiar.

Apple begins with a basic orientation to the homeschooling movement, noting its left-wing origins but stressing its dramatic growth among conservative Christians in the 1980s and 90s.  His preferred term for these conservative Christian movement activists is “authoritarian populists,” a phrase that acknowledges both the grass-roots nature of the movement and its long-term goal of restoring the vision of Godly and Patriarchal authority it embodies in the home to the broader American culture.

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A Young Scholar looks at Homeschooler Attitudes toward Tests and Socialization

This post briefly reviews Lisa Bergstrom, “What Effect Does Homeschooling Have on the Social Development and Test Scores of Students?” (M.A. Thesis: U of Wisconsin-Superior, 2012). [available here]

This Master’s Thesis covers very familiar terrain in the world of homeschooling research.  Bergstrom begins with a very cursory and idiosyncratic lit review, revealing that when she first started looking into homeschooling she was going to focus on its negative aspects.  But reading some literature made her more positive about the phenomenon. 

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Home Study Programs in the 1920s-1930s and Today

This post reviews Robert Hampel, “The Business of Education: Home Study at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin in the 1920s and 1930s.” in Teachers College Record 112, no. 9 (September 2010): 2496-2517.

Hampel, a professor at the University of Delaware and respected colleague, here provides a fascinating look at a once popular but now largely forgotten form of education that was based in the home.  In the early 20th century millions of Americans enrolled in all sorts of programs by correspondence.  Most of them enrolled in classes with for-profit companies who often promised the moon, used aggressive recruitment strategies, and played hardball if you failed to make payments.  But several thousands of Americans also took study-at-home courses from the nation’s universities.  In earlier work Hampel has given us fine history of the for-profit companies.  Here he looks at the universities.

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Burch on Virtual Charters and Other Market-Based Educational Trends

Two weeks ago I reviewed Terry Moe and John Chubb’s new book celebrating market-based education reform, especially home-based online learning.  Today I review Patricia Burch, Hidden Markets: The New Education Privatization (Routledge, 2009), which is a critique of these same trends.

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