Record: Martha Albertson Fineman, “Home Schooling: Putting Parental Rights Over Children’s Best Interest” in Robert A. Fox and Nina K. Buchanan, eds., The Wiley Handbook of School Choice (Malden, MA: 2017), pp. 362-375.
Summary: Fineman is one of the most important living feminist legal scholars. Since the mid-1970s she has taught at a string of universities, the latest of which is Emory, where she is now the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law. She is the author of many, many books on family law. Many of these books connect in one way or another to what has long been her central project–to move legal privileges and fiscal support away from the “sexual family” toward the broader network of caregiving relationships that form the context within which we live our lives.
In this piece Fineman turns her gaze to education. She begins by explaining that historically public schools offered both public goods (civics instruction, historical understanding, fostering of public-spiritedness) and private goods (skills and literacies that would lead to personal economic well-being). Unfortunately, thinks Fineman, recent decades have seen a dramatic retreat from public goods and a near exclusive focus on private goods. Because of this, school choice initiatives continue to gain ground, the most extreme of which is homeschooling. Continue reading →
offering a withering critique of