{"id":662,"date":"2013-04-22T15:06:06","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T15:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=662"},"modified":"2014-02-10T19:36:15","modified_gmt":"2014-02-10T19:36:15","slug":"write-these-laws-on-your-children-christian-homeschooling-in-america-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=662","title":{"rendered":"WRITE THESE LAWS ON YOUR CHILDREN: Christian Homeschooling in America, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Robert Kunzman, Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling<\/a>\"\"<\/em> (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).<\/p>\n

Kunzman, 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.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

This first post will summarize the basic thrust of the book and give my overall impressions.\u00a0 The next post<\/a> draws out some\u00a0of the specific conclusions and take-home messages it offers. <\/em><\/p>\n

Summary:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Write these Laws<\/em> is a fascinating hybrid of a book.\u00a0 At its core are six in-depth case studies of Christian homeschooling families in the United States, representing a wide range of family sizes, economic circumstances, geographic locations, and pedagogical approaches.\u00a0 Kunzman’s families come from California (2), Vermont, Tennessee, Oregon, and Indiana.\u00a0 In each case Kunzman visited the families in their homes for several days over a two year period, watching the homeschool in action, interviewing mother, father, and children separately, going with them to church and other family activities, sharing meals and downtime.\u00a0 Kunzman takes this immersion and spins narrative gold, telling each family’s story with great power and detail.\u00a0 Reading each family profile is almost like reading a short story, so compelling are the characters and interesting the dramatic tensions and resolutions he chronicles.\u00a0 In the book’s introduction Kunzman promises that he’ll explore such questions as<\/p>\n

What do homeschoolers do all day, and why do they do it?\u00a0 What makes these parents decide to homeschool in the first place?\u00a0 What do their children have to say about it?\u00a0 Do these kids learn to think for themselves or are they herded into mirroring the beliefs and commitments of their parents?\u00a0 What do they learn about democratic citizenship and engaging with people who believe differently about important social and political issues? (p. 2)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And Kunzman’s case studies deliver the answers.\u00a0 For the first time ever we get a faithful, scholarly\u00a0depiction of what daily life is really like for homeschoolers, not idealized by advocacy or demonized by critics but related with clarity by a scholar who not only knows his stuff but\u00a0can tell a good story.\u00a0 As I said in the blurb I wrote for the book, it’s both fun and enlightening to read.<\/p>\n

Interspersed as breaks between the case studies, Kunzman switches gears and offers broader analysis of various themes and trends within the world of Christian homeschooling.\u00a0 He takes us to\u00a0two of the country’s largest homeschool conventions.\u00a0 He talks with the directors of a prominent California Independent Study Program.\u00a0 He muses\u00a0about the significance of race in homeschooling.\u00a0 He summarizes the scholarly discussion of academic achievement and socialization.\u00a0 Most importantly and provocatively, he\u00a0explores and analyzes HSLDA<\/a>,\u00a0especially\u00a0its\u00a0Generation Joshua <\/a>initiative, divulging some juicy internal squabbles along the way.<\/p>\n

Kunzman concludes with a summary of his findings.\u00a0 He notes that some\u00a0homeschools he visited\u00a0“rivaled or even surpassed the best of institutional schooling” while in others “children floundered in environments marked by poor teaching, questionable curricula, or frustrating interpersonal dynamics.”\u00a0 (p. 214) He found that while homeschooling leaders talk big about restoring Christian values in America, most homeschoolers “seem less focused on political engagement or transforming the broader culture” than on their own families.\u00a0(p. 215)\u00a0 What really drives Christian homeschoolers is their sense of the divine commission that parenting entails.\u00a0 It’s their core conviction that education is part of the larger parenting function, and that this function cannot be delegated elsewhere, that accounts for Christian homeschooler’s antipathy toward any and all government regulation of education.<\/p>\n

Appraisal:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have only a few minor critiques of this wonderful book.\u00a0 The first and most obvious one from the vantage point of research is that this book has no methodology section or notation apparatus.\u00a0 Beacon is not an academic press so this is not surprising, but it is a real problem.\u00a0 In his introduction Kunzman describes how he found the six families he interviewed, and it seems a rather haphazard affair.\u00a0 He “relied on mutual acquaintances for initial introductions” and then, after explaining what his project entailed, was turned down by some but accepted by six.\u00a0 (p. 7) This is what is\u00a0sometimes called a “convenience sample”–you take what you can get, and it is unfortunately the most common form of sampling in homeschooling research.\u00a0 Kunzman’s work here is qualitative rather than quantitative.\u00a0 He’s not trying to generalize to an entire population from his sample, so this method is less a problem for him than it is for some previous studies.\u00a0 Fortunately for Kunzman’s and our sake, his convenience sample just happened to have a lot of variability, so the results, while not easily generalizable, are fascinating and\u00a0complex.<\/p>\n

The lack of notes really detracts from the book’s value as a research guide.\u00a0 Peppered throughout it, both in the case study sections and in the excurses into broader themes, are many important comments on trends, statistics, research findings, and so forth.\u00a0 Anyone familiar with the homeschooling literature will immediately recognize that Kunzman is on solid ground in his observations and that he could easily cite his sources, but they’re not in the book.\u00a0 I asked Kunzman about this when I read an advance copy and he acknowledged the problem but said that he and the publisher agreed to forgo source notation in the interest of making the book more accessible to lay readers.\u00a0 I understand this idea, but frankly I don’t think it’s true.\u00a0 People who might be scared away by footnotes are probably not going to pick a book like this up anyway.\u00a0 Conversely, anyone interested enough in homeschooling to read a careful study of it will not be intimidated by endnotes.\u00a0 Homeschooling readers of my own book have made it clear to me that homeschoolers are often the sort of people who WANT the notes and may just check up on you to see if you got it right.<\/p>\n

Finally, I found a few of Kunzman’s forays into the larger national trends a bit shallow.\u00a0 The\u00a0short chapter reviewing research on academic achievement and socialization, while accurate, could be much more thorough.\u00a0 It is by no means a complete literature review.\u00a0 Even more cursory is his\u00a0brief chapter\u00a0on homeschooling and race, an important topic to which too little research has been dedicated.<\/p>\n

But what the book may lack in scholarly embellishment it more than makes up for in its fascinatingly thick description of a wide range of real Christian homeschoolers.\u00a0 If you want to really understand why so many conservative Christians are turning to homeschooling and what they’re actually doing all day, this is the book to read.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Milton Gaither, Messiah College, author of Homeschool: An American History<\/a>\"\"<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Record: Robert Kunzman, Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009). Kunzman, Associate Professor of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington and author of many works on religion, ethics, and education, here … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[61,46,585,305,586,63,587,346,588,119,589,590],"class_list":["post-662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-brian-d-ray","tag-brian-ray","tag-bridgeway-academy","tag-california","tag-generation-joshua","tag-hslda","tag-indiana","tag-lawrence-rudner","tag-oregon","tag-robert-kunzman","tag-tennessee","tag-vermont"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=662"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1099,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662\/revisions\/1099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}