Rethinking the boundaries and burdens of parental authority over education: a response to rob reich's case study of homeschooling

Educational Theory

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 1-16

  Glanzer, Perry L ^a  

^a BAYLOR UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65249138849     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2007.00272.x     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Rob Reich, Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 142. This work will be cited as BLM in the text for all subsequent references.
2. For examples from the past decade and a half, see Shawn Francis Peters, The Yoder Case: Religious Freedom, Education, and Parental Rights (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003);
3. John Tomasi, Liberalism Beyond Justice: Citizens, Society, and the Boundaries of Political Theory (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001);
4. Stephen Macedo, Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000);
5. Meira Levinson, The Demands of Liberal Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
6. Walter Feinberg, Common Schools, Uncommon Identities: National Unity and Cultural Difference (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998);
7. Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997);
8. Stephen Gilles, "Liberal Parentalism and Children's Educational Rights," Capital University Law Review 26 (1997): 9-44;
9. Stephen Gilles, "On Educating Children: A Parentalist Manifesto," University of Chicago Law Review 63, no. 3 (1996): 937-1034;
10. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Amy Gutmann, "Civic Education and Social Diversity," Ethics 105 (1995): 557-579;
11. and William Galston, "Two Concepts of Liberalism," Ethics 105(1995): 516-534.
12. Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972);
13. and Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education, 827 F.2d 1058 (1987).
14. For Reich's extensive list, see BLM, 250 n2.
15. For this quotation, see the back of the paperback edition. Numerous articles and books have addressed the topic in the past fifteen years. See for example Michael Apple, "The Cultural Politics of Home Schooling," Peabody Journal of Education 75, no. 1-2 (2000): 256-271;
16. and Chris Lubienski, "Whither the Common Good? A Critique of Home Schooling," Peabody Journal of Education 75, no. 1-2 (2000): 207-232, as well as the bibliographies of the other essays in the two volumes of the Peabody Journal of Education (2000) devoted to homeschooling. See also Mitchell Stevens, Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001).
17. For a review of the research relevant to this point, see Richard G. Medlin, "Home Schooling and the Question of Socialization"Peabody Journal of Education., 75, no. 1-2 (2000): 107-123
18. Sarah H. Ramsey and Douglas E. Abrams, Children and the Law in a Nutshell (St. Paul, Minnesota: Thomson/West, 2003). Well-known children's rights advocates also take this position. See, for example, Joseph Goldstein, Albert J. Sonja Goldstein, and Anna Freud, The Best Interests of the Child: The Least Detrimental Alternative (New York: The Free Press, 1996).
19. This line of argument is set forth in Elmer Thiessen's books, In Defense of Religious Schools and Colleges (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002) and Teaching for Commitment: Liberal Education, bIndoctrination, and Christian Nurture (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993
20. Susan McDowell, Annette Sanchez, and Susan Jones, "Participation and Perception: Looking at Home Schooling through a Multicultural Lens," Peabody Journal of Education 75, no. 1-2 (2000): 124-146.
21. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, A Guide to Naturalization, Publication M-476 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2007), 18.
22. One could also argue that Reich's approach to education for minimalist autonomy raises an important question at this point: "Are women [or men] who have been forcibly re-educated, or brainwashed, or systematically conditioned from infancy to value autonomy really autonomous?" (Thiessen, Teaching for Commitment, 132).
23. Perhaps Reich's claim itself needs to be turned on its head: his concern about unregulated homeschooling is in my view "wildly exaggerated," for even homeschools "exhibit enormous diversity and are in any case far from the only socializing influence on children." Instead of a controlled system of centralized public education, which tends to encourage uniformity, homeschooling allows for a diversity of methods and ends that the state system does not allow. For an understanding of the diversity within the homeschooling movement, see Stevens, Kingdom of Children.
24. It is intriguing to glance through the countries that do allow some form of homeschooling: Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Japan, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Switzerland, Tawan, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States (see http://www.hslda.org/hs/international/ default.asp). For a discussion of home education law in Europe, see Lesley Ann Taylor and Amanda Petrie, "Home Education Regulations in Europe and Recent U.K. Research," Peabody Journal of Education 75, no. 1-2 (2000): 49-70.
25. See also Charles Glenn, Educational Freedom in Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute,1995).
26. James Davison Hunter, The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
27. See, for example, Warren Nord's evaluation of U.S. textbooks in Religion and American Education:Rethinking a National Dilemma (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
28. Richard G. Medlin, "Home Schooling and the Question of Socialization," Peabody Journal of Education75, no. 1-2 (2000): 109.17. Ibid., 119.
29. A 1999 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll found that 92 percent of respondents agreed that homeschoolers should "take all the state and national assessment tests that public school students are required to take."
30. I agree that private schools that accept vouchers should be required to have their students take standardized tests to show progress in baseline competencies.
31. Apple, "The Cultural Politics of Home Schooling."
32. See, for example, Hanna Rosin, "God and Country," New Yorker, June 27, 2005, http://www.\newyorker.com/archive/2005/06/27/ 050627fa-fact (on-line).