Kariane Mari Welner, Teachers College, Columbia University
March 2002
This somewhat recherch?? paper by Kariane Mari Welner of the UCLA School of Education is another in the burgeoning series sponsored by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia. The author interviewed 26 home-schooling families to ascertain (among many things) how these parents conceive of democracy and whether there's a tension between their civic views and their decision to home-school their children. The conclusion: sometimes there is. The author sorts home-schoolers into the "civic minded" and the "autonomy minded" and examines various of their values and attitudes and how these intersect with different conceptions of democracy and philosophies of education. It may hold mild interest for political theorists and people trying to understand what makes home-schoolers tick (though it seems from this paper, as from most research on the subject, that they tick in many different ways that defy easy generalizations and categorizations-the more so when one's sample contains barely two dozen of them!). You can find it on the web at www.ncspe.org by clicking on "Occasional Papers."
