Homeschooling is hot and a new book, Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement, by Mitchell Stevens takes a fresh look at where the movement came from and what it means for American education and culture. Stevens, a professor of sociology at Hamilton College, spent ten years interviewing and observing homeschooling families and reading their publications. If you don't have time to read books, a thoughtful review by Margaret Talbot appears in this month's Atlantic Monthly. Among the interesting points she (and, presumably, the book) makes: that homeschooling is more modern and forward-looking than it is old-timey; that, while conservative Christians tend to dominate homeschooling today, the movement's pioneers were sixties-style hippies and radicals who met one another at the food co-op; and that homeschooling's appeal to countless mothers is that it offers intellectual outlets and entrepreneurial opportunities for women whose goal is full-time motherhood but who want to use their education in systematic ways and yearn to be recognized as more than "just moms." Talbot concludes that we don't need to worry about the academic or social skills of homeschooled kids, and that homeschooling poses no real threat to social cohesion. See "The New Counterculture," by Margaret Talbot, The Atlantic Monthly, November 2001. Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement, by Mitchell Stevens, is published by Princeton University Press and can be ordered for $24.95 at http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7135.html.
