Kingdom of Children : : Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement / / Mitchell Stevens.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter PUP eBook-Package 2000-2015
• VerfasserIn: Stevens, Mitchell,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2009]; ©2001
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: Core Textbook
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology ; 37
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

More than one million American children are schooled by their parents. As their ranks grow, home schoolers are making headlines by winning national spelling bees and excelling at elite universities. The few studies conducted suggest that homeschooled children are academically successful and remarkably well socialized. Yet we still know little about this alternative to one of society's most fundamental institutions. Beyond a vague notion of children reading around the kitchen table, we don't know what home schooling looks like from the inside. Sociologist Mitchell Stevens goes behind the scenes of the homeschool movement and into the homes and meetings of home schoolers. What he finds are two very different kinds of home education--one rooted in the liberal alternative school movement of the 1960s and 1970s and one stemming from the Christian day school movement of the same era. Stevens explains how this dual history shapes the meaning and practice of home schooling today. In the process, he introduces us to an unlikely mix of parents (including fundamentalist Protestants, pagans, naturalists, and educational radicals) and notes the core values on which they agree: the sanctity of childhood and the primacy of family in the face of a highly competitive, bureaucratized society. Kingdom of Children aptly places home schoolers within longer traditions of American social activism. It reveals that home schooling is not a random collection of individuals but an elaborate social movement with its own celebrities, networks, and characteristic lifeways. Stevens shows how home schoolers have built their philosophical and religious convictions into the practical structure of the cause, and documents the political consequences of their success at doing so. Ultimately, the history of home schooling serves as a parable about the organizational strategies of the progressive left and the religious right since the 1960s.Kingdom of Children shows what happens when progressive ideals meet conventional politics, demonstrates the extraordinary political capacity of conservative Protestantism, and explains the subtle ways in which cultural sensibility shapes social movement outcomes more generally.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- CHAPTER ONE. Inside Home Education -- CHAPTER TWO. From Parents to Teachers -- CHAPTER THREE. Natural Mothers, Godly Women -- CHAPTER FOUR. Authority and Diversity -- CHAPTER FIVE. Politics -- CHAPTER SIX. Nurturing the Expanded Self -- Notes -- Index