Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement

Home-schooling has become an elaborate social movement, with its own celebrities, rituals and networks, which now encompasses more than a million American children, observes Hamilton College sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens in Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement. Moving from why parents opt for home-schooling to the long-term effects on their children, he draws on interviews with a mix of parents from fundamentalist Christians to pagans and educational radicals and persuasively contextualizes the movement within the ""organizational strategies of the progressive left and the religious right"" in their attempt to preserve their core set of values: ""the sanctity of childhood and the primacy of family in the face of an increasingly competitive and bureaucratized society."" (Sept.)