The Wiley Handbook of Home Education

For myriad reasons, more and more parents are choosing to educate their children at home and not just in the United States. In recent years, home education has grown to become an established phenomenon around the world. The Wiley Handbook of Home Education is a comprehensive collection of the latest scholarship about all aspects of home education in the United States and abroad. Featuring contributions from top international academic researchers and scholars, readings serve both to synthesize the existing literature in the field and set an agenda for avenues of future study. Initial chapters emphasize themes relating to home education in the United States, examining its decades–old roots, historical development, and current demographics. Topics explored include legal issues, parental motivation, academic achievement, higher education, home–schooling of minority populations, and many more. Chapters in subsequent sections cover home education in Canada, Europe, the South Pacific, Africa, Asia, and other regions of the world. Particular attention is given to legal issues and the ways other countries and regions have produced home–educational experiences both similar to and different from those of the United States. Authoritative and illuminating, The Wiley Handbook of Home Education sheds important new light on a dynamic alternative educational movement begun in America that is rapidly spreading to all corners of the globe.

Notes on Contributors vii

Introduction to The Wiley Handbook of Home Education 1
Milton Gaither

Part I Home Education in the United States 5

1 The History of Homeschooling 7
Milton Gaither

2 Using Survey Data Sets to Study Homeschooling 32
Eric Isenberg

3 Legal Issues in Homeschooling 59
Antony Barone Kolenc

4 The Calculus of Departure: Parent Motivations for Homeschooling 86
Joseph Murphy, Milton Gaither, and Christine E. Gleim

5 Academic Achievement: Making an Informed Choice about Homeschooling 121
Sandra Martin Chang and Kyle Levesque

6 Homeschooler Socialization: Skills, Values, and Citizenship 135
Robert Kunzman

7 Homeschoolers and Higher Education 157
Marc Snyder

8 Homeschooling Motherhood 186
Jennifer Lois

9 Homeschooling among Ethnic Minority Populations 207
Cheryl Fields Smith

10 Teaching the Child with Exceptional Needs at Home 222
Karen Hurlbutt Eastman

11 Homeschooling 2.0: An Overview of Online Learning in K 12 Education across the United States 246
Bryan Mann

Part II Home Education Worldwide 269

12 Home Education in Canada 271
Christine Brabant and Marine Dumond

13 Home Education in the United Kingdom 303
Helen E. Lees and Fiona Nicholson

14 Common Themes in Australian and New Zealand Home Education Research 329
Glenda M. Jackson

15 Theories, Practices, and Environments of Learning and Home Education in Latin America 362
Erwin Fabián García López, Diego Fernando Barrera Tenorio, and Wills Emilio Alejandro Fonseca

16 The Legal Situation of Home Education in Europe 395
Henk Blok, Michael S. Merry, and Sjoerd Karsten

17 Home Education Experience in Selected Post Communist Countries 422
Yvona Kostelecká

18 Home Education in Asia Minor 446
Elife Do an K l ç

19 Home Education in China 468
Xiaoming Sheng

20 Contemporary Homeschooling and the Issue of Racism: The Case of South Africa 494
Michael Olalekan Olatunji

Index 516

Milton Gaither is Professor of Education at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He is the author of American Educational History Revisited: A Critique of Progress (2003) and Homeschool: An American History (2008). Gaither has held several leadership roles for the History of Education Society and is a founder and board member of the International Center for Home Education Research.