Choice without markets: homeschooling in the context of private education
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Homeschooling is enjoying new‐found acceptance in North America. Drawing on a variety of secondary sources and our own data from Ontario, Canada, we find that homeschooling is growing steadily, and is becoming an increasingly legitimated form of education. To understand these changes, we review prevailing sociological explanations that focus on the rise of neo‐liberal ideology, and pressures of class reproduction and human capital requirements. We document the contributions of these theories and note their limits for understanding the rising popularity of homeschooling. We then situate homeschooling within a broader context of private education, distinguishing segments that encourage market‐consumer, class reproduction, human capital and 'expressive' logics. The combination of large investments of time and effort with highly uncertain outcomes makes homeschooling the most expressive form of private education, which we trace to the burgeoning culture of 'intensive parenting.' Acknowledgements This research was funded by a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. The authors are listed in alphabetical order. They would like to thank Linda Quirke for her assistance with data collection and her helpful suggestions. Notes 1. We define education as private when it is not governed or funded by state bodies. 'Homeschooling' refers to 'parent or guardians educating their children at home by choice,' as distinct from educating a child at home because he/she is not able to attend school (Luffman, Citation1997, p. 30). 2. Some of these data were collected with Linda Quirke, who is studying new private schools in Toronto. 3. Homeschooling associations provide much more generous figures. In Canada, one estimates that approximately 100,000 students are currently homeschooled (http://www.life.ca/hs/). In the United States, the Home School Legal Defence Association put the number of homeschooling children between 1.725 million and 2.185 million in 2001–2002 (see http://www.hslda.org/research/faq.asp#1). 4. See http://www.ontariohomeschool.org/ppm131.html 5. Searching the database of a major Canadian bookseller, we found 60 books on homeschooling. No less than 90% of these books have been published since 1997. Of these, 52 were 'how to' books, only two had religious themes and only one made explicit reference to John Holt or unschooling. There are now even books on the topic in the 'for dummies' series. Homeschooling has truly entered the literary mainstream!
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it