Kyle Greenwalt

Home/Schooling Revisited

This book raises the question of what compulsory schooling does to children and the adults who care for them. In so doing, it examines stories that help illuminate the past and present nature of the home-school relationship. I’d like to start the book by first raising for you an image. That image is of the homeschooled child.

What Schooling Does to Kids

The purpose of schooling in the United States has never been taken for granted. The religious and cultural pluralism of the country, in addition to its traditions of secularity, civic voluntarism, and suspicion of strong, centralized state power, has resulted in a healthy conversation over the past 150 years about what, exactly, compulsory public schooling is meant to achieve.

What Schooling Does to Parents

The people who prepare the bulk of American teachers work in our colleges and universities. They are often bitterly criticized—by their students, by classroom teachers, and, increasingly, by the public at large—for being out of touch with the realities of teaching. How do you teach another person how to teach when you might never have done it or have only done it a very long time ago?

Home/Schooling Our Children

I started this book with the idea of home/schooling. In that opening chapter, we reviewed literature on the history of the conventional homeschooling movement and saw the way in which our own present moment might lead us to believe that the forces that have, for so long, neatly divided public from private spheres are indeed lessening—with a variety of DIY movements leading the way to such changes (including, among certain sectors of the movement, conventional homeschooling).

What Schooling Does to Teachers

Elizabeth, Mary and Sophia Peabody were sisters from Massachusetts, all born in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Their stories, if you don’t know them already, are incredible.