Home Schooling: Parents as Educators (book review)

Home Schooling

Parents as Educators

By: Maralee Mayberry

J. Gary Knowles

Brian Ray

Stacy Marlow

BOOK REVIEW

(I received nothing to review this book. The opinions written here are my own and are unsolicited.)

Let me begin by saying that I didn't even read the back cover of this book when I picked it up from the library. I didn't glance at anything but the title. As soon as I opened this book I knew I was in for some trouble. This is a very research based book and was written by professors and assistant professors who received a grant from the government to study homeschooling from different angles. It is, by it's nature, a very dry read. The authors sampled home educators and school superintendents from three different states, with varied results, and limited replies to their questionnaires. They are very up front about this.

Reading through just the introduction to the book you quickly come to realize that you are in for a very dry read highlighting the differences between home education and "professional" educators. Research was done in the early 90's to preface this book and so is also slightly out of date. 

I found I was forcing myself to finish each page, chapter, and finally the book. Like stereo instructions, it's something that you might not want to read and therefore are only reading it because it MAY contain information that you will find useful at some point in the future. The text is littered with what I call hundred dollar words, or to put it another way ... words from a literary dictionary that aren't widely used in conversation. Even though I pride myself in my vocabulary and have some college education I stumbled over a few or the words here and there simply because I come across them so infrequently. 

Scattered throughout the book are stories and quotes from home educators who responded to the initial questionnaire and were later interviewed for further information. There's also several tables of statistics in the book based upon those initial questionnaires. Most of the information that I gleaned from this book I did not previously know ... in that one way it was educational and enlightening. 

Perhaps having this book in your home library would be a good thing (it's relatively short, only seven chapters). I suppose it could be used as something to present to a local superintendent that may be unresponsive to homeschooling. Certainly it doesn't take up much room and if you've read it once I seriously doubt you'll go back to it unless you find that you have a need to reference some of the data given. I honestly think that you would be better served with just about ANY other homeschooling book no matter how dated it's information may be. 

Just because this book isn't for me doesn't mean that it's not for someone.