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This essay explores the relationship between theories of domestic pedagogy as articulated in eighteenth-century conduct books, and fictional representations of home education in novels of the period. The fictional discussions of domestic pedagogy interrogate eighteenth-century assumptions about the innate superiority of a domestic education for women. In so doing, they participate in a much wider eighteenth-century and Regency-period debate about the proper role of women in public life. In order to make the argument that a woman’s education was vital to the public welfare of the nation, writers from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Austen shifted the grounds of the debate, making the previously private into a matter of public concern. Early eighteenth-century ideals of domestic education, which kept women firmly in the private sphere, therefore began to seem outdated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Once societies embarked on programmes of mass education home schooling became essentially a middle-class project and remains so. This paper looks at the educational experiences of some lower middle class women at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for whom the resources of the middle-class home were simply not available. It explores both their experiences of formal schooling and of the educational provision they chose to seek and found among other groups and institutional frameworks in their society. The range and extended chronology of their educational experiences highlight the need to reconceptualise education as extended processes of physical, intellectual and moral socialisation not necessarily limited to the years of childhood and/or adolescence or time-stopped in any way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the work of educationist Charlotte Mason (1842–1923) to explore the practice of home education in the late nineteenth century. Mason’s work reflected and responded to the particular circumstances and concerns of her clientele. She provided a way for parents to compensate for the practical deficiencies of contemporary educational provision, while engaging with current pedagogical theory. In the process, she demonstrated the enduring appeal of a strand of pedagogical thought resistant to the dominant educational models, but not hostile to institutional education per se. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Elective Home Education is a legal, minority approach to the compulsory education of children. I review the potential contribution of the historical analysis of ‘domestic pedagogies’, presented in this Special Issue, for home education practice in the UK. By drawing on narratives of a period at the cusp of the perceived normalcy of ‘schooling’, I consider an alternative discourse to articulate the purpose of, and approaches to, education. In particular, I focus on the family not only as the site for educational practices, but also as critical for our understanding of what constitutes a ‘suitable education’. Along the way, I show how distinctions, common in home education practice, illuminate the historical debates on ‘domestic education’. I conclude by suggesting we cannot disassociate discussions of a suitable home education from the family within which such an education occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that domestic conversations taking place in a sociable context played a more important role than has hitherto been considered in the intellectual training and development of children. The centrality of conversation as an informal method of training the mind to reason had one important consequence: the publication of the highly successful ‘familiar format’, texts which used ‘conversation’ as the method of instruction. Written mainly but not exclusively by women, these texts were modelled on the instructive ‘familiar’ conversations which were part of the fabric of social and familial exchanges, and were an attempt to extend conversation’s educational effectiveness into a pedagogy. The article also explores why the format became a lost pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the history of home education in Great Britain, the distinction between learning in the home and institutional instruction, and the role of parents in instruction of their children.

Literacy before and after the 1921 People's Revolution in Mongolia has been largely represented by socialist historiography and post-socialist urban perspectives, which have rendered unofficial and non-pragmatic literacies invisible. This study explores rural, vernacular and grassroots literacy theories to recontextualize the pre-revolutionary category of Mongolian home schooling and to offer a new perspective – pastoral literacy – which enables historians and other researchers of Central Asia to represent the literacy practices of non-urban semi-nomads more accurately and vividly. This study applies the pastoral literacy perspective to literacy narratives extracted from University of Cambridge Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia interviews and demonstrates that pastoral home schooling was a socially and culturally salient domain for acculturating young Mongolians into the 1960s. Mongolian pastoral home schooling consisted largely of personal, male teacher–student relationships, authoritative teaching models, alphabet-based curricula, as well as texts and materials adapted from dominant religious and state literacies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines loose homeschooling laws in Illinois and compares it with international and domestic regulation. Topics discussed include whether Illinois should change its home education requirements, history and background of homeschooling and current status in the U.S. and domestic regulation of homeschooling. It presents views of Judith G. McMullen, law professor at the Marquette University Law School, on parental rights.

This article focuses on the idea of domestic education in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. Drawing on the cross-reading of a selection of two different sets of printed sources - pedagogical tracts, and art tracts which largely intersected with Catholic aims of religious reform and the creation of a confessional state and society - the article discusses the educational value that was attributed to the home environment, in its private, public and political dimensions, and the relevance which was attached to domestic visual and material culture and to the senses as learning tools to be used by children of different gender, age and class. Debates about education uncover less-known aspects of domesticity while suggesting the possibility to explore the continuities that might have existed between pre-modern notions of education and modern ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of dissemination of nutritional knowledge in textbooks of household schools between 1890 and 1940. It starts by considering the nature of food recommendations in manuals that are used in Belgian household schools, and then deals with the sources that are referred to by those who give food advice, comparing the latter to the state of the art of nutritional knowledge. If, prior to 1925, school manuals referred to working-class households, paid attention to abundant and economical food, recommended meat, hardly cared about breakfast and connected food to health in a general way, the manuals of the late 1920s and 1930s discussed the average consumer, advised limited meat consumption, warned against unbalanced diets that could lead to specific diseases and recommended required amounts of calories and vitamins. Textbook authors rarely referred to their sources – and if they did, international names were hardly mentioned – which raises the question of the value of the information in these textbooks. Yet from the late 1920s onwards, more direct references were made to science and researchers, which may be linked to the strengthening of scientific authority within society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the modern homeschool movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, homeschooling families have clashed with public institutions. Early homeschoolers joined together to win favorable legislative and judicial outcomes that resulted in the legalization of homeschooling in all 50 states by the early 1990s. Homeschoolers continue to face opposition from professional educators and the organizations that advocate for them. But although some interactions between homeschoolers and public schools are confrontational, in other cases, public school districts offer a variety of resources and opportunities to home educators. Some homeschoolers accept public school offerings through charter or online schools that allow children to remain at home while completing public school curricula. Others have gained the right to access public school extracurricular programs including high school sports. Not all homeschoolers agree on the merit of participating in programs offered by public schools. It is likely that instances of both cooperation and confrontation will continue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the history of homeschooling in the U.S. Particular focus is given to the intellectual and cultural origins of American homeschooling, including the theories of educational reformers John Holt and Raymond Moore. The author examines the factors which have removed homeschooling from educational and social marginality and placed it within the mainstream. Details on the hybridization of homeschooling and public education are also presented. Topics discussed include unschooling, parental control of education, and the religious aspects of homeschooling.