"What They're Reading at the Kitchen Table"

That's the title of an article written by Mark Oppenheimer in Wall Street Journal (Friday, September 2, 2005). The subtitle is "Home-schoolers of all stripes find common ground in some good, old-fashioned books." The author writes, "According to recent polls, nonreligious families now make up more than 40% of the home-schooling market." He goes on to write about how both religious and secular homeschoolers tend to go to old standbys for books. The works of Laura Ingalls Wilder and G.A. Henty have become "smashingly successful" with both camps.

I like the way he ends the article:

"...what's more interesting is what these two authors--and their
readerships--have in common:

• a preference for long books, often parts of a series, consumed with a leisure that public-school curricula don't allow;
• an emphasis on narratives, which children like, divorced from contemporary politics, which surely can wait; and
• a powerful sense that children are major players in the world, the kind of people, perhaps, who deserve better than large classrooms and who may grow up more likely to write books than to be told which ones to read [bullets mine for emphasis]."