Who Needs Teacher Education? Gender, Technology, and the Work of Home Schooling

In this article, the author examines the ways in which the claim to subaltern status has led to a partial withdrawal from state-run institutions and to a practice of schooling that is meant to equip the children of authoritarian populist parents both with an armor to defend what these groups believe is their threatened culture and with a set of skills and values that will change the world so that it reflects the conservative religious commitments that are so central to their lives. He focuses on the ways in which new technologies such as the Internet have become essential resources--in essence "the" model of teacher education--in what authoritarian populists see as a counter-hegemonic struggle against secular humanism and a world that no longer "listens to God's word" (Apple, 2006). He argues that only by placing these technologies back into the social and ideological context of their use by specific communities (and by specific people within these communities) can people understand the meaning and function of new technologies in society and in education. In order to accomplish this, the author also focuses on the labor of home schooling, on how it is organized, on new definitions of legitimate knowledge and legitimate teaching, and on how all this has been partly transformed by the ways in which technological markets are being created. Much of the author's discussion centers around the place of gender in social movements, since conservative women have multiple identities within them, simultaneously able to claim subaltern status based on the history of dominant gender regimes, and having dominant status given their positioning in relationship to other oppressed groups.