By Julie Anderson
3L Publishing, $14.95, 117 pages

In Quickest Way to Insanity – Homeschool Your Kids Julie Anderson claims to write “an irreverent guide to educate your children, maintain your composure and keep a sense of humor.” From this, readers might presume this is a humorous look at the home schooling lifestyle. Rather, Anderson undertakes a fairly serious overview of home schooling and brain-based learning.

Anderson begins by discussing what she sees as the advantages of home schooling. While she includes the ability to adapt curriculum to each child’s needs and spend more time with our children, she also suggests home schooling avoids child-molesting teachers, drugs, bullying, germs, and health-endangering low self esteem.

Anderson accurately characterizes the strengths and weaknesses of various means of home schooling. However, she also spends considerable time on various theories about how the brain affects learning, which may be better left to experts with more than “numerous college units in subjects that range from psychoneuroimmunology to deaf studies” and training under an unnamed expert on something called the Brain/Personality connection. While Anderson does accurately discuss some aspects of home schooling, much of this book seems to require a grain of salt.

Annie Peters

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