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God's Choice

God's Choice
God's Choice.jpeg
Original cover
Author Alan Peshkin
Subject Weekday church schools, education philosophy
Published 1986 (University of Chicago Press)
Pages 360
ISBN
377
LC Class LC621

God's Choice: The Total World of a Fundamentalist Christian School is a 1986 book written by Alan Peshkin and published by the University of Chicago Press. It is the product of his late 1970s 18-month ethnographic study of a 350-person Christian fundamentalist Baptist school in Illinois. He describes the K–12 day school's function as a total institution that educates about a singular truth (God's will) and subordination before God. The final chapter is a comparative analysis of the school and other schools, institutions, and social movements, wherein Peshkin concludes that the school is divisive in American society for promoting intolerance towards religious plurality, the very condition that permits the school's existence.

Reviewers wrote that Peshkin's account was fair, and praised his decision to let the participants speak for themselves through quotations. They also noted that the book filled a literary lacuna in scholarly understanding of the rapidly expanding and understudied fundamentalist Christian school.

God's Choice: The Total World of a Fundamentalist Christian School is a 1986 book written by Alan Peshkin. It is a profile of an Illinois Christian fundamentalist school—its policies, practices, and participants. Peshkin, then Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, intended his account to be both impartial and "empathetic". He presents the fundamentalists as disciplined, dedicated, and determined with "formulas for success" opposite "fragmented and defensive" detractors. They believe in "one Truth"—God's plan—and reject philosophies of multiple truths. A teacher told Peshkin that their job is to prepare students for this "one pattern" of thought. In turn, the community's constituents do not wish to leave, but appreciate conformity as an end in itself. Peshkin describes the school as a "total institution": a place where many similar people live by their own formal rules apart from outside society, as based on Erving Goffman's 1961 essay. Peshkin asserts that this was a natural conclusion from a school "based on absolute truth".God's Choice was the third book in his series of studies on school–community relationships. It was published by the University of Chicago Press.


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