The First Home-School Catalogue: A Handbook & Directory

Donavon L. Porter is a public-school teacher in Haileybury, Ontario.

Donn Reed’s Catalogue, subtitled “A Handbook and Directory,” provides a valuable resource for anyone interested in obtaining materials to supplement or provide their children’s education. “Handbook” is perhaps a misnomer, since little how-to material is provided. Instead, Reed relates his rather unfortunate experiences in dealing with the public school system and gives a couple of grammar lessons for the enlightenment of the reader. Reed also provides material describing certain other successful home-school situations in North America.

The really valuable contribution that Reed makes in this book is the catalogue of resource materials. In his efforts to obtain suitable material for his own home-school situation, Reed has uncovered most of the sources used by the public school system to obtain their materials as well as a large number of American sources which are not normally patronized by Canadian school boards. Reed provides a brief description of the material as well as a source and price for each item.

If one is prepared to take Reed’s personal analysis of the public school system lightly and is able to gloss over the fundamentalist jargon that crops up here and there throughout the text, The First Home-School Catalogue should prove to be a useful source book for parents interested in expanding their children’s education.