 Original cover | |
| Author | Alan Peshkin |
|---|---|
| Subject | Weekday church schools, education philosophy |
| Published | 1986 (University of Chicago Press) |
| Pages | 360[1] |
| ISBN | 978-0-226-66199-5 [1] |
| 377[1] | |
| LC Class | LC621[1] |
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.