Mary Pride (born 1955) is an American author and magazine producer on homeschooling and Christian topics. She is best known for her homeschooling works, but has also written on women’s roles, computer technology in education, parental rights, and new age thought from a conservative evangelical perspective. For her pioneering role in authoring guides for the homeschooling movement, Pride has been described as "the queen of the home school movement" and as a "homeschooling guru". Stemming from her first book, The Way Home, she is also considered a pioneer in the Christian Quiverfull movement.
Pride was born in New York City, New York, in 1955. She has described herself as a bright student who graduated high school at age 15, after which she entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she earned a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1974 and a master's degree in Computer Systems Engineering a year later. She married her husband Bill around this time and both soon converted to Evangelical Christianity. Pride had formerly considered herself a feminist activist.
Before the first of Pride’s nine children were born, she had decided to homeschool them. The lack of homeschooling guides she encountered prompted her to begin writing her own.
In Pride's first book, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, she chronicled her journey away from what she argued were feminist and anti-natal ideas of happiness, within which she had lived as an activist before her conversion to conservative evangelical Christianity in 1977. She described her discovery of happiness surrounding what she felt was the Biblically mandated role of wives and mothers as bearers of children and workers in the home under the authority of a husband. Pride argued that such a lifestyle was Biblically required of married Christian women but that most had been unknowingly duped by feminism. She meanwhile countered in the book various versions of Christian feminism.
As the basis for her arguments, Pride selected numerous Bible verses from which to lay out what she felt was the Biblical role of women. These included verses she saw as containing her ideas of the importance of childbearing and non-usage of any form of birth control. Pride argued that the mindset that led to use of family planning was a root cause for inadequate influence in the world by the Christian religion.
Pride's rejection of each and every method of family planning in The Way Home was soon noticed by prominent members of the Couple to Couple League, a Catholic natural family planning (NFP) movement. John and Sheila Kippley in their The Art of Natural Family Planning describes how representatives of the organization contacted Pride to express concerns over her position. In 1989, Pride in her HELP for Growing Families periodical published portions of the correspondence between the Kippleys' and herself, during which Pride accepted NFP use only for couples who wished to remain healthy until they were ready to use no fertility control at all. Sheila Kippley credits the correspondence as the reason why Pride accepted NFP in such circumstances in her sequel, All the Way Home.
Mitchell Stevens, a Hamilton College sociologist, has criticized Pride for exhibiting feminist values in her lifestyle much more than in what she espouses. Pride has countered that the model of womanhood in Book of Proverbs 31 in the Bible shows there is no hypocrisy in a woman engaging in public and economic life, so long as she maintains homemaking as her first loyalty.
Pride's The Way Home has been an assigned text in at least one university course.
On homeschooling
Because so few guides were available on homeschooling in the mid-1980s when Pride began writing on the subject, her works are considered pioneering.
Pride has argued that public school systems are overly concerned with student self-esteem concerns and that they can no longer teach right from wrong. She has highlighted public school environments as contributing to teen sexual activity, while also noting them as frequent sites of gang violence and drug use.
The first volume of Pride's three-volume homeschooling series, The Big Book of Home Learning, was released in 1986 and had sold 250,000 copies by mid-1991. The work was still subject to journal reviews ten years later.
Pride's 2004 work, Mary Pride's Complete Guide to Getting Started in Homeschooling, was described by Publishers Weekly as a "Herculean signature title" that covers "every aspect of home-schooling imaginable".
Pride has summarized her approach to homeschooling in what she calls "The Four Standards for Sane Home Teaching": "It's gotta be simple, fun, comprehensive and cheap".
On parental rights
In 1986 Pride released The Child Abuse Industry, which is most noted for its pulling together of cases where, in Pride's view, state child protective services wrongly infringed parental rights.
On computer technology
Pride has argued that public schools were designed for a factory age when it was important to work in groups on rigid schedules, but that they are no longer suitable for a technological age in which conditions have so radically changed. She has contended that the increasing user-friendliness of home computer technology has rendered public schools "obsolete".
Pride has been a pioneering advocate of software usage in home education. Her 1992 Prides' Guide to Educational Software was reviewed as a groundbreaking work aimed at providing homeschoolers with software curriculum and tools, and was recommended by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. PC Magazine described the book as a "monumental 607-page book", "a treasure trove of educational software", that "describes, analyzes, and ranks over 750 programs for DOS, Macintosh, Apple II, and Amiga platforms".Wired Magazine stated that the Prides' and their computer-savvy children had evaluated and mercilessly tested in the book every piece of educational software known to be on the market. Pride's Internet-based questions & answers sessions on usage of technology for homeschooling were noted in the Wall Street Journal, and her work using technology in homeschooling shown in the Rocky Mountain News.
Pride has continually advocated that homeschoolers use Internet technology to "be able to react instantly to any and all political threats," to "become a nationwide support group," and to "transform the entire face of American education".
In addition to her books, Pride is editor of Practical Homeschooling Magazine which by 1998 figures had a circulation of 100,000, the contents of which is carried by Thomson Gale's educational databases. She also runs the website Homeschool World (http://www.home-school.com) which maintains it is the world's most visited site on homeschooling.
