Having been an early champion of homeschooling and having homeschooled our daughters from pre-school to college admission, I will respond therapeutically to the paper recently revised and touted: “Homeschooling: Parents Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights To Education & Protection” by Harvard scholar Elizabeth Bartholet. I have written pieces objecting to these tired arguments before, e.g., Vetoing a Parent’s Prerogative Washington Post July 11, 2004, when homeschooling was not yet as mainstream. Bartholet writes in the same academic tradition as Robin West’s The Harms of Homeschooling in Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly Vol. 29, No. 3-4. Both create premises out of progressive thin air, citing their own work or gut feelings to substantiate their unscientific finding in the usual intellectual inbreeding that has become higher education. If they wonder why so many parents have opted into homeschooling, they need go no further than their own scholarship.
My first objection is a premise commonly touted as true, prima facie, even among the freedom loving homeschool community: education is a right.
Education is not a right. Public education is a privilege afforded by the taxpayers who have an interest in the education of the community for numerous reasons–but it is not a right. To shape it as a right, such as the right to vote or the right to assemble, prescribes an obligation by society to provide it and something that can be cherished or disdained by the rightsholder. But as a privilege, children (and their families) are the ones obligated, and those that neglect or abuse their education should be told to take a hike. In this way it is like the privilege of driving a car. Abuse the rules of the road and that privilege will be taken away and you may face severe punishment depending on the offense. Same with education—or it should be. But because people like Bartholet patently assume that it is a right uncontested, we have the broken, dysfunctional, expensive, bureaucratic, worthless institution that is public and higher education. And even as a right, education as it is provided by the government is a total violation. As Sir Ken Robinson discovered, the educational system, if it is anything, is ultimately geared to produce one kind of person: a college professor. This is perhaps why Bartholet and West think so highly of government schools, but for the rest of us sentient human beings, public education is beyond reform.
My second objection is the bigoted tone and pejorative language she uses to caricature the so-called “homeschooling regime” educating a “whopping” 3-4% of all school age children. Bartholet, like her pseudo-intellectual forebears, props up the most prejudicial stereotype of homeschooling parents being a mass of uneducated, inbred, child molesting morons clinging to their guns and Fundamentalist Protestant religion, citing extreme cases of deranged people (who, yes, used homeschooling) to spray paint everyone the same color. The language suggests that abuse is rampant within the movement citing “many” and “a significant subset” without providing so much as a count or ratio to substantiate the language. She cites “chilling” cases of neglect, abuse, and isolation, without citing the numerous benefits that homeschooling has provided despite the academy, not just to the homeschooled children, but to our society and its future. In any case, her repeated ad nauseam argument is a straw man since what the author really objects to is not homeschooling, but parenting.
Third, her premises and arguments are false. Practically every sentence, at least those that try to make a point, is biased if not outright wrong. Let us examine just a few.
“Homeschooling parents can, under current law, deny their children any meaningful education and subject them to abuse and neglect free from the scrutiny that helps protect children in regular schools”
In Northern Virginia where we homeschooled, the state required we apply every year and that at least one us have a college education. We also had to use standardized tests and meet minimum scores to continue homeschooling or be put on probation. Should the problem continue another testing cycle we would be fired. Of course, our daughters demolished the standardized scores and we were not fired from administering (not necessarily teaching) their education. Is this criterion used for public school systems? Imagine if that were so.
“[Homeschool] parents are committed to homeschooling largely because they reject mainstream, democratic culture and values and want to ensure that their children adopt their own particular religious and social views…that exposing their children to ideas such as secularism, atheism, feminism, and value relativism is inconsistent with the values they espouse and undermines their ability to inculcate in their children their beliefs in the sacred, absolute truth of the Bible.”
Homeschooling families reject mainstream culture for the very fact that it has become, not only toxic and the antithesis of an educated society, but that it is an undemocratic institution intolerant of dissent. It is not secularism, feminism, etc, that disturbs the homeschooling families—it’s the lack of discourse. In the government schools, ideas contrary to this ruling paradigm, starting with homeschooling itself, are given absolutely no quarter. This tradition carries on to higher education where people are not allowed to speak out or critically think for fear of academic reprisal or even physical abuse. That includes Harvard . Try walking on campus with MAGA hat and see what happens or just disagree with the professor on any sociological topic and be summarily dismissed and targeted for abuse.
“Unregulated homeschooling, therefore, badly compromises the development of capacities for autonomy in the children subjected to it . . . . [T]he children in some of these homes are being schooled quite intentionally for lives of submission to authority, not for autonomy . . . . They are discouraged from developing either the will or the skills to break those bonds”
Am I the only one that sees the irony here? Submitting to authority would mean sacrificing one’s children to the public-school Moloch and that’s precisely why homeschooling families rebel, including the students who quickly see the difference. The thing the really galls Bartholet and West is not that the children are slavishly obedient to Authority, but that they are not slavishly obedient to their pseudo-educational regime and the shit they sell as autonomy and knowledge.
And when it comes to creating autonomy, who are they kidding? The public institutions they speak of create intellectual dependence whereby students graduate without the most fundamental of life skills other than, maybe, birth control. By college they are told to work in groups where all eyes look to someone to take responsibility (usually a homeschool graduate) because they won’t, can’t or don’t really care to. They claim graduates of public institutions are prepared for the workforce, but they end up jobless, in debt, and dependent on mom-and-dad well into their thirties. Then they end up being dependent on the state where they cry for loan forgiveness, minimum wage increases, free birth control, free healthcare, and free education whereby it will be worth every penny.
Finally, Bartholet never compares her premises against the real regime with near-absolute intellectual hegemony: the public-school system. She talks, even screams, incessantly about children being abused everywhere in the “homeschool regime” without comparison to the rampant abuse that exists in the public school system, starting with the waste of human potential that is the 12+ years of mind-numbing indoctrination, nihilism, and suicidal boredom. Our children go into the system full of hope and anticipation, only to come out unable to write a complete sentence, not inclined to ever read another book, uninformed of their own and the world’s history, mathematically incompetent at every level, overly conscience of imagined rights, overly indulged, socially stratified, confused of identity, void of virtue, void of truth, void of future, void of hope. They become the very model of ignorance and dependence.
Homeschooling is on the rise (which Bartholet recognizes but never adequately explains) because people like the thing it produces. The homeschool educated, now coming of age, show the public education system as the complete and utter failure it is. Wherever Bartholet uses the term “homeschool” one could substitute “public” and her premise would be a thousand times valid.