The Liberated Learner — Column by Suzanne Kearney
The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18? I think that’s dangerous…
Elizabeth Bartholet
Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet is not mincing words: the government wants your kids.
Her Harvard Magazine May/June 2020 article entitled “The Risks of Homeschooling” made headlines when she openly called for “a presumptive ban on homeschooling,” a recommendation she outlines more thoroughly in a previously-written 80-page treatise.
The magazine piece is headed by a drawing depicting several happy, free-range (assumedly public-school) children playing outside, while a forlorn, homeschooled girl gazes despondently out her iron-barred window. Notably, her prison-cell house is constructed from a stack of books, including (of course) that oppressively confining, mythical fairy tale, the Bible.
Ironic. Last time I checked, it was the public-school kids that were locked in all day, not the ones at home.
The article raises alarm at the fact that homeschooling is the fastest growing form of education in the United States. Why the panic? Among other reasons, Bartholet laments the possibility that children may be influenced by their “conservative Christian,” “extreme religious ideologue” parents, ones who “question science and promote female subservience and white supremacy.”
Translation: if you are white, Christian, and support the traditional family, you are a danger to your children.
I will admit, it is conceivable that some homeschooled children could be undereducated, or neglected, or ideologically isolated. But so may their government counterparts. The question is not, which form of education is risk free, but rather, what is the risk-benefit analysis? In comparison to homeschools, public institutions carry the additional liabilities of peer pressure, bullying, school violence, explicit books, progressive indoctrination, and increasingly prevalent abuse by teachers, administrators, and peers. Academically, reading and math proficiency of students in public school continues to plummet as costs per student increase.
Here are a few facts, as reported here and here by the National Home Education Research Institute (NHREI):
- There is little evidence that public schooled or private schooled children are abused, neglected, or otherwise maltreated at a higher or lower rate than the homeschooled.
- Home educated students consistently score higher on academic achievement tests.
- Having a credentialed parent is not significantly related to children’s academic achievement.
- Degree of state control and regulation of homeschooling is not significantly related to academic achievement.
- Homeschooled students score above average on measures including “peer interaction, self-concept, leadership skills, family cohesion, participation in community service, and self-esteem.”
- Adult graduates who were homeschooled are more likely to have internalized their parents’ values and beliefs.
So you see, it’s not about facts. It’s about power.
Your betters, the elite academics at institutions like Harvard, want to end your right to homeschool. Because you are nothing but an ignorant religious zealot, unenlightened by progressive ideology and untrained by state-sanctioned “professionals,” your “right” to educate your children should be revoked. To the Omniscient Ones, government “intervention” is the panacea to all ills and freedom is the literal end of democracy. The exalted Professor Bartholet eloquently waxes, “From the beginning of compulsory education… we have thought of the government as having some right to educate children… it’s… important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints.”
In other words, their values.
In conclusion, let’s end with Professor’s own words: “…it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.” On this one point, she is correct. We the Parents must take the power back to ourselves and remove it from the hands of the political and academic elite.
If we don’t, rest assured, they will take it.
