It is important to remember that there exist terrifying liberal authoritarians who think homeschooling is horrible and should be banned because it gives parents, particularly conservative Christians, too much control over their children’s education.
Harvard Law School hosts a program called the “Child Advocacy Program,” or CAP, which works on weakening “parent rights” and diminishing the idea of “family preservation,” done in the name of fighting abuse. Fighting abuse is good and important. Children often need protection from abusive parents. But the latest crusade by CAP’s director, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, is basically to abolish homeschooling.
“The Risks of Homeschooling” is Harvard Magazine’s headline on an article about Bartholet’s crusade. It was flagged on Twitter over the weekend by education scholar and homeschooling advocate Corey DeAngelis. Bartholet’s latest law review article is titled “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection.”
This is how Bartholet sees homeschooling, per that law review article: “Many homeschool because they want to isolate their children from ideas and values central to our democracy, determined to keep their children from exposure to views that might enable autonomous choice about their future lives.”
She advocates “a presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool.”
Bartholet describes homeschooling as a shield or excuse for child abuse. For instance, her law review article states that “child abuse and neglect characterize a significant subset of homeschooling families. Many families choose homeschooling precisely because it enables them to escape the attention of” Child Protective Services.
Her citation? A 2015 law review article that states “a substantial amount of anecdotal evidence showing that some abusive parents, who have no intention of educating their children, have taken advantage of lax homeschooling laws to hide their children from mandatory reporters.”
So, based on this second-hand anecdotal evidence of some horrific cases, Bartholet tries to create a presumption that homeschoolers are abusers. The weight of anecdotal evidence on this specific question, however, doesn’t exactly recommend public schools. See Illinois’s practice of locking misbehaving children in solitary confinement, where at least one child ended up in a pool of feces and urine, “crying for his mom.”
Or here’s a story about another threat at school: “The Associated Press uncovered roughly 17,000 official reports of sex assaults by students over a four-year period, from fall 2011 to spring 2015.”
But back to Bartholet: Much of her argument is standard, paranoid “what’s to stop x from y” reasoning. She argues that under current state laws and enforcement, there are all sorts of bad things some parents could be doing.
“We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling,” Bartholet asserts. All 50 states have laws that make education compulsory, and state constitutions ensure a right to education, “but if you look at the legal regime governing homeschooling, there are very few requirements that parents do anything.”
But her real worry isn’t children getting no education. It’s children getting the “wrong” education.
Basically, Bartholet stays up at night, worrying that some parent, somewhere, is preparing a lesson plan on Psalm 23.
Read this paragraph from the Harvard Magazine piece, and pay attention to that “but” (emphasis mine):
“She notes that parents choose homeschooling for an array of reasons. Some find local schools lacking or want to protect their child from bullying. Others do it to give their children the flexibility to pursue sports or other activities at a high level. But surveys of homeschoolers show that a majority of such families (by some estimates, up to 90 percent) are driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture.”
See, she grants there are legitimate reasons to pull your children from school. But she is really worried about religious parents who don’t like public schools teaching their children transgender ideology, moral relativism, or radical feminism.
To drive that home, Harvard Magazine had an insane picture illustrating the story. Public school children are all running around freely, while the homeschooled child is locked in a literal prison made of books — including the Bible. (Oh, and Harvard Magazine misspelled “arithmetic” in the illustration.)
This is Alice-in-Wonderland, truth-on-its-head stuff. The idea that homeschooled children run around outdoors less than public-schooled children is totally insane. The notion that public schools provide more meaningful education than the average homeschooler is also insane. The idea that homeschoolers are, de facto, not exposed to “community values, social values, democratic values” is also totally unfounded. Unless, again, by “social values,” she means the values of the secular Left.
The Harvard Magazine article is getting plenty of hate on Twitter, and not just because of its insane illustration and radical proposal of a presumptive ban on homeschooling. It scares people because this is part of a movement in powerful circles.
Harvard is planning to host an anti-homeschooling conference in June, DeAngelis points out. “The focus will be on problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling.”
Bartholet will speak, along with a handful of other anti-homeschool activist lawyers and professors.
If you live in a state with a Democratic legislature, you need to worry about these people. They will craft an agenda to make it illegal to homeschool your children unless you can prove good reason. They will do this precisely because they don’t want conservative Jewish, Muslim, and Christian parents passing down their values. And while these activists will lead by focusing on the rare and horrific abuses, they clearly believe that religion and conservative values count as “maltreatment.”
These people have a dangerous agenda. We shouldn’t ignore their work.
