Homeschooling Under Attack

According a recent article in Harvard Magazine with the title "The Risks of Homeschooling," teaching your own children at home is bad news:

Elizabeth Bartholet [Harvard Law School] ... sees risks for children - and society - in homeschooling, and recommends a presumptive ban on the practice.   Homeschooling, she says, not only violates children’s right to a “meaningful education” and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.

Bartholet says that 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.”  Does that include Darwin Doubters and would she put Is a Young Earth Possible? which advocates Young Earth Theory Intelligence in the library of her ideal school?  Albert Mohler (Southern Seminary) rightly pinpoints the real significance of this Harvard Mag hit piece:

It's a broadside argument to abolish homeschooling and it also basically recommends a complete transformation of American law and morality to remove parental authority and parental choice as the key issues, determining issues in the education of children and instead in the name of children's rights and with an argument based upon especially international law and precedents, call for homeschooling to be basically abolished ...

Are you looking for an alternative to regular school?  Empower your children's  educational path by checking out unschooling.  Our son is largely self taught and is a musician and audio engineer - he works for a gaming company.

Kerry McDonald lives near Harvard and wrote Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom.  She is a regular Forbes contributor who earned a Master of Education degree in Education Policy from Harvard!  She submitted a letter to Harvard Magazine critical of the article.  She is a longtime Harvard donor, education researcher, and homeschooling mother of four children.  Here is her appearance on Fox confronting this sad attack on the freedom to homeschool.

Kudos to Dr. Bartholet for being brave and joining a discussion and Q&A session with Kerry McDonald (CATO), Milton Gaither (Education Prof., Messiah College) and Neal McCluskey (CATO).  Gaither wrote Homeschooling: An American History which gives the deep background of the home education movement.

These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.  Impress them on your children.  Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.  Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. (Deut. 6:6-9)

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.  Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.  They are a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck. (Pr. 1:7-9)

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