Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Parents can’t be trusted

Here's a portion of an article that came out of the Home School Legal Defense Association (of which we're long-standing members) concerning the death of a homeschooled child who suffered from severe cerebral palsy. Her death was in no way connected to her home education, except in the minds of those anxious to link homeschooling with child abuse in an attempt to discredit the entire movement (since, of course, we only homeschool to hide the bruises).


The last part of the article was so interesting and so well-expressed that I lifted it from their website. It verbalizes beautifully the disdain and downright hostility so many people have toward homeschoolers. From the article:
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Opponents of homeschooling frequently couch their objections under the guise of child protection to mask the real reason they dislike this form of education: They don’t like what many homeschoolers teach their kids. So they argue that children in homeschooling families are at risk because they are “off the grid” and not “in the community.” Studies by the federal government have shown, however, that only a minority of reports of child abuse and neglect come from educational professionals with most coming from other mandated reporters, neighbors and others. Different studies also show that homeschoolers are quite active in the community, participating in at least five regular activities outside of the home per child, on average.

Again, behind this failed argument lies the true reason would-be reformers target homeschoolers. They fear the influence homeschool parents have over their children, especially given the fact most of these parents wish to teach their faith and values—usually, Christian values.

For advocates of radical social change who often disdain traditional religious values as “intolerant” or “narrow-minded”—laws that grant homeschool freedom are simply “intolerable.” For these, parents can’t be trusted and only the government can and should be in control of educating children. This idea of total state control over education, of course, runs counter to the principles of limited and enumerated powers that our government is founded upon. What’s more, documents such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights recognize that parents have a prior right to choose what kind of education their children receive, including private education.

Unfortunately, there are some opponents of homeschooling who go so far as to favor the kind of educational totalitarianism that exist in states such as Germany and Sweden. There, parents who attempt to exercise their human right to teach their children as they see fit face real persecution. Attempts to spread the philosophy behind this oppression have even touched North America.

...The fact that homeschoolers are outside the “control” of the state frustrates people who have a different vision for society. So, whenever they can, they encourage more regulation...

6 comments:

  1. Your post is timely... I just read this article last night: http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/10/us/education-my-view-why-i-chose-home-schooling/index.html?iref=allsearch

    As a fellow homeschooler, I was appalled and dismayed at the hostile comments and arguments associated with the article. We live in a rural area and have not really been met with negativity (other than the "disbelief" that we would not want to hand our kids over to someone else for 8 hours a day... LOL). This article (and more specifically, its snarky, naive commentary) are a nice complement to your post above.

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    1. Yes, I caught that article this morning as well... along with the plethora of snarky comments. In fact I saved the article and copied over some of the comments as the basis for a possible future article and/or blog post.

      (shaking head) Some people...

      - Patrice

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  2. It's been many years since I was a HSLDA member and I can imagine it even more necessary and difficult to home school given the total lack of defined morals in today's society. If we are to see any remnant of our Constitution survive, it's going to be through these families that are not under the gov't's control and form of reckless abandon to our nation's founding principles.

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  3. Government knows that confiscation of our guns will trigger (no pun intended) a revolution. However they grossly underestimate the response to confiscation of our homeschoolers. This latter ‘event’ is likely to occur first.
    Montana Guy

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  4. When we were in the process of adopting our daughter, the social service woman asked where she would be going to school and I said I would be home educating her. She told me we could not adopt because there would not be a way to see if we would be abusing her. I called the governor office of Idaho where it is legal to home school and they called the social service woman telling her she had no right to stop the adoption process. The process lasted two years and there were other calls to the governor's office but we adopted our lovely daughter and she is in college taking 23 credits and working in the kitchen of the college and an A student.

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  5. I've read an article entitled "Some Lessons from the Underground History of American Education" in the book "Everything you know is Wrong" that has given me conviction to home school my children when they get older.

    It pretty much states the Current Education System was derived from the Prussian System, in order to standardize children for the corporate industrial workforce. One problem with that was that literacy rates plummeted, the reason given was teaching kids language via whole word memorization, rather than the phonetic method.

    There's a plethora of information in the book, and it all reinforces the notion that whatever the people in charge/authorities claim to be working for/doing, they are actually effecting the opposite.

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