If you follow my writing and podcasting, you know that I am a big proponent of homeschooling. My wife and I homeschool our five kids (at least, the ones who are old enough), and before I recently left California for Texas I was teaching history and literature to teenagers from other families in our homeschooling community.
We homeschool for all the obvious reasons: public schools and even many, if not most, private schools are now hopelessly broken, “dark, satanic mills” of woke indoctrination; polls show that homeschooled kids are not only better educated but better socialized than public school kids; we value the freedom, family unity and self-sufficiency; it enables us to keep the kids’ passion for learning alive instead of having it ground out of them by the drudgery and routine of standard education; we can focus not only on intellectual pursuits but also impart life skills that public schools no longer teach; we’re free to include religious and moral instruction; and it enables me and my wife to control the pace at which they are (inevitably) exposed to corrosive cultural influences.
So at every opportunity I urge parents and grandparents to homeschool if at all possible, in order to rescue their children from the grim alternatives. But I’m also aware that homeschooling is a very demanding commitment that only a minority of parents are in a position to undertake, and I fault no parent for being unable to make that commitment.
The surge of interest in homeschooling since the pandemic is a blessedly welcome development for society, but it has brought with it increased suspicion and scrutiny from the current Powers That Be. Leftwing ideologues have been working on capturing the culture, especially education, for over half a century, ever since they abandoned marching in the streets to make the Long March through the institutions. Homeschooling is a deeply serious threat to the Left’s totalitarian lust for power, and that is why Scientific American, the nation’s leading mainstream science magazine, recently added its voice to the call that homeschooling parents be “regulated.”
In a May 14 opinion piece titled, “Children Deserve Uniform Standards in Homeschooling,”, the editors of Scientific American called for federal homeschooling regulations, going so far as to suggest that parents of homeschooled children “undergo a background check.” The magazine reiterated this message in its June 17 “Today in Science” newsletter.
The op-ed cited data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) which stated that nearly 3% of American children — that’s 1.5 million kids — were homeschooled in 2019. That number rose dramatically during and in the wake of the pandemic nightmare, which at least had the positive benefit of giving many parents an eye-opening revelation about the kind of dumbing-down indoctrination and predatory sexualization that their children were being exposed to in the woke public school system. The most recent NCES estimate is that 5.4% of children in grades K-12 were homeschooled in 2020-2021. I have seen estimates as high as 10%, however; it is a difficult figure to pin down, partly because eleven states do not even require parents to inform anyone that they are homeschooling.
In any case, the op-ed admits almost grudgingly that many homeschooled children “are well-rounded and well-adjusted children who go on to thrive as adults.” But, Scientific American frets, “others do not receive a meaningful education” – a laughable concern considering what a catastrophic failure education in America is today. Never mind a “meaningful” education – our failed children today can’t even spell the word.
It is important to note that Scientific American has been captured by woke ideology to such an extent that City-Journal devoted a lengthy recent article called “Unscientific American” to detailing how the mag has gone from covering popular science to promoting social-justice-in-science, publishing articles with titles such as “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity.” This is not scientific, educational, or even rational; it is ideological propaganda, pure and simple. Keep that in mind when it comes to the magazine’s editors complaining that parents can’t be trusted to teach their own children.
The Scientific American op-ed claims that studies which show equal or higher levels of academic achievement among homeschooled students are often “methodologically flawed” – in other words, they produce results that are embarrassing to the establishment. The editors quickly go on to fear-monger about the risk of “horrific abuse” children are exposed to from homeschooling parents; in fact, they’re actually at much greater risk of bullying, violence, and abuse in the Thunderdomes of today’s public schools – not to mention school shootings. The op-ed even warns that some homeschool curricula “extol the virtues of Nazism.” The “Nazi” smear is a sure sign that the aim of this op-ed is to not to ensure the welfare of homeschooled children but to demonize their parents – who tend to (but not always) lean conservative – as A Threat to Democracy™.
Scientific American doesn’t explicitly mention this, but other accusations often directed at homeschoolers are that the kids are not being fully assimilated into the mainstream culture (as if that were a bad thing), they are getting too much religious education (as if that were a bad thing), and they are being inculcated with – gasp! – traditional values (as if that were a bad thing).
Anyway, the editors argue that the “federal government must develop basic standards for safety and quality of education in homeschooling across the country.” They add that homeschooling parents should be required to undergo a background check — the same as K-12 teachers. By the way, to see just how effective a background check is, scroll through the videos at Libs of Tik Tok for the countless examples of openly radical freaks and groomers that somehow managed to get hired to teach our children.
Scientific American editors also complain that parents “are not required to have an education themselves to direct instruction.” In response, I would argue three points: one, that there are plenty of video examples online of barely literate, foul-mouthed teachers who don’t know their dangling participle from their XY chromosome; two, that what “educators” are mostly trained to teach today are Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and anti-Americanism; and three, no one is more passionately committed to give their children a solid education than parents. Countless fathers and mothers (not “birthing parents”) who homeschool have simply taken the leap and committed to educating themselves and then their children. It’s demanding but it’s working, and that’s a “meaningful education” for the whole family.
Those same countless parents across the nation are wised up to, and fed up with, the politicized public education system and its obsession with drag queens, pride flags, transgender indoctrination, personal pronouns, and Critical Race Theory racism. They are sick of the Left’s mission to drive a wedge between them and their kids in order to transfer children’s trust and allegiance to the State.
The upshot is this: the aim of the neo-Marxist Left is to break down the family unit by de-legitimizing parents’ legal and moral right to determine how their own children are raised. The Left wants to take your children and grandchildren and raise them as loyal, dependent subjects of the atheistic State, disconnected from their own history and culture, and devoid of critical thinking skills, intellectual independence, or a spiritual dimension. This is no conspiracy theory; the evidence for it comes directly from the horse’s mouth, with many so-called “educators” proudly proclaiming on social media that they consider themselves activists and revolutionaries out to dismantle or smash every social norm. “I’m your parent now,” they openly tell the schoolchildren in their charge.
This is not merely an unacceptable state of affairs; it is predatory, civilizationally destructive, and ultimately satanic. Education is the key battleground today for your children’s future, your family’s future, and this nation’s future. Homeschooling should be encouraged, not forced to conform to federal government approval. Parents must be granted every form of assistance to pass down the True, the Good, and the Beautiful instead of being smeared as threats to their own kids.
“Education is a basic right,” the Scientific American editors conclude. “We need to make sure kids have chances to investigate what makes them curious, study history and science and reading, and ask questions and learn from others. We want them to reach adulthood ready to take on the world.”
Agreed. And it is abundantly clear that parents who want those opportunities for their children are going to be crushingly disappointed trying to find them in our public schools, maybe not even in most private schools, and certainly no longer in the pages of Scientific American.
Deprive the Left of any more generations of indoctrinated drones. “Teach your children well,” as Crosby, Stills and Nash once sang. Homeschooling is the way.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.