As a result of 46-state lock-downs, schools have closed for more than 55 million students nationwide, and at least 34 states have shuttered schools for the rest of the academic year. Just in time, the liberal media and academic elites are coming out swinging against homeschooling.
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 sometimes need protection from abusive parents. But the latest crusade by CAP’s director, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, is basically to abolish homeschooling.
An article appearing on the Harvard-linked website of Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet, is titled, “The Risks of Homeschooling.” It announces, with great alarm, that “a rapidly increasing number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school, choosing instead to educate them at home. Well yes. Especially when schools are shut down across the country, Madam!
This is how Bartholet sees homeschooling:
“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 for “a presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool.” She continues,
“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.”
“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,” Mrs. Bartholet said. “I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless and to give the powerful ones total authority.”
Bartholet apparently misses the extreme irony that using government to ban homeschooling is the very essence of authoritarianism. Bartholet also notes that some of these parents are ‘extreme religious ideologues’ who question science and promote female subservience and white supremacy.”
The professor also warned that homeschooling — an “unregulated regime” — may allow parents too much time with their children. In short, Bartholet’s view is that elite educators necessarily know better than parents and that it would be a disservice to children to let them be taught by the people who gave them life.
She reluctantly admits there are some 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. How can we expect children to flourish, after all, if their parents teach them that man and woman are created in the image and likeness of God rather than that gender exists on an infinite spectrum and that they must choose their precise location on that spectrum — though be careful, it might change on any given day! — starting at the age of four.
Ultimately, Bartholet’s argument is thinly veiled anti-religious bigotry coupled with a healthy dose of privileged elitism. It assumes, first and foremost, that homeschooling is merely a front for religious zealots to indoctrinate their children with backwards, anti-science beliefs based on Christianity’s horrific, outdated teachings.
On Twitter, Princeton’s Robert George sounded the alarm:
“The way this usually works is that secular progressives are in the red zone before conservatives and religious folk have noticed there’s a game going on and gotten onto the field. For once, just once, could we notice? A serious attack on parents’ rights and authority is underway.”
To quote one Senator “This [suggestion by Bartholet] is barbaric. Myopic. And unconstitutional.”
We must agree.
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“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).