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Monday, April 27, 2020

Banning Homeschooling: Are They Your Children or Children of the State?

     Due to the coronavirus pandemic, 50 million children are not attending school. Many of them are being homeschooled by their parents or guardians.

     In the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, in her eighty-page article entitled "Homeschooling: Parents Rights vs Child Rights to Education and Protection," asserts that giving parents more access to their children through homeschooling is harmful to them. "I think it's always dangerous, she writes, "to put powerful people [parents, not teachers] in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority." For this reason Professor Bartholet wants to ban homeschooling.

     The professor argues that in normal times--when the vast majority of children are being taught in public schools--teachers are the ones who most frequently report child abuse to child protective services. According to Bartholet's thinking, mass homeschooling will increase incidents of child abuse, noting that none of the fifty states requires homeschooling parents to be checked for prior reports of abusive behavior. "The issue is," she writes, "do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages 0 to 18?"

     In Bartholet's concern for protecting America's children from their parents, the Ivy League professor doesn't seem bothered by the mediocracy of public education. Moreover, she fails to acknowledge how corrupt teacher's unions exert their power to protect pedophile teachers and coaches. Instead of firing sexual predators, and alerting the police, school administrators, under the influence of teacher's unions, simply transfer these sex offenders to other schools. This practice is so common it even has a name: "passing the trash."

     Journalist Kelly Marcum, in an April 23, 2020 article in The Federalist, wrote that behind Professor Bartholet's "veneer of concern for children's welfare," lies her real agenda: "disdain for Christians and conservatives."

     According to Kelly Marcum, Professor Bartholet is not concerned about failing school systems and the serious problem of student bullying. Academic curricula and bullying are the principal reasons most parents cite for pulling  their children out of public schools. And she is obviously not concerned about the intense left-wing political indoctrination students are exposed to in lieu of a straightforward education.

     In authoritarian societies, children are essentially raised and indoctrinated by the state. Parents have little control over how their children are brought up. These kids are treated as children of the state. If parents in these countries dare contradict the political teachings of the government, they are often turned in to the state by their own children. In America, this form of collectivism, outside of academia, is rejected by citizens who want to maintain control of their children. Parents want to have a say over what is being taught in government run schools. Many believe that over the years in America, parents have been losing control of their children to a massive and powerful public education bureaucracy.

     For "social justice" collectivists like Harvard professor Elizabeth Bartholet, when it comes to teaching and indoctrinating America's children, the state knows best. 

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