Evil or Misguided? Thoughts on Homeschool Opposition Part 2
by Erin Edwards-Social Media Marketing Director and Outreach Coordinator
If you need a refresher, last week I started some thoughts on a recent article by The Washington Post, wherein homeschooling is the fastest growing choice in fringe education. (Hurray!)
This is alarming to some people, including one Elizabeth Bartholet, Harvard professor and anti-homeschool activist. She created a seventy-plus page document, published through the Arizona Law Review, condemning homeschooling as a viable form of education. She also organized a summit to discuss creating new laws banning homeschooling.
I have so many questions when I read words from people like Bartholet.
I wonder where they get their information, I wonder if they’ve spent any time inside the homeschool community. I wonder if their opinions are misguided at best and at worst, maybe they are just evil people.
If Bartholet has evil designs on our youth it is because she wants to teach what to think, not how to think. It’s because she doesn’t like the values being taught from the parents and feels the state knows best.
Her thinking aligns with the likes of Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto.
According to Marxists, the nuclear family is only good for passing down wealth and property to their children, along with capitalist ideology. Capitalism is bad. We should all be equal, with no private property because that promotes classism. Capitalism stunts growth and makes people feel alienated. The only way forward according to Marx and Engels is communism.
No communist state has ever benefited its people. Ever. Communism works only for those in power.
In the United States, we have a constitutional federal republic, wherein power of the centralized government is limited, and states have a greater ability to create laws based on the needs of their residents.
Bartholet feels like too many states have too little regulation when it comes to schooling laws. According to Bartholet, the way forward is through a legal regime. This regime “should impose a presumptive ban on homeschooling, [for all states] allowing an exception for parents who can satisfy a burden of justification. And it should impose significant restrictions on any homeschooling allowed under this exception.” (Bartholet, 2019)
Bartholet mentions many times more than I care to count that the predominant homeschool family is Christian and being Christian means we don’t introduce our children to other opportunities and thought processes. She contends that we teach our daughters to be submissive to men.
These repetitive generalizations signify that Bartholet is not doing her research. If she is bending bits and pieces of information to fit her narrative then I must conclude she is evil.
Still, I’d love to invite her to a homeschool convention. I wonder if she’s ever been.
I attended The Great Homeschool Convention in California, June of this past year. I witnessed a diverse group of homeschool families throughout my weekend. We had Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and people of many faiths and ethnicities. The thread of commonality was these families were concerned about raising amazing children. They were all highly involved. I saw moms and dads together, equally yoked, pondering over what curriculum would best fit their children. Yet Bartholet thinks it’s highly unlikely that these same people can satisfy academic and social function.
Does this sound evil?
As I read the latter parts of Bartholet’s article, she stresses how homeschooling aids to abuse, and without it, the public-school teachers can be better gate keepers in ensuring children’s safety.
This is where I think Bartholet is misguided.
If only eliminating homeschooling could fix the abuse that an extreme number of children in our country are facing.
Unfortunately, it will not.
According to American SPCC 45.6% of children who die from child abuse are under one year old. This is a sobering statistic. These babies are too young for the protection that Bartholet feels they will receive in public school.
Another statement on americanspcc.org is that “Child Abuse crosses all socioeconomic and educational levels, religions, and ethnic and cultural groups.”
The greatest risk factor is NOT homeschooling but substance abuse. Parents abusing drugs or alcohol in the home are 30% more likely to neglect or abuse those under their care.
Bartholet references The Hart Family and how they were allowed to homeschool after one child reported abuse to their teacher.
I read this story when it happened. It hit close to home for many reasons. The family resided in a small town just north of mine. The children were homeschooled. The Hart family was under investigation from CPS long before they committed this crime.
In fact, the Hart family would move from state to state as soon as CPS caught on to their abuse and neglect. In the end, neighbors reported the family.
This is why the women that posed as mothers to these poor souls took them and murdered them. They knew they had been found out again and were at risk for losing their kids.
This is not a homeschooling problem.
In fact, each and every case Bartholet uses as an example in her article to say that homeschooling was used to hide abuse is a case that had ongoing CPS involvement before the children were homeschooled. Before the children lost their lives.
Again, CPS had reports on abuse or neglect in all cases she used in her study. Every single one. Yet CPS still allowed these children, by the power of the state, to live with their abusers.
I cannot stress this enough…their abusers took the lives of these children under the watchful eye of the state.
Ms. Bartholet, it seems we have a much bigger problem then homeschooling here. It seems that Child Protective Services is what needs new regulation, or regime, a word you seem fond of.
If the state knows best, why are these children dying under state investigation? This shouldn’t be happening.
Ms. Bartholet, I wonder if you’d consider a different approach, if it is really the children’s well-being you are concerned with?
Have you exhausted all efforts?
Have you consulted any Harvard think tanks while holding these anti-homeschool summits?
I’m curious what would happen if we started promoting family values?
What if we showed the nation how children thrived in a two-parent home?
Recently the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at Brookings hosted a conversation between Jim Tankersley, a New York Times journalist, and Melissa Kearney, author of The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.
Kearney’s main idea was how marriage affects childhood well-being. That financial support from the state cannot compensate for the absence of a second parent in a child’s life. She contends that we gave up on trying to help families succeed.
“Having two parents in the household, Kearney explained, offers benefits such as increased parental time for activities like reading and homework assistance, as well as reduced stress and greater emotional bandwidth for parenting. Additionally, she underscored the limitations of schools in addressing the disadvantages faced by children who lack stable, two-parent households. Kearney emphasized that schools, while crucial for education, cannot fulfill all of a child’s needs.” (Cantu, 2023)
Elizabeth Bartholet complains about unscientific research when gathering data from homeschooling families, but I’ve read her brief multiple times now. It is grossly unscientific and biased.
It is hard for me to deem Bartholet as completely evil. It’s also hard to say that she is merely misguided. It appears to me that she has a narrative in her head fueled by her love of the traditional school system, books like Educated, and national headlines such as the Hart family incident.
She hasn’t taken the time to see the whole picture, which is far more nuanced, and it seems she doesn’t want to.
The only good I took from her article is we have a powerful ally in HSLDA, they are doing important work in defending the right of families to homeschool their children.
In the meantime, my sweet homeschool families, you are doing amazing work, I believe in you.
My dad always said to prove bigots wrong by example and although I don’t feel we need to go around and justify our choices as parents for what we feel is in the best interests of our children, I do think that my kids are the best representatives of a system that is working for us. (I admit bias on this subject.)
I am rooting for you.
Erin