Originally published at: I Homeschool My Kids, but I’m Repulsed by the Parental Rights Movement - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This story is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. My partner and I homeschool our four kids. We chose it for reasons that will sound familiar to many families who educate at home: flexibility, the ability to tailor instruction to each child’s interests and pace, and the chance to foster…
PFFT… Only TRUMP homeschooling will be allowed, which continues the 40+ year old Republican Tradition of keeping American students down.
2 Likes
It’s child abuse, no matter what parents say. Sprinkle in religious overtones, plus the us against “them” paranoia , and good luck kids.
2 Likes
Our school district has, for more than 30 years, committees on just about everything in the District. They basically beg people to join the committees - curriculum, staffing, facilities, etc. Very few bother.
Bring in a loud mouthed parental rights candidate demanding that parents have input and they win the election. Does anyone in local media - or even their opponents - point out they could have joined in on any of these committees and been involved from the planning states. 
7 Likes
You lost me at “I homeschool.” It’s child abuse.
2 Likes
When you homeschool you are tunneling your child’s education through you, thus narrowing your child’s mind. Rather than learning to socialize in a real world, the children are limited to choice of one or two people who many may observe, are scared of the real world. A child going through the public education system is exposed to at least 12 teachers, likely more, who are trained educators and teaching concepts their parents are blind to.
9 Likes
excellent point, if you have the time, send this to your local paper ‘letters to the editor’ or all the major news organizations
3 Likes
@txlawyer I enjoy your posts and legal insights. However, your broad brush painting of homeschooling as child abuse is asinine. My wife and I homeschooled our children because our district was hopelessly median. 50th percentile in every regional ranking. We sacrificed income for the benefit of our kids. Are there fundamentalist know nothings out there? Of course. We encountered them in associations with other home schoolers. Our daughter noticed snooty distain from “Christian” moms in middle school over our more progressive views of life. She proudly debated our values with her peers in these groups. She won some fast friends for that, and was shunned by others. We hugged her and told her to always stand up for her beliefs and what is right.
When done correctly, home schooling starts out where the parent is the teacher and then gradually evolves to the parent role becoming that of facilitator as you instruct them how to study, practice, and research letting them do more and more on their own. Both of our children won multiple regional science fair competitions over the years in the South Jersey/Philly area against public school students. They were joined by friends from several other homeschool families in their success. Collectively these home school kids kicked ass. All are grown now living out successful careers.
My daughter never attended a public school in her life until she qualified for US State Department program (NSLI-Y) that allowed her to spend her 12th grade year in Beijing. Just one of 36 selected nationally. She than proceeded to earn her dual Bachelor’s in Chinese and Supply Chain Logistics finishing a semester early with high honors. She now works for a Fortune 100 company in Manhattan and is being tracked for bigger and greater roles.
Now, homeschooling is not for every child. Our son made it through 7th grade when his stubbornness finally pushed Mrs. C14 to eat him alive. Fortunately Dad came home in time to commute his sentence to four years in the public school. He has gone on to earn a degree in Culinary Arts, before deciding that kitchen life is not really what he wants to do. He now serves in the Air Force working in a contracting office thankfully far out of harms way.
Sorry for the long response, but there are many out there that do not comprehend the true nature of homeschooling because the fundamentalists and some folks who sadly are abusers are the ones who make the news. In conclusion, what made us qualified to homeschool our kids. Nothing, other than the idea that we could make our children’s lives better than our own on our own terms.
4 Likes
@jcs See my reply to @txlawyer. Now to your remarks, au contraire. Real homeschooling does not fit your ascribed stereotype. It is not done in a vacuum. Unless you are Da Vinci, one could not possibly teach their child everything, but there are avenues to accomplish a wide breadth of learning and social interaction. There are music, dance & art lessons, homeschool groups & co-op’s, community youth orchestras, youth sports, Scouts, and 4H. Our children were involved in all of these things not to mention local library programs. There are many other outlets as well. Also they played with all of the other kids in the neighborhood, and just like my youth, their friends parents were also their parents. We are fortunate to have a wonderful neighborhood.Social interaction is the easiest thing to accomplish. Just let the kids be kids.
All of these offerings involve exposure to other adults serving a instructors, coaches, and leaders. I am not a dancer, artist or musician, but my children are because we found the means to give them exposure to the opportunities that they desired. I was also never a scout, but our daughter earned the Bronze, Silver, and Gold awards in the Girl Scouts, their highest rankings, and our son is an Eagle Scout. Thank you to their leaders, coaches, and instructors helping us to help them. You are completely misinformed in your thoughts about homeschooling.
3 Likes
Homeschooling is still child abuse. It denies children autonomy and community for the sake of the parents’ prejudice, phobia, and vanity. Artificially imposed isolation is abuse.
2 Likes
For 20 years, I gave art tours at our local art museum where we frequently gave tours to homeschool groups. They stood out in their fear of the art, their sexualization of art, and their reluctance to discuss and share.
I have 2 nieces who were homeschooled, both have trouble moving from home to the real world. One in counseling, one living an isolated life homeschooling her 6 children on an isolated average in MT.
This explains my exposure to homeschooled children. Yes, not all homeschooled children’s experiences are the same. Not all public schooled children are the same. Teachers are educated educators and most are excellent, under paid educators.
6 Likes
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of the wingnuts who insist on the sanctity of homeschooling also push “school choice” where any institution that calls itself a school is entitled to state money for the students it enrolls, but without state oversight of curriculum.
(I know people who homeschool, and one of the deals in my state is that parents need to do serious documentation with the state department of education to show what the kids are getting taught. Sometimes enough that they decide to go with conventional education instead.)
3 Likes
It does no such thing. Examine your own predjudice, phobia, and vanity. There is plenty of community in multiple outlets. and their autonomy is what allows them to grow and succeed. Homeschooling is a viable educational opportunity for kids, but it takes commitment from parents to do what is right. You can read my reply to @jcs. The traits you ascribe to homeschooling does not apply across the board just as many descriptive phrases do not apply to all lawyers or Texans. Be better.
3 Likes
Thanks for your reply and comments. There is also the whole red state - blue state divide too. The same divisions carry through in the homeschool community with the more conservative folk probably being like you saw. Our community was committed to fact based learning and scientific method which is why they excellent in the science fairs, music and the arts.
1 Like
Examine your abuser’s mindset.
Like chezzer14, I regularly find your comments here insightful and informative.
But also like chezzer14, I find your stuff in this comment thread just off-the-wall unhinged.
There are parents who are tightly circumscribing their kids’ access to the world by homeschooling, “protecting” them from the sins of modernity (evolution through natural selection; the idea that gay people are people; the idea that women are people; the idea that Black people are people; etc.). And I agree that that deprives the child in important ways.
And there are parents who are using home-schooling as a situation to abuse their children in ways more conventionally recognized as abuse.
But I know adults who were home-schooled, and adults who do home-schooling for their children, without either of the problems identified above. The children (or now adults) are fully engaged in the world, as autonomous beings with a healthy level of self-esteem and intrinsic motivation.
You can keep repeating your mantra that home-schooling is abuse and that anyone who does it has an abuser’s mindset.
But all you’re doing is stripping the word “abuse” of any meaning.
2 Likes
Sometimes abused children emerge as healthy and happy adults.
It still needs to be illegal.
Wow, you are outrageously close-minded about this. I usually appreciate your posts but on this one you’re way out of line. Homeschooling can be wonderful, or not. I suspect that the majority of homeschoolers today are on the right wing and their kids are getting really slanted and isolationist upbringings. But there are some situations where people homeschool and their kids end up happy and successful and emotionally healthy. My wife and I homeschooled our two kids (boy and girl) because I had a very unusual job that allowed me to work just five weeks a year and allowed us to live anywhere in the world. My kids, on their own initiative, both started their schooling going to junior college at age 12. One is a PhD physicist and the other a very successful creative director for video gaming companies. Both are gregarious, professionally extremely competent, and delighted at their upbringing. My son even urged me to write a book about parenting, though I declined because our situation (essentially retired while raising a family) was so unusual as to be inapplicable to almost everyone. And yes, txlawyer, in the course of meeting other homeschooling families when our kids were young there were definitely some that were far worse off for it, whose parents weren’t educating them or worse. Hence the need for oversight. But forget the broad brush condemnation. Sometimes it not only works but is completely logical to homeschool one’s kids. And we had so much fun together when they were little, and are so close now that they’re grown. I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything.
2 Likes
In other words, you’re not interested in evidence.
You know you’re right, and so that’s the end of the matter.
This is exactly the mindset that has turned the GOP into a monster destroying our society.
1 Like
I am quite closed-minded about this. I had friends growing up who were taken out of public school in favor of home-schooling. It did them no favors. They grew awkward and isolated, all for the sake of soothing their parents’ social and religious and sexual and racial anxieties. I also taught college for a number of years where the home-schooled kids tended to be fish-out-of-water (though their academic performance was no better or worse than their peers, so far as I could tell).
Socialization is a key component of childhood (and adult) education. And the overwhelming point of home-schooling is to isolate the kids from their peers and other perceived threats and bad influences. That’s bad, period.
Signed,
Someone Who Insisted on Sending His Children to Public School in a Big, Diverse School District That Actually Resembles the World They’ll Spend Their Adult Lives In.
No, I’m really not. The evidence, such as it is, is mostly cherrypicking and small sample sizes.