[PJMedia] It's ironic at a time when 56 million children in the U.S. are being homeschooled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic that Harvard Magazine would publish an article calling for a ban on homeschooling.The article by Erin O'Donnell, headlined "The Risks of Homeschooling," sets up one straw man after another to make the case that the government must step in to protect children from their own parents—who are presumed guilty and ill-qualified to care for their own children.
The government must control all. What a good little communist.
Elizabeth Bartholet, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, told the magazine that homeschooling deprives children of their right to a "meaningful education." She cites no law that requires a child to receive a "meaningful" education (because there is no such law in the U.S.) but defines it thusly: "But it’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints." (Nothing about reading, writing, and 'rithmetic in her formula, it ought to be noted.)
In other words, she knows that homeschooled children are being taught to think for themselves, and she won't stand for it. Bartholet is no doubt keenly aware that government indoctrination centers have been wildly successful in their quest to force-feed vulnerable children progressive values. One need only spend a short time on a college campus to understand the extent of their success. Abraham Lincoln famously said that "The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next." Social and moral revolutionaries understand that society and culture are shaped in the classroom and they've spent the last 100 years working tirelessly to ensure that the "correct" (read: progressive) values are being imposed on children.
This is not to say that all teachers are hell-bent on brainwashing children to accept left-wing values. Most are not. The vast majority love their students and are passionate about teaching and give no thought to indoctrinating children. But education thought-leaders like Bartholet and the national teacher's unions are determined to ensure that children adopt their liberal values, and that's where the problem lies because they've managed to leverage federal funding to amass an immense amount of control over local education decision-making.
Abolish the department of education
Out of one side of her mouth, Bartholet says that parents have "very significant rights to raise their children with the beliefs and religious convictions that the parents hold. Out of the other side, she says there should be limits to the influence parents have over their children.
"The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18?" she asks. "I think that’s dangerous," she answers. "I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority."
Left unsaid, but clearly implied, is that it's ok to put powerful government bureaucrats in charge of powerless children because, obviously, they know better than the parents what a child needs. It takes a village to raise a child, we've been lectured for decades.
Except in most educator's cases, they are a village of idiots and we need to keep our kids as far away as possible.