Posted on 04/18/2020 10:38:37 PM PDT by DeweyCA
A rapidly increasing number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school, choosing instead to educate them at home. Homeschooled kids now account for roughly 3 percent to 4 percent of school-age children in the United States, a number equivalent to those attending charter schools, and larger than the number currently in parochial schools.
Yet Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, sees risks for children—and society—in homeschooling, and recommends a presumptive ban on the practice. Homeschooling, she says, not only violates children’s right to a “meaningful education” and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.
“We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling,” Bartholet asserts. All 50 states have laws that make education compulsory, and state constitutions ensure a right to education, “but if you look at the legal regime governing homeschooling, there are very few requirements that parents do anything.” Even apparent requirements such as submitting curricula, or providing evidence that teaching and learning are taking place, she says, aren’t necessarily enforced. Only about a dozen states have rules about the level of education needed by parents who homeschool, she adds. “That means, effectively, that people can homeschool who’ve never gone to school themselves, who don’t read or write themselves.” In another handful of states, parents are not required to register their children as homeschooled; they can simply keep their kids at home.
This practice, Bartholet says, can isolate children. She argues that one benefit of sending children to school at age four or five is that teachers are “mandated reporters,” required to alert authorities to evidence of child abuse or neglect. “Teachers and other school personnel constitute the largest percentage of people who report to Child Protective Services,” she explains, whereas not one of the 50 states requires that homeschooling parents be checked for prior reports of child abuse. Even those convicted of child abuse, she adds, could “still just decide, ‘I’m going to take my kids out of school and keep them at home.’”
As an example, she points to the memoir Educated, by Tara Westover, the daughter of Idaho survivalists who never sent their children to school. Although Westover learned to read, she writes that she received no other formal education at home, but instead spent her teenage years working in her father’s scrap business, where severe injuries were common, and endured abuse by an older brother. Bartholet doesn’t see the book as an isolated case of a family that slipped through the cracks: “That’s what can happen under the system in effect in most of the nation.”
In a paper published recently in the Arizona Law Review, she notes that parents choose homeschooling for an array of reasons. Some find local schools lacking or want to protect their child from bullying. Others do it to give their children the flexibility to pursue sports or other activities at a high level. But 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. Bartholet notes that some of these parents are “extreme religious ideologues” who question science and promote female subservience and white supremacy.
She views the absence of regulations ensuring that homeschooled children receive a meaningful education equivalent to that required in public schools as a threat to U.S. democracy. “From the beginning of compulsory education in this country, we have thought of the government as having some right to educate children so that they become active, productive participants in the larger society,” she says. This involves in part giving children the knowledge to eventually get jobs and support themselves. “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,” she says, noting that European countries such as Germany ban homeschooling entirely and that countries such as France require home visits and annual tests.
In the United States, Bartholet says, state legislators have been hesitant to restrict the practice because of the Home Schooling Legal Defense Association, a conservative Christian homeschool advocacy group, which she describes as small, well-organized, and “overwhelmingly powerful politically.” During the last 30 years, activists have worked to dismantle many states’ homeschooling restrictions and have opposed new regulatory efforts. “There’s really no organized political opposition, so they basically get their way,” Bartholet says. A central tenet of this lobby is that parents have absolute rights that prevent the state from intervening to try to safeguard the child’s right to education and protection.
Bartholet maintains that parents should have “very significant rights to raise their children with the beliefs and religious convictions that the parents hold.” But requiring children to attend schools outside the home for six or seven hours a day, she argues, does not unduly limit parents’ influence on a child’s views and ideas. “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,” Bartholet says. “I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.”
She concedes that in some situations, homeschooling may be justified and effective. “No doubt there are some parents who are motivated and capable of giving an education that’s of a higher quality and as broad in scope as what’s happening in the public school,” she says. But Bartholet believes that if parents want permission to opt out of schools, the burden of proving that their case is justified should fall on parents.
“I think an overwhelming majority of legislators and American people, if they looked at the situation,” Bartholet says, “would conclude that something ought to be done.”
Harvard...lol
And yet she managed to write a book that was published.
As for being abused by a family member that happens despite going to a public school. Having a teacher look at you everyday is no guarantee that they will discover you’re being abused. Sexual abuse of a child is very hard to detect.
Working in a successful family business is probably the best education available.
my thoughts exactly.
When my kids were pulled from the public indoctrination station, their behavior, attitude and entire disposition changed for the better. They don't like that.
Children apparently have violated rights to their parents’ choice of education for them? This is an entirely too slippery slope towards facism or communism.
What a steaming pile of bovine scatology
Some states don't require any proof the kids are learning.
In NH, homeschooled kids have to be tested annually by a certified teacher. We always did this, and preferred to, as we want to be sure we were keeping them up to speed.
They always tested above grade level, in most subjects, at least a year above grade level. When they went to public school at grade 7, they were bored.
The last couple of years they were probably the most tested kids around.
Our Assistant superintendent was grousing one day that he had a lot of tests, that he wanted to "test the test", but principals and teachers were fighting it as they were afraid of how poorly the kids would do.
He couldn't get through to them, that the idea was to "test the tests", no so much the kids. I told him we were paying $50 a year for each kid to he tested, we would be glad to do it for free.
So they were tested over and over, part of what they did was they critiqued the tests.
He got his feedback and we got our tests, everybody was happy.
BTW, both "kids" are doing very well. One is in charge of several offices and several scientific magazines in NYC, London, etc., the other a mom and cook, and due to this, homeschooling..
the risk is that parents and society will find out the kids learn better, to the chagrin and demose of unionized public school bureaucrats and teachers
Risks that kids will miss out on communist indoctrination, learning about perversion, violence, pornography, humiliation, abortion without parental consent, exposure to mold, asbestos, viruses, TB, etc.
Oh, the horror!
I’ll make sure to tell my homeschooled since birth son, with a Yale Master’s Degree that the Harvard folks truly are dolts.
For us, and most that we knew, it was the exact opposite.
Public schooling isolates kids by ages, and they don't learn how to deal with people outside their age group.
My wife and I and a few other parents were the founders Of the North Country Homeschoolers about 30 years ago.
Shortly we had over 70 families in it.
We went on at least monthly field trips to museums and other places of interest with quite a throng.
The comment we heard the most was that they had never encountered so well behaved and interested a group of kids before.
The folks at the Shelburne Museum in VT were especially forthcoming in surprise and interest.
We did everything we could to ensure the kids got out and about both locally and at a distance together.
There was the one religious family that tended to isolate their kids, but they still went on most of our outings.
The teachers, who are keeping in touch, are surprised at how well they are doing.
Now she is thinking of quitting her job and homeschooling.
She and her husband are doing well and she doesn't need the job.
https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10048/Bartholet
Here bio mentions no family, husband or kids. She went to Radcliff. She is the spitting image of Elizabeth Warren. My guess would be lesbian. But she is the expert on kids.
Harvard was supposed to have a massive anti-HSing conference on March 24, 2020. It was moved to June because of COVID-19. This article was clearly written to coincide with the afterglow of the conference and to build on the attendant overbearing sentiment.
The funny bit is that the entire nation now has a forced test drive on HSing. Thus the fire of hysteria and lies they would have fanned in March has been extinguished by the soothing cool water of forced homeschooling.
Yes many parents will come away from their experience being thankful to send Johnny and Mary back to school. But they won't see HSing as this horrible thing-they'll likely be positively disposed to it and won't see full time HSers as freaks anymore. And a goodly number of parents will likely start on the homeschooling journey, having seen the propaganda being pushed on their kids.
The irony of all this, is it's liberals who are all for keeping the country locked down - and as a result for de facto homeschooling to continue...and possibly further delay this horrid conference.
F-Harvard
Home to Timothy LSD Guru Leary and the Unabomber
The public school is maybe 15% effective in students gaining useful life skill and knowledge. The rest is dead filler and collectivist thought.
How about the risks of sending our kids off to be abused
during school hours?
“Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program”
Based on that alone I wouldn’t trust her to change a baby’s diaper.
This Stalinazi bitch, Bartholet, has no business being near anyone’s children. If you love your kids, keep them out of public ed (and away from these horrid Stalinist indoctrination centers of “higher ed”).
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