Allowing parents to educate their own children at home puts them at risk of all sorts of problems and abuses without massive state controls and “oversight,” declared an anti-homeschooling activist this week in the establishment mouthpiece of record. Home education is now firmly in the crosshairs of the educational totalitarians amid a push to create a police state.
The December 14 New York Times piece, headlined Home-Schooled Kids Are Not All Right, calls for massive new government controls over homeschool families. It comes just weeks after the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a shocking report demanding such regulation worldwide under the guise of “human rights.”
The Times opinion essay was written by Stefan Merrill Block, who was promoting his forthcoming memoir “Homeschooled.” It uses an emotionally charged memoir of an unconventional and harmful home-schooling experience — his mom was extremely weird — to argue for sweeping federal oversight of all home education, nationwide.
The author recasts parental discretion and even worldview formation as abusive. “The choice to isolate a child from peers and outsiders seems to me plainly abusive,” says Block. “I would also characterize as abuse a parent’s decision to… indoctrinate a child into one mind-set or ideology without the possibility of other perspectives.”
Home education, family autonomy, and parental rights, meanwhile, are portrayed as a dangerous failure of the state to oversee everything. “Our home-school had fallen into a newly legislated invisible space, where a child could easily vanish from public view,” continued Block. “The country has passively endorsed a nationwide system of blind spots.”
Block portrays the state as the ultimate authority, arguing that parents cannot be trusted with their children absent draconian government supervision. He calls for “an authority outside the home” to protect children from their parents. And he makes the case that all decent people would want benevolent bureaucrats checking in on families.
The call for unconstitutional national restrictions, meanwhile, is clear and unambiguous. “To truly protect home-schooled children, we must put in place common-sense laws nationwide,” Block argues. “A good starting point would be… requiring parents to register their home-schooled child with the state.”
To avoid sounding silly as millions of highly educated homeschooled graduates make their mark on the world, Block acknowledges “most home-schooling parents do not abuse or neglect their children.” Still, he repeatedly portrays parental authority itself — particularly when exercised outside state control — as inherently dangerous, abusive, and suspect.
Critics lambasted the piece and the arguments made in it. Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), is the top researcher and academic focused on home education in the world. After reading the Times opinion piece, he systematically dismantled the arguments in response to questions from The Newman Report.
“Stefan Merrill Block’s opinion is an anecdotal story meant to tug at emotional heart strings for philosophical and political purposes,” explained Dr. Ray, who has studied home education for decades. “He wants the government to control private homeschool education with hopes that it will indoctrinate students in his worldview and reduce harm by parents to zero.”
Of course, Block did not provide any empirical evidence to show there is a significant problem for the government to address. Instead, his argument “operates from the philosophical assumption that children belong to the state and if only the state could intervene in all families’ lives, then all children would be safe from any alleged or real harm,” Ray said.
“All parents are assumed guilty until they provide evidence that they are not,” he continued. “Block wants to reverse American law and liberty so that parents and families are guilty until they prove themselves innocent.” On top of that, government schools were never created to be social workers or police agencies, but allegedly to educate, Ray added, further undermining Block’s argument.
Responding to Block’s claim that everyone should support his ideas, Dr. Ray noted that America has always operated on the notion that parents are to be trusted unless and until shown otherwise. Only if a parent harms a child is the state allowed to intervene. “We do not begin by invading the privacy of every home and family and put the burden of proof on them,” he said.
The reason so many ordinary Americans disagree with Block’s assumptions is that they do not believe in statism or fascism, Ray explained. As such, the do not wish to see the government invading bedrooms, living rooms, family homes, and children’s bodies and minds under the guise of “protection,” the researcher argued.
The data also undermines Block’s argument. An estimated 5.7 million children in government schools will be sexually maltreated by staff before they graduate, according to data compiled by researcher Charol Shakeshaft. Imagine if every one of those victims wrote a column in newspapers arguing for more government oversight of teachers. It would never end.
On the education front, the picture is dire too, with government data showing only around one third of children in public schools are even “proficient” in the core subjects. How a government that cannot educate even the children already under its control is supposed to oversee and improve education provided by parents is not clear.
Homeschoolers do much better on average anyway, even when parents do not have a high-school diploma, the research shows. This is true on social and emotional metrics and socialization as well, the growing body of research into home education reveals.
Meanwhile, studies show children in government schools are at higher or the same risk of abuse and neglect as homeschoolers. “We already have laws for child abuse and neglect; use them,” Ray said. “There is no empirical evidence that homeschooling is bad for children overall; no evidence there is a problem that the government should or could solve.”
“You cannot stomp out all bad-but-not-illegal behavior of public school, private school, or homeschool parents with more laws,” he said. “Trying to use the civil government to control all behaviors and how we should raise our children before an illegal or blatantly harmful act is committed would turn us into a police state, and none of us wants that.”
“If the author were to apply his same dream for the control of government and his worldview ruling Americans’ lives and reducing harm to children, he would have to call for the abolition of current public schools, then start over with a dystopian set of state agencies and random monthly police and social worker visits into every home in the US that houses minors,” Dr. Ray said. “This is not America.”
In the end, Block’s argument is that government — not parents — should control what children learn, with whom they associate, and what tests they must take to ensure compliance with government or the powered elite. But in a free society, government cannot and should not seek to stomp out all childrearing that Block disagrees with.
The NY Times attack, republished by other major newspapers across the country, is part of a coordinated assault. From the UNESCO report demanding government control over home education and the efforts of Harvard law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet to ban it, to European media anti-homeschooling propaganda and government attacks, this is just the start.
Ultimately, home education appears to be emerging as a major threat not just to government indoctrination programs, but to totalitarian agendas everywhere. The more children receive an amazing education from their parents, the more obvious it becomes that the “public education” system is dumbing down and brainwashing the population.
This battle is about much more than home education. It is, at its core, about the future of society and fundamental, God-given rights. Will parents retain the right and responsibility to educate and raise the children God entrusted them with, or will the state usurp that too? Will parents determine what the next generation learns, or will an all-powerful state shape the hearts and minds of future voters?
In this battle, a free society hangs in the balance. Parents should respond accordingly.
