The Horrors of Homeschooling

I came across this lengthy article in Prospect by Kathryn Joyce profiling children who had been raised in fundamentalist home-schooling homes and escaped out of the miasma of Parental Control. I tend to chuckle, despite myself, when I read articles like this. Not that there aren't terrible homeschooling situations. Undoubtedly there are. And I feel real compassion for children who are raised to believe that any dissent from there parents is a sure route to hell. That is vicious and mean doctrine and should be spoken out against. In that sense, I have no problem with an article talking about some of these awful scenarios in which fundamentalist kids were raised. When this becomes problematic is when the anecdotal stories of abuse are slap-dashly used to represent the logical outcome of any homeschooling by Christians.

You can see this tendency in scare paragraphs ("scareagraphs"?) like the following: 

"What many lawmakers and parents failed to recognize were the extremist roots of fundamentalist homeschooling. The movement’s other patriarch was R.J. Rushdoony, founder of the radical theology of Christian Reconstructionism, which aims to turn the United States into an Old Testament theocracy, complete with stonings for children who strike their parents. Rushdoony, who argued that democracy was “heresy” and Southern slavery was “benevolent,” was too extreme for most conservative Christians, but he inspired a generation of religious-right leaders including Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. He also provided expert testimony in early cases brought by the HSLDA. Rushdoony saw homeschooling as not just providing the biblical model for education but also a way to bleed the secular state dry."

Now I have never heard of Rushdoony, and maybe he is the rat bastard he is made out to be in this clearly objective paragraph, but really all this paragraph seems to be saying is "one douchebag favored homeschooling." He was too extreme for most conservative Christians, but he nonetheless "influenced" James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. How? you might ask. Doesn't matter. Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson! You just have to recite the names of conservative bogeymen and let that do the arguing for you.

I imagine most of you know that my wife was homeschooled through junior high and went to public high school. I don't know if her parents have ever heard of Rushdoony, and they would surely be surprised by the notion of democracy as "heresy" but none of that matters--they were Christians and homeschoolers, ergo bad people who suppressed their children.

The whole article is about as well-researched as a term paper one of my old freshman writing students turned into me at K-State. There are stats about how many people give money to the Homeschooling Defense fund, but none that might give any indication about the percentages of homeschooling students who are disgruntled and felt the need to escape the Fundamentalist Philistinism of their parents. Joyce relies on horrifying anecdotes. A homeschooled teen was killed by her parents and they had a popular homeschooling book on the shelf. Although the book does not explicitly tell parents to kill their kids it is clearly implied. Spanking is a gateway drug to murder, after all.  

But anecdotes don't prove much, really. My wife and her seven siblings seemed to enjoy the experience of being homeschooled and most will probably homeschool their own kids (as we might well do ourselves). My wife's dad is one of her heroes, and her mom her example of servanthood and love. Should I use their anecdotes to cancel out an opposing one?

You can feel Joyce's frustration when she writes things like this: "Homeschooling now exists in a virtual legal void; parents have near-total authority over what their children learn and how they are disciplined." For shame, America! Letting parents teach their children and discipline them. Discipline is so medieval. Or this: "The amendment [in Pennsylvania] would enshrine in the Constitution parents’ 'fundamental right' to direct their child’s upbringing however they see fit, free of state interference." I think we used to call this being a family. And I think that is Joyce's most elemental problem with homeschooling: the state does not have complete control, but parents. It is a short road from that belief to advocating for children to being taken out of their home because any conservative parenting constitutes abuse. 

There are problems aplenty with parenting in our nation, but I am going to go out on a limb here and say that most of the problems are not emanating from the occasional over-zealousness of Christian parents. Clara helps moms deliver babies nearly every day with stories that would put to shame the sob stories of kids who weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons (incidentally, starting at an appropriate age, The Simpsons will form an integral part of our children's education; everything I needed to know about pop culture and America I learned from The Simpsons). She had a patient recently, eight months pregnant who is so addicted to alcohol that she drank hand-sanitizer while in the hospital to get a fix. How is life going to go for that kid? She has had numerous moms who were on meth and continued to use while pregnant. Others, less overtly extreme, just seem as if they do not care about their children at all. Often there is no father around. And I would imagine that these cases are relatively more common than an abusive homeschooling parent. But those cases don't rile up the target audience of Prospect to the same level of fear as that of the Christian Fundamentalist. Plus, they are only anecdotes as well. Most moms are drug-free, non-alcoholics, who will love their kids and try hard to raise them well. 

It is a complex world. Do abuses of homeschooling mean we should outlaw homeschooling? What about teachers who abuse children? Should we outlaw teachers? Does encouraging your daughter to value motherhood and children equate to naked patriarchal subjugation? What about just not giving a shit about your kids? Which is worse? Joyce doesn't want to answer complex questions. For her, it is not a complex issue. These disparate anecdotes are evidence enough, and her confirmation bias tells her everything she already knew.