I would like to do my part to spread the word about the We Stand for Homeschooling petition. The petition was designed to help spread awareness about the deceptive use of the word “homeschooling” by public cyber schools.
These public cyberschools are using the word homeschooling as a way to lure those wishing for a public school alternative back into the fold. The problem the signers of this petition are trying to avoid can be summarized by a simple guilt by association. Public virtual charter schools are proving to be colossal wastes of money, especially when their students are not performing even as well as their public school counterparts. Their use of homeschooling terminology needs to stop now.
We might not be able to define what homeschooling is, given its variety of forms, but we can confidently define what homeschooling is not, and that is a publicly-funded program.
I can’t be any more emphatic about this: Enrolling in public virtual/cyber charter schools is not homeschooling.
There is a flurry of media attention pointed at a Massachusetts school district that distributed a “diversity book bag” to elementary students promoting the homosexual lifestyle. When David Parker, a concerned parent, prompted a meeting with school administrators, they responded by having him arrested for trespassing.
An ACLU lawyer, however, told the judge that “it is a tremendous bonus” for children to be given information of which their parents wouldn’t approve, and that teaching children homosexuality when their parents’ Biblical beliefs do not support that has nothing to do with a violation of religious freedom, according to the MassResistance.org reports.
This boils down to a fundamental question about the nature of government’s rights. Does the state have the right to interrupt the parent-child relationship for the “good” of society? It’s an interesting concept; one that Germany has been grappling with recently.
Is it really that radical or extremists to believe that parents should have ultimate authority over what children learn? Or should we allow an outside body of representatives to decide what’s best for our children?
If you take this logic to the extreme, you end up with children growing up in test tubes, belonging to no one but the state a la Brave New World. We’re one step away if we give up the right to have any kind of say in what our children learn.
My advice to Mr. Parker: Stop trying to reform and just get out. Homeschool your children and never worry about compromising their innocence again.
The show highlights opinions from both sides of the playing field. A professor declares that homeschool students are not well socialized. Another claims that the government has an interest in ensuring that homeschool children are exposed to beliefs outside of what their parents believe.
I don’t think that most homeschooled children run the risk of not being exposed enough to ideas that oppose their parents’ worldview. Every single media outlet is constantly sending messages to our children that conflict with a Christian worldview.
What Professor Reich is essentially saying is that its the government’s responsibility to make sure your children believe what’s right and what’s wrong on their terms. There is a “You birth the babies, we’ll take over from here” mentality.
He claims that he does not want to see homeschooling banned. Yet he argues that parents should be forced to expose their children to ideas that are antithetical to their own. Although I think it’s healthy for children to understand what the world thinks, I think that’s a decision that’s up to the parent. Yes, there will be kids lost in the system. There will be occasional abuses. Some kids will graduate from their homeschool program with poor social skills. However, that’s no reason to throw so much red tape down on homeschooling that it hampers all of the “good” homeschool parents.
Bruce says it best:
SHORTT: I think it’s ironic that someone with an obviously authoritarian agenda is attempting to lecture others, and unfortunately education seems to be one of those areas in which the failures astonishingly insist upon trying to regulate the successful.
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