Children of the State
Thursday, February 1st, 2007By Mimi Rothschild
Religion and Ethics has a transcript of a PBS special on home education featuring advocates such as Bruce Shortt and Voddie Baucham.
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.