Children of the State
By 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.
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Of course the state has an interest in the views of the citizens. But our constitution is supposed to protect our individual rights against abuses of the state’s “interests.”
The “state” is supposed to serve us, not the other way around.
Comment by Dana — February 3, 2007 @ 3:27 am
If he suggests that “parents should be forced to expose their children to ideas that are antithetical to their own” then shouldn’t public schools also be forced to do the same? If he wants Christians to teach their kids secularism, then shouldn’t the secular world be forced to teach Christianity? He’s a hypocrit and proof of exactly why the public school system is awful.
Comment by Donna — February 5, 2007 @ 1:53 pm
Professor Reich’s statement that homeschoolers are not “well socialized” is of course an uninformed and woefully simplistic characterization of a much more three dimensional issue. If he means that homeschoolers are NOT encouraged to follow the crowd, wear what everyone else wears, think what everyone else thinks and not question anything, then maybe he is right. It really boils down to what he means when he says “socialized”. Public school was created to homogenize society, to blend the differences between the melting pot’s many cultures and teach an uniform set of values. Most homeschoolers do not want their children to be “blended” into anything or anyone else. We want our children to be their own unique, amazing, precious and different treasures!
Comment by Mimi Rothschild — February 6, 2007 @ 11:53 am
My experience being in the Public school is that the Government is concerned with teaching all ideas except for Christianity. If it was not for my parents, I would not have had any exposure to Christian ideals! Thank God for my parents!
Comment by Toni — February 6, 2007 @ 1:32 pm