Harvard’s educational elites are terrified that parents might take a more active role in educating their children when we all come out of quarantine. So, they’re plotting to ban parental choice.
In an article last week called “The Risks of Homeschooling,” Harvard Magazine called for a home-schooling ban, claiming that the “dangerous” practice isolates children and fails to prepare them for participating in democratic society. Home schooling, the article claims, subjects children to parents who at best may indoctrinate them with their own religious and political beliefs and, at worst, are abusive criminals.
“The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18? I think that’s dangerous,” Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet says in the article. “I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.”
It is indeed always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless and to give powerful ones total authority. But that very notion should make educational policymakers champions of educational choice and advocates of parent empowerment. Instead, Harvard’s educational elite preach that children’s minds are so endangered by their parents that children’s rights can only be fulfilled by government schools.
The Harvard Magazine article is the fanfare of a whole movement to ban home schooling. The Washington Post published a claim last month that home schooling during the pandemic would set back an entire generation. Bartholet and her colleagues have planned an anti-home-schooling summit for June 19-20 this year, where a battle plan to pass a presumptive ban is on the agenda.
“Homeschooling is a realm of near-absolute parental power,” Bartholet says in a paper that will be required reading for the conference. She also claims that the practice violates a child’s right to a “meaningful education.”
If they truly cared about children’s right to “meaningful education,” Harvard elites would concern themselves with fixing the broken public education system, not banning homeschooling.
Students at public schools, not home schools, are most likely to face a threat to their rights. According to the Heartland Institute, about 20% of all U.S. students age 12 to 18 report being bullied at school, and roughly 4 out of 5 public schools report violent criminal incidents. The Department of Education estimated that about 10% of students will experience some form of sexual misconduct by a school employee by the time they graduate high school.
Homeschooled students do not experience threats to their safety. With some unfortunate exceptions, homeschooling parents choose the lifestyle because they believe it is the best educational choice for their children.
It’s certainly not the easiest choice for parents. The required parental commitment, coordination, and oversight in home schooling exceed that required for any other educational choice. And the payoff is proven. Twenty years of data show that home-schooled students test higher than public school students on the ACT, and the college graduation rate of home-school alumni is nearly 10% higher than their peers: 66.7% compared with 57.5%.
Bartholet and her Harvard colleagues have forgotten that parental rights are sacred and foundational to a free society. Parents do have near-absolute power over their children, as well they should. Parents bring a child into the world and have the responsibility to feed, clothe, and care for that child.
They also have the right to make important decisions about how their child is raised, including what religion the child is raised in, what school the child attends, and what ideas the child is exposed to. Free societies rely on parents raising their children responsibly.
Educational elites feel threatened because they know that the quarantine will prove to be a huge wake-up call for parents. Home with their children, parents are learning that meaningful education does not have to take eight hours each day and that there is no silver bullet curriculum to produce a well-educated child. When quarantine home schooling is no longer a necessity, parents may go looking for alternatives to the public schools their children previously attended.
Bartholet is hard at work to ensure parents don’t have that choice.
Vivian E. Jones is a mother, a home-school graduate, and an alumna of Hillsdale College. She writes from Nashville, Tennessee.
