Are homeschooling families indoctrinating their children to be future terrorists? Susan Johnson seems to think so.
The retired West Virginia teacher recently published an op-ed comparing private and home schools to terrorist training camps. “Many children are homeschooled using private instructional programs — some that are online — that are marketed for particular religious and political persuasions,” she writes.
This leads, she argues, to terrorism: “In some Middle Eastern cultures, private schools called madrassas have been known to engage in religious and political indoctrination beginning at a very young age, even including combat training with military weapons. These are the people who brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center.”
Ironically, for Johnson, public schools are not so much institutions of learning as they are centers for indoctrination in her own preferred value system. She thinks a public education is necessary for students to “unlearn the prejudices and discriminations of their respective ‘tribes.’” She worries that, deprived of the all-American experience of the big homecoming game, students who receive a private education will fail to grow up into good citizens. “The American public school,” she writes, “is where we learn to be Americans.”
Johnson’s view of people as bigoted, tribal extremists is ludicrous coming from someone who apparently doesn’t know that madrasa is just the Arabic word for school. There is no more of an inherent connection between Middle Eastern schools and terrorism than there is between U.S. public schools and the recent violent riots in Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere.
Normally, I wouldn’t pay attention to a private individual’s unhinged ravings. But Johnson’s offensive, inflammatory, and wildly inaccurate rhetoric reveals how desperate some members of the public educational establishment are to prevent West Virginia families from having meaningful choices in the education of their children. Freedom of speech and the press are vital to a healthy civic society, but for a newspaper to print wildly inappropriate, misinformed, and bigoted opinions such as Johnson’s is not helpful.
Johnson laments the progress of school choice initiatives that would increase the number of charter schools or create government-funded accounts directing a portion of state school funding to an individual student’s education. This reveals her priorities: Johnson’s real concern is not teaching children to be productive and peaceable members of society but propping up an institution, public schools, the budget of which already absorbs nearly half of all government expenditures in the state. “Get ready for cuts in teacher positions, salaries and benefits,” Johnson writes, reciting the talking points of school bureaucrats and teachers unions.
It’s true: Parents have been looking for other options. Despite its outsize share of the state budget, West Virginia’s public education system has competed for last place as long as national education scorecards have been keeping track. And it’s no wonder when Johnson and others like her care more about their “positions, salaries and benefits” than about whether students are receiving a good education.
While Home School Legal Defense Association is concerned that government money in private education can lead to excessive government controls that don’t help students, our primary goal is simply for homeschooling to be protected as an educational choice, freely available to anyone. But as homeschooling has become more popular in West Virginia, school officials are nervous about their budgets.
Several years ago, Harrison County school officials alleged that the increase in homeschooling had “cost” them more than $2 million. While schools do not receive state education funding for students who are not enrolled, homeschooling actually costs schools zero dollars since the schools have no expenses related to homeschool students. What can I say? Math is hard.
Johnson isn’t the only one attacking homeschooling. Recently, the Kanawha County school board made waves for complaining about its lack of control over homeschooling families. The board was ignorant of the fact that West Virginia school boards have significant oversight over homeschool students, who must take annual assessments and make periodic reports on students’ academic progress. Homeschooling parents must possess a minimum teaching credential. In fact, West Virginia is among the more regulated states in America for homeschooling.
Last year, I responded to Harvard professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who accused homeschooling parents of being neglectful and abusive. Johnson goes a step further by suggesting that homeschooling and private education will produce “domestic terrorists.”
“Based on the rhetoric we are hearing from certain domestic terrorists, are we very far away from schools like that in America? Proud Boy Academy? Boogaloo Boot Camp?” she asks.
Johnson’s paranoid views don’t match reality. Research indicates that children exposed to homeschooling are more tolerant and, according to some surveys, more likely to vote and participate in volunteer organizations.
Johnson’s demand that the legislature reinforce a failing system and prohibit parental choice when schools aren’t even open and are not delivering much of an education at all, even when parents are, is too much to bear.
After decades of failure to provide West Virginia children with a quality education, the legislature should set aside bad-faith bureaucratic objections to homeschooling and school choice and put parents in the driver’s seat. Parents are 100% more in tune with what is best for their children, and empowering them is the best choice.
Michael P. Donnelly is senior counsel at Home School Legal Defense Association.
