Home schooling tends to be a hot-button issue in political discourse. But that’s particularly true at the moment, being that home schooling has risen amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a November 2020 survey of parents by the Edweek Research Center, “9% of parents who weren’t home-schooling their children last school year said they planned to home-school their children at least some of the time this school year.” Last week, the left-wing writer Jill Filipovic added to the debate. She tweeted and wrote about home schooling, voicing particular disdain toward its organized conservative supporters. Filipovic takes particular issue with conservative groups that push back against state mandates that require basic proof that parents are actually teaching. Her concern is that, left unchecked by government, home schooling opens up the possibility of abuse and neglect.
I take a different view.
I home-schooled my four children for six years, give or take, depending on age. They’re now in their third year of public school. I remain an ardent home-schooling advocate. As such, I take issue with Filipovic’s arguments. But I also observe that her concern over the lack of regulations surrounding home schooling is not solitary. They represent a common, overarching, liberal worldview about parents, children, and government. It’s a worldview with a few problems.
First, Filipovic is correct that home-schooling regulations differ state by state. Some laws are quite loose, while other states require a listing of the curriculum. Others require parents to provide a child’s test scores. As frustrating as this may be to a person who believes more government involvement is better for the general public, one of the reasons that right-wing groups don’t necessarily encourage increased regulation is that the majority of home-schooled children and parents don’t need it. While there are occasional instances of abuse, just as there are in families that send their children to public school, there is no evidence that abuse rates are higher in families that home-school. Nor is there compelling evidence to show that home schooling is somehow used to cover up abuse.
Then, there’s the more philosophical issue of who is raising your children. Conservatives tend to believe that the most powerful unit in U.S. democracy is not Congress, but the family home. We believe that the strength of our democratic republic rests, at least in part, on trusting citizens to make better choices than government for their family’s interests — whether that be a single person, a couple, a single parent, or a family of two parents and five children.
The Left fears home schooling because its ideological purveyors want the government to be involved in more aspects of our lives. Home schooling, put simply, isn’t that.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
