Leftists push for homeschooling ban amid coronavirus crisis – so now they don’t want children getting ANY education?
Ethan Huff
As most of America waits in lockdown for the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis to end, Harvard Magazine is keeping busy criticizing parents for teaching their children at home, and is actually calling for a full-scale ban on homeschooling.
That’s right: The self-proclaimed champions of education on the left believe that children should not learn anything at all if they can’t learn it at public school because homeschooling comes with “risks,” according to Harvard Magazine‘s Erin O’Donnell.
O’Donnell cites the opinion of Elizabeth Bartholet, a Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty at Harvard and director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, who believes that homeschooling violates children’s right to a “meaningful education.”
Bartholet further contends that children face “potential child abuse” if they are taught at home by their parents, and would be safer learning at public school. She also says that homeschooling may prevent children “from contributing positively to a democratic society.”
Based on these positions, Bartholet believes that homeschooling should be prohibited in the United States.
“We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling,” Bartholet is quoted as saying, noting that while all 50 states have laws requiring education, “there are very few requirements that parents do anything” when it comes to homeschooling.
Bartholet also does not like that many homeschooling parents do not have the level of education themselves that she believes they need in order to be “qualified” to teach their own children.
“That means, effectively, that people can homeschool who’ve never gone to school themselves, who don’t read or write themselves,” she claims, presumptively assuming that most homeschooling parents are somehow illiterate.
Pompeo says parents have sacred authority over their own children
Bartholet also does not approve of the fact that many parents who choose to homeschool have a Christian perspective in mind. These “extreme religious ideologues,” as Bartholet calls them, are the types who “question science and promote female subservience and white supremacy.”
These extreme positions by Bartholet and Harvard prompted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to speak out in support of homeschooling. In a tweet, he stated that:
“The risk to children is NOT from homeschooling. The risk is from radical leftist scholars seeking to impose THEIR values on OUR children.”
Pompeo is certainly right on this point, seeing as how leftists like Bartholet have made it clear that they want to deny parents the right to educate their own children apart from government dictates.
Bartholet actually believes that the government has the right to educate children exclusively “so that they become active, productive participants in the larger society.” She also wants the government to educate children so that they “grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints.”
In other words, Bartholet wants all children in America to support things like the “trans” movement, as well as to presumably become trans themselves, as well as adopt an anything-goes attitude towards life that is “accepting” of all degrees of deviancy and wickedness as embraced and promoted by the left.
“The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18?” Bartholet further asks. “I think that’s dangerous.”
The irony, of course, is that Bartholet is calling on the government to have essentially authoritarian control over other people’s children from ages zero to 18, and does not in any way consider this to be dangerous. Chalk it up to differences in community, social, and democratic values, we suppose.
“This ivory-tower screed attacking parents who choose to dedicate their lives to educating their own children, often at significant financial sacrifice, is a reminder that we must all work together to protect civilization’s most successful institution: our families,” Pompeo concluded in his response.
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