I continue to be amazed at the public displays of rank anti-religious ignorance by members of the “educated class.” This time it’s in an article entitled “The Harms of Homeschooling” by one Robin L. West (h/t to Izzy Lyman), from a recent issue of Philosophy & Public Policy, published by the University of Maryland. The name of the publication led me to expect something academic, but the article is basically a bigoted screed against the supposed religious extremism of the “hard core” of the homeschooling community. It’s chock-full of dispassionate academic prose like this (describing homeschoolers):
The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner. These families are not living in romantic, rural, self-sufficient farmhouses; they are in trailer parks, 1,000 square foot homes, houses owned by relatives, and some, on tarps in fields or parking lots.
Large families! Tarps! Trailer parks! Only one breadwinner! The horror!
You can search the footnotes for the peer-reviewed studies establishing this and other, comparable points. You won’t find any. In fact, it looks like most of West’s references are to various articles backing up her claim that there’s no legal “right to homeschool.” (I guess we better get to work on that.) She longs for the good old days when parents who kept their kids home “were criminals, and their kids were truants.” She insists she merely opposes “unregulated” homeschooling, but that’s a mere fig leaf.
The piece is filled with unsubstantiated claims and errors of logic. For example, West cites a study showing that 95 percent of abuse cases are referred by school teachers or officials as evidence that homeschooling shelters parents who abuse their children (really). She doesn’t even suggest any evidence for the prevalence of abuse among homeschooling parents.
In fact, her only references related to the demographics of homeschooling is one reporting that homeschoolers have higher than average incomes (contrary to her stereotype) and another reporting that there are more than 2 million people who report homeschooling their children.
I’m not an educational policy expert, but my wife and I did homeschool our first daughter for four years, and managed to do it without ever once entering a trailer park. I have many friends who homeschool. No trailer parks. In fact, one of our homeschooling friends lives in Bill Gates’s neighborhood. Maybe my friends and I are a non-representative sample; but I’d be willing to bet that homeschooling isn’t even all that prevalent in trailer parks. But even if it is, so what?
West’s purpose, of course, is to imply that homeschoolers are generally fundamentalist ignoramuses who have no business teaching their children. This kind of slur may have been mildly plausible 25 years ago, when homeschooling was more rare and perhaps more eccentric. But the world of homeschooling is now quite diverse—both religiously and politically. My impression is that West has no idea what she’s talking about when it comes to today’s real-world homeschooling community. But why acquaint yourself with the real facts and real people, when you can just rely on your unexamined prejudices?
In response, Izzy Lyman offers a few examples of children who somehow survived their Christian homeschooling experience, even ones that required memorizing Scripture. You know, unsocialized misfits like Tim Tebow—the recent Heisman Trophy winner.