The Center for Home Education Policy – A Solution in
Search of a Problem
I was with great interest that I read The Washington Post
Magazine’s article, by Lisa Grace Lednicer, on this new enterprise – The Center
for Home Education Policy.
The young people who run this organization were homeschooled
and their goal is to help those who do not like the homeschool life their
parents have designed for them. The
Center for Home Education Policy wants to help young men and women “escape” their
homeschools, and, rather presumptuously, will offer some basic life skills
support in the process.
Sarah Hunt and Carmen Green are rather accomplished young
people (Rhodes Scholar candidate and Georgetown Law). They have an outstanding command of the king’s
English, did well at college, and clearly know how to get a job done. This puts them head and shoulders above most of
their brick-and-mortar-schooled peers. They are not
poster children for some backwoods, Bible-thumping, slop-‘dem-hogs-or-else kind
of parenting. I bet that the parents of
these enterprising young adults are exceedingly proud of them, as well they
should be.
The goal of The Center for Home Education is more government
regulation of home education, but as this essay will point out, there are
errors and omissions in their petition.
The Center for Home Education Policy zooms in on
fundamentalist Christianity as a culprit while
ignoring other forms of religion-motivated, segregating, educational options. This is troubling. If The Center for Home Education Policy truly
cares about the isolating and rigid circumstances which can be found in some extremely
religious homes, and if they care about how hard it is for the young lives
trapped there, then it would definitely need to put a wide-angle lens on the
camera. Christians are not the only home
educators out there. What about the
solitariness of Amish children? What of the
detachment of children in conservative, orthodox Judaism? Finally, what about the confinement, oppression
and degradation of young Muslim girls? These
cultures represent huge homeschool communities - why doesn’t the Center for Home Education
Policy “go there”?
I think it is because they would not feel comfortable
stomping around the sacred grounds of a culture they do not know, even if it
does have practices which offend their sensibilities. Maybe they have more respect for the rituals
of these religious cultures than for their own?
Regardless, their approach to helping home educated youth seems biased. They appear to be on a targeted witch hunt,
and it robs their goals of integrity and sincerity.
On the claims of abuse and starvation in these
fundamentalist homes, it is imperative to point out the difference between
families who are truant and families who home educate. Truant families do not send kids to
school. Neither do they homeschool. They do nothing at all because they are bad
people. Legislating home education will
do nothing at all to save kids from bad parents and creating a police state
where kids are checked up on regularly steps into a very menacing space. The corruption in large government,
bureaucratic departments which aim to “help children” is legendary. Relying on any agency to verify the integrity
of a homeschool (against whose standards?) has a distinctly Orwelian stench. Bad people who fail to send their kids to
school ALWAYS claim to be homeschooling.
Hunt and Green have erroneously conflated these two groups.
Think. How many
public-school kids suffer at the hands of bad parents? Tragically, too many to count. Why don’t we blame public education for this? Why don’t we seek some oversight in these
families? If a few of the 1.8 million
homeschool kids are mistreated in their homes, this is a terrible thing. But here is a much worse statistic – thousands
and thousands of kids, who are not homeschooled, are mistreated in their homes each
year. Thousands of kids who attend public schools are victims of abuse. Kids
who attend public school are also much more likely to be murdered - while AT
the school. Child abuse is ghastly and
heart-breaking and for the sake of those victims, I think we should interpret
the data correctly.
Hunt and Green explain that many kids who were homeschooled
in isolating circumstances need very basic life skills training and academic
remediation as well. I have caught one
or two rare glimpses of this, so I do not disagree entirely. But it is very disingenuous to suggest that
this is common in home education. It is
not common. It is rare. It is, however, very common to meet a middle
schooler who attends a public school and who still cannot read. Of the young people who fill our prisons and
who drop out of high school or college, the overwhelming majority went to a
public school. That is a very scary
outcome.
You see, the question that does need an answer is this: Why are so many young people who come out of
our nation’s public schools not prepared for college, for life, and for self-sufficiency? This is a problem that needs a solution, but
it is not a problem generally found in homeschool homes.
More importantly, today’s headlines have revealed how public
school students are narrowly formed around a bubble of progressive,
politically-correct, left-of-center orthodoxy.
The shocking events on our nation’s college campuses show us how very
intolerant and viciously protective that isolating piece of society can
be. (Here, I am referring to the
isolation which public education molds.)
Now - take a look at the Nation’s Report Card
THIS is terrifying.
None of the kids represented in these statistics were home
educated. This is a crisis, a tragedy, and
a terrible injustice. On a GRAND
scale. How can one point fingers at a very few
ill-prepared homeschool children, when an entire nation is facing an academic extinction
event brought to us compliments of ….no, not home education…. but that wondrous
alternative known as public education? The
author of this article, Lisa Grace Lednicer, failed to show the Nation’s Report
Card or the Homeschool
Report Card. Such an omission is not cool.
The numbers and the research speak volumes. This is why I think that The Center for Home
Education Policy is a solution in search of a problem. Home education builds better citizens.
The problem is public education.
In the Washington Post article, Sarah Hunt explains that
some homeschoolers do not even know what the SAT is. The
direct opposite has been my experience.
I have heard the same things, year in and year out, from homeschool
teens who take the SAT or ACT. Homeschooled
teens come away shocked at how oblivious the other students are about these
tests. During the test breaks they
listen to bewildered comments from the school kids, many of whom do not even
know why they are there. These public school students are shocked to find out
that the test is 3.5 hours long. They
are shocked to learn that they must write an essay. They are shocked to learn that they must
know Geometry to do the math portion. My
own four kids (each took SAT 2 to 3 times in total) were flabbergasted at how
unskilled and vulnerable these kids seemed.
And they felt pity for them.
As someone who consults with parents during the college
application process - parents of homeschoolers as well as parents of public
school students – I can tell you that there is a huge difference between the
two. Homeschool parents are much more
aware of the requirements for graduation and the criteria for admission to
college. For many homeschool families, the
proof of the pudding arrives during the first year in college. This is when homeschool kids truly
shine. Colleges are eager to have them
and they thrive, while many of their public schooled peers do not.
I think that Hunt and Green have focused on the wrong data. To illustrate this point - imagine you are
in a room where there are 100 young people who were very poorly educated and
who come from wacky families. Now,
imagine that 3 of them were home educated.
How can you hope to be taken seriously when your take-away from this is
that more regulation is needed in home education, when the real problem is in
the BIG numbers … the 97 other people?
It does not make sense.
The timing of this article and, indeed, the timing of the
whole “homeschool monitoring” message is suspicious, given the present political
climate. There is an elephant in the
room, which may be the real reason for the howls for “home education
monitoring”. It is this - the inevitable
a la carte approach to education. If the
US moves toward a voucher model for education then home education will grow
even more. So, best to start the
bleating and barking for more controls now, right?
I wish The Center for Home Education Policy well but remain
convinced that they are a solution in search of a problem. I hope they turn their well-formed minds to
the real problems in education, where they might rescue countless children lost
in an intellectual and cultural wasteland.
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