This is a major essay by a professor in one of the top law schools in the USA. This essay will reinforce and validate the fears of policy makers and law makers. It will surely be featured at the upcoming conference at Harvard Law. These are culture-making and culture-shaping institutions. Today’s Harvard Law students are tomorrow’s congressional representatives, U.S. Senators, and governors. They are achievers. They have a plan for your life. Freedom and parental control of children is not on Bartholet’s agenda and it will not likely be on theirs.

One of the unexpected outcomes of the Covid-19 shutdown/quarantine has been the widespread turn to homeschooling. Parents are being asked en masse to become intimately involved (again) with the education their children. For some parents, it means making sure that their children have access to an online platform. For many parents, however, the quarantine has thrown them into homeschooling. Thousands of American households are suddenly little schools, laboratories, and gymnasiums (or gymnasia). For thousands of other families, however, the shift to homeschool happened intentionally. Ours was one of those families. We did not set out to become homeschoolers. Our eldest began her education in a church-related school while we were in the UK. When we returned to the USA, we found that she had begun in what was, more or less, first grade and the local school wanted her to go start over in kindergarten. We tried that but it was clearly not working so we tried homeschooling and it worked well enough that we never stopped. Both children did well, arguably better than they would have done in a traditional school. Both scored well on standardized tests and found themselves taking courses at the local community college and one of the local state universities before they earned scholarships and went for their undergraduate eduction, where they did well. Both are pursuing professional careers. They have different personalities, interests, and gifts but are widely traveled and at speak least three languages beside English. Both learned Latin. One taught Latin briefly. Both are musicians and one of them is a professional musician. They took riding lessons, played basketball, studied martial arts and dance. Their education was superior to anything offered by the local public school and they got their education without fear of violence from within or without the school. They had many opportunities for socialization and wanted for nothing academically.

This is not to say that this is the way it is for all homeschoolers but as the product of the American public schools of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s (if we include state universities) I am mystified at the portrait of homeschool being peddled to American elites. Consider the recent article in Harvard Magazine in which Erin O’Donnell warns of “The Risks of Homeschooling.” Typically, magazines and conferences require planning such that it seems unlikely that both the article and the upcoming Harvard Law conference on homeschool were designed to respond to the surge in homeschooling due to Covid-19. Nevertheless, the coincidence of the conference and the article with the quarantine are remarkable.

O’Donnell reports that about the same percentage of children are now homeschooled as are enrolled in charter schools (about 3-4%). According to one report, as of 2015, about %10 of American elementary and secondary school children were educated in private schools. Some homeschool students may be included in that 10% figure but how the two relate is not clear. Nevertheless, close to 90% of all primary and secondary school children are educated in publicly-funded schools controlled by school boards. Still, this hegemony is not enough for O’Donnell nor for her primary source for the article, Elizabeth Bartholet, J.D., who holds an endowed chair in Harvard Law. She complains that homeschooling is unregulated, that students are isolated, potential victims of abuse, potential future survivalists, Christians removed from mainstream culture, and protected by the Homeschool Legal Defense Association. O’Donnell (who has really just strung together quotations from Bartholet, writes,

Bartholet maintains that parents should have “very significant rights to raise their children with the beliefs and religious convictions that the parents hold.” But requiring children to attend schools outside the home for six or seven hours a day, she argues, does not unduly limit parents’ influence on a child’s views and ideas. “The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18? I think that’s dangerous,” Bartholet says. “I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.”

Bartholet concedes “No doubt there are some parents who are motivated and capable of giving an education that’s of a higher quality and as broad in scope as what’s happening in the public school” but she doubts that many are.

As the product of the Omaha Public Schools and the Lincoln Public Schools (and the University of Nebraska) I guess that I have as much experience with public school as Bartholet. Breadth was not a feature of my public school education. I did learn how to fight, however. I did not begin to learn how to learn until my third year in university when my introductory Logic professor taught us how to memorize, something I should have learned in primary school. The radical changes, the turn from the objective to the subjective, from the effective to the affective, ushered into public schools in the 50s and 60s had begun to take hold by the time I arrived in school. I am fortunate that I learned phonics and once I could read, I could teach myself. Beyond that, my education was pedestrian. The Deweyite revolution effectively destroyed education by the 1970s and it has only become worse since then.

Bartholet’s concerns are not justified in O’Donnell’s article they are merely asserted. To respond to them briefly:

• The reason the HSLDA is well funded and effective is because they win in court not because they are, as the article implies, bullies. Thousands of American families rely on them for legal protection precisely because of the sort ill-informed speculations in articles such as these.
• Homeschooling is hardly unregulated. It is true that in a federal republic, the states and local school districts do approach homeschooling differently but “unregulated” is hyperbole. In many places homeschoolers have to jump through a considerable number of hoops.
• One wonders if she was worried about the hippies removing their children from bourgeois conformist, middle-class culture in the 1960s and 70s? I guess not. Conservative Christians and other types of homeschoolers, after all, learned about this approach to education from the hippies. One gets the sense that were we to change the term “Christian” to another sub-group, the steam would evaporate from this article.
• Survivalists? Has Bartholet ever met a homeschooling group? If reading Tolkein and Harry Potter is an indicator of future terrorists, I suppose but I doubt the correlation.

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