Kevin Williamson on why the Left hates homeschooling:
The Left’s organizing principle is control, and the possibility that children might commonly be raised outside of its control matrix is an existential threat from the progressive point of view. Institutions such as free markets and free speech terrify progressives, because they are the result of arrangements in which nobody is in control. Harry Reid and Senate Democrats just tried to repeal the First Amendment because they are horrified that anybody so inclined can broadcast a political message without asking the government’s permission or being subject to official oversight. The states of Ohio and Minnesota went so far as to create “truth” police, secular inquisitions that determined who is allowed to speak and under what circumstances. (Blessedly, these have been thrown out by the courts.) The idea that people could be teaching their children practically anything, without the input of credentialed education experts, is a nightmare. (Never mind that those credentialed experts are intellectual under-achievers, education majors typically having the lowest standardized test scores of any college cohort.) If people discover that they can live without overseers in the matter of education, who knows in which other of life’s endeavors they might be inclined to go their own way?
Professor West of Georgetown is scandalized that parents “have virtually unfettered authority to decide what subjects to teach, what curriculum materials to use,” etc., and, naturally, worries that this will result in parents who teach “from nothing but the Bible.” (Question: What is the opposite of “unfettered”?) She is particularly offended that in some states, home-schooling families are not even required to notify the authorities of their intent to home-school — as if they could manage their own families any way they saw fit, as if they didn’t need permission. The Left’s war on school choice is mostly about money, but its jihad against home-schooling is about power.
Contrary to the crude cartoon of them, home-schooling families are a motley bunch, including everybody from heartland Evangelicals to Brooklyn’s quinoa-and-yoga set. Many of them are amused and surprised when I describe them as “radicals,” but that is what they are — people who have told the state that they’ll pay their taxes but are not handing over their children, that they will render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s but not a mite more. Home-schooling isn’t for everybody, but every home-school student, like every firearm in private hands, is a quiet little declaration of independence. It’s no accident that the people who want to seize your guns are also the ones who want to seize your children. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s desire to imprison people who hold the wrong views on climate change and Harry Reid’s plot to gut the Bill of Rights are not aberrations in an otherwise genuinely liberal agenda; the Left desires to put every aspect of every human life under political discipline, from which history books your children read to what kind of cheese you eat.
