(OPINION) Home education and homeschool families are under vicious attack from establishment media outlets, with major propaganda voices on both sides of the Atlantic working to portray homeschooling as dangerous and radical.
The anti-homeschooling screeds come as the number of families removing their children from government schools has grown by as much as 100 percent in recent years.
The general gist of the escalating jihad against parental rights and educational liberty is that parents cannot be trusted with their children. Some might teach them to be Nazis without the state’s benevolent hand to oversee “education,” one major newspaper implied. Others might fail to teach their children enough LGBT propaganda. And some might even abuse their progeny, the propagandists claimed.
The leftwing media declaration of war against homeschoolers — by far the best performing and safest students in the United States, according to the data — comes even as victims of government schools suffer from massive levels of illiteracy, innumeracy, mental-health problems, suicide, sexual abuse, gender confusion, and more.
Federal data show less than one in three students in public schools are proficient in any core subject, with some government schools failing to produce a single student proficient in anything.
Meanwhile, over 10 percent of children in government schools will be the victim of sexual abuse perpetrated by staff members of those schools including teachers and officials, U.S. Department of Education data show.
Leading the charge against home education in the United States was the Washington Post, the rapidly shrinking propaganda megaphone of billionaire Amazon extremist Jeff Bezos.
The Post, ridiculed by conservatives as the “ComPost,” has published multiple articles in recent weeks strategically attacking both home education and the leading researcher in the field.
Last year, the Post published several articles detailing the steady exodus from government schools into home education, along with a silly anti-homeschooling “article” (almost a parody) in May about a Christian husband and wife who were homeschooled as children but decided to send their own children to a government indoctrination center.
The goal was clear: Sound the alarm among leftists and the education establishment about this growing threat to their agenda and power.
Then the attacks started getting more vicious. As the year was coming to a close, Post propagandists Peter Jamison and Laura Meckler wrote an article headlined “Home-schoolers dismantled state oversight.
Now they fear pushback.” Disguised as a piece chronicling legislative efforts to bring homeschoolers under government control, the article painted a deceptive picture while suggesting that public funding of home education would be the bait used by government to sucker homeschooling families back into the “system” they fled. That much is true.
Another “article” by the Post just a few weeks earlier sought to discredit and demonize the top researcher on home education in the world, Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute.
Dr. Ray, who has studied homeschooling in depth for decades and is meticulous in his research, happens to support homeschooling, an option the data show generally offers a far better education. But the Post used dishonesty to smear him.
Under the headline “How a true believer’s flawed research helped legitimize home schooling,” the piece quotes a fringe fanatic at William and Mary attacking Dr. Ray for having an “ideological agenda” — without mentioning that the professor believes the “parent-child relationship exists is because the state confers legal parenthood on people through its paternity and maternity laws.”
“The Post committed several logical fallacies that are aimed at basically all scholars whose research has found positive things connected to homeschooling,” Dr. Ray told The Newman Report.
“Many studies by a diversity of researchers show that homeschool students from poor and rich, rural and suburban, darker- and lighter-skinned, rural and urban, and secular and Christian families are typically performing above average in academic achievement and social development.” The broader undertone of the paper’s attack on homeschooling also runs contrary to the basic values of freedom and liberalism. (READ MORE)
