Not a Good Argument for Home-schooling

I’m not a big fan of public schools, and I am an advocate of home-schooling, but this article at Taki’s is over the top.

“But amidst the chirpy greeting card mentality that accompanies this familiar rite of passage is another message that won’t get any meaningful airtime: It’s also that time of year when vulnerable youngsters are required to leave their homes to being nine long months of subjection to statist agitprop. As Alan Caruba, founder of the National Anxiety Center, observed in a recent commentary: ‘From the Head Start program to the International Baccalaureate, the whole purpose of ‘education’ today is to create new generations of Americans who think that the United Nations should govern the entire planet and who uncritically accept politically correct beliefs about gender issues, diversity, multiculturalism, and environmentalism.’

No kidding. Abetted by mandatory education laws, many modern schools now serve as de facto indoctrination centers where little kids, tweens, and teens are compelled to listen to half-truths about everything from the Founding Fathers to the free market. The kiddos are ‘taught’ by folks who are largely too lazy, too liberal, too inexperienced, or too illiterate to teach phonics, history, economics, or mathematics with any degree of rigor or intellectual honesty.”

The author need not worry herself so much. Even if the purpose of public education is to create a generation of One Worlders, and I doubt this very much, public schools are not capable of pulling it off. Frankly, they are mainly just places to park the kids during much of the day. And if you are looking for intellectual rigor and honesty, you are not likely to find many parents who have those attributes. I reckon that public schools do their share of inculcating statist propaganda, but religious schools do the same thing, and parents are just as guilty.

If your kids are in public school and get their values and information solely from the school, that’s your fault as a parent. You still have a responsibility to educate your kids and point out when the curriculum is inconsistent with your views. Those parents who don’t bother to educate their children in addition to what they get at public school probably wouldn’t be very good home-school teachers, either.

And you don’t have to be a UN-phobic, sexist, racist, ethnocentric polluter to favor home-schooling and to problematize public schooling. Public schools are going to reflect the hegemonic dominant culture, and a public school teacher who taught that women were inferior to men, that races should keep to themselves, and that different cultures were evil would be in a lot of hot water. A teacher who advocated littering and despoiling the earth would also run counter to prevailing attitudes.

I am all for education. I don’t even think schools are bad. I just don’t think that they should be coercively managed and financed. Also, I would prefer to see parents and the proprietors of schools exercise control over all aspects of schooling. Under those conditions, the author of the article could choose a school for her children where they could be taught to believe in absolute sovereignty, sexism, racism, ethnocentrism and the disposability of the planet. Or she could just teach them at home and avoid exposing them to anyone different from themselves in any way.