Two of the best-selling biology textbooks [for home-schoolers] stack the deck against evolution, said some science educators who reviewed sections of the books at the request of The Associated Press. "I feel fairly strongly about this. These books are promulgating lies to kids," said Jerry Coyne, an ecology and evolution professor at the University of Chicago.
Coyne is even more explicit about his antipathy toward home-schoolers in his personal blog:
As Lovan noted in his piece, “83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children ‘religious or moral instruction.’”
I weep for those children. For many of them are simply being brainwashed by their parents. Yes, that’s what it is—brainwashing...How many budding biologists have been stifled by their parents’ willful ignorance of science, and on their insistence that the Bible is the real source of biological information?
Wow...sounds like the state should intervene, doesn't it? These poor kids probably should be taken from their parents. Forcing the kids to go to a government-run school would be a good start, but insufficient. Sure, you can get them on the right track at school, but what's going to happen when they go back home to their parents?
Religiously brainwashing children, who are helpless because they depend entirely upon their parents, I asserted, is a form of child abuse.
Home-schooling, too, in most cases is done for the purpose of brainwashing, and therefore in most cases is child abuse.Children home-schooled by “Christo” fascist parents are put at a huge disadvantage. Even children who are home-schooled for reasons other than religious indoctrination — children whose home-school curricula aren’t religious-based — are put at a disadvantage because they don’t get the same opportunities to socialize with children who come from different backgrounds as do their non-home-schooled peers.
For all the talk about the need for exposure to diverse views, Mr. Crook's ability to digest opposing opinions is surprisingly underdeveloped:
I Googled your e-mail address and found your blog, rightklik.net. On your blog you link to Michelle Malkin, RedState and The Heritage Foundation as “important websites,” for [expletive deleted] sake. You’re a wingnut. So I’ll consider the source. You are, after all, preparing your children for the End Times, which they don’t teach in our public schools.
Unfortunately, this notion that home schooling is some kind insidious abuse is not confined to personal blogs and left-wing hate sites. Serious scholarly publications have entertained the idea as well:
The right to unregulated homeschooling visits quite concrete harms on the homeschooled children themselves, the mothers who are teaching them, and the often rural and isolated communities in which they are raised and taught...
...[T]here are political harms. Fundamentalist Protestant adults who were homeschooled over the last thirty years are not politically disengaged, far from it. They vote in far higher percentages than the rest of the population. They mobilize readily. The “army” in which adult homeschooled citizens are soldiers has enormous clout: homeschoolers were called “Bush’s Army” in 2000 and 2004 for good reason...
They are as effective as they are, and as successful as they are, because they engage in politics in the same way that soldiers participate in combat. They don’t question authority, and they can’t go AWOL. With little education, few if any job skills, and scant resources, their power either to influence the lines of authority within their own sphere, or to leave that sphere, is virtually nil.
An army of stupid, conservative Rove-bots? This must be stopped! Here's the plan:
As the political philosopher and homeschool critic Robert Reich has persuasively argued, curricular review would give the state a way to ensure that the academic content is such as to protect the children’s interest in both acquiring the necessary skills for active, autonomous, and responsible citizenship in adulthood, and in being exposed to diverse and more liberal ways.
And now we see the real concern. The statists aren't losing sleep at night because little Johnny can't read ― if that were the case, they'd allow kids to escape our lousy public schools ― no, the statists are worried that Johnny is sneaking off to Tea Parties with his parents when he should be at a real school singing praises to Barack Hussein Obama! Better keep an eye on Johnny.
