The Horrors of Home Schooling

A friend sends along a newspaper piece, originally from AP, lamenting the tragic situation of homeschooling families who might inadvertently purchase a textbook for their child that does not endorse Darwinian evolution.

The story is most interesting as a typical example of the anti-religious bias of the mainstream media. The basic premise of the article, that it is difficult to find science texts for homeschooling that are not creationist, is simply, obviously, utter nonsense. There is, for example, a large Catholic homeschooling movement. Their textbooks would include Darwinian evolution, as the Catholic Church has never had any problem with it. And don't kid yourself--there is a huge constituency of parents who are homeschooling not for religious reasons, but out of concerns for the quality of the public schools; just as there are many non-religious private schools. Book publishers make little enough money; seven thousand copies in hardcover is a good run in Canada. And textbooks are their cash cow. You want to bet they're going to serve any niche market they can find. There are also many options to homeschool your kids using exactly the same curriculum and exactly the same books available in the public schools of a given jurisdiction, if that is your preference.

Anybody competent to do a simple web search can easily find homeschool textbooks suiting their own preferences. It is entirely in the interests of companies supplying a fundamentalist Christian market to make that clear--just as the author says, it is a large market--so mistakes are unlikely. Anyone who cannot manage to do this is probably not competent to homeschool their child.

The subtext of the article is that the writer of the article has problems with the concept of his neighbour being allowed to raise his child with a religious world-view. He sees religion as a kind of social contamination.

What happened to the supposed moral and educational value of “diversity”? What's more important, diversity in skin tone, or diversity in thought?

What happened to the vaunted "right to choose"? Does it only apply if your choices are pre-approved by the state?

Disraeli wrote over a hundred years ago, "whenever is found what is called paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."

Exactly so: state education is an opportunity for state indoctrination, and many—probably most--“educators” make no bones about this agenda. This is not the practice of a free people. Private schools and home schooling are a vital protection for our most fundamental liberties.

Steve the Roney