Thursday, March 20, 2025

Part I

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The Culture War Against Homeschooling: Why the Educational ‘Blob’ Wants More Oversight on Homeschooling

Well, here it comes again, recurringly, as if on some kind of almost predictable cycle, stories emerge in the press in which homeschooling is identified as a problem, as a vulnerability for children, because after all, children who are being homeschooled are taken outside the supervisory power of the state. Big story there, we’ll come back to that in a moment. 

But the latest headline and the latest occasion for this kind of argument has come out of Waterbury, Connecticut, where just a matter of days, ago on a welfare check, local authorities there discovered a 32-year-old man severely undernourished held in what appears to be a state of captivity. And the reason homeschooling is brought into this is because as far back as 2005, persons were concerned when this individual, now 32, was a child, and authorities had indicated that there would be some kind of a house visit.

But nonetheless, it turns out that “a welfare check performed at the request of the State Department of Children and families found nothing amiss.” Okay. And so, now that this man has been found held captive, severely undernourished in this house, the accusation is this wouldn’t have happened if you had some kind of state supervision over homeschooling. Now, let’s just state that that’s quite a stretch when you’re talking about a 32-year-old man, and we are talking about a situation that undoubtedly invokes criminal behavior. There’s just no question about that, that’s why the police are involved. But as Matthew Hennessey of the Wall Street Journal points out, the people who want to jump on homeschooling and criticize homeschooling, and point the finger at homeschooling, have found yet they believe another example of the kind of atrocity story they can haul out to say, “What we need is more government supervision of homeschooling and homeschooling families.”

Hennessey starts this piece this way. “Every few years something horrible happens and progressives rush to blame homeschooling. The claim is always the same,” he writes, “homeschooling enables abuse by removing children from the protective gaze of teachers, administrators, coaches, and the broader community. Why would parents pull their kids out of a traditional school environment, if not to indoctrinate or abuse them?” Now, Hennessey is exactly right, that’s exactly how this functions in the society, but it also affirms something else and that is that the educational establishment, the cultural powers that be really, really hate homeschooling. And when I say they really hate homeschooling, I mean they hate every dimension of it. And as we’re thinking about this, Hennessey’s exactly right, they’re just trotting out homeschooling. And by the way, if there’s a failure here it’s a failure of the government back in 2005 that had a complaint, went for a welfare check and found nothing amiss and didn’t follow up.

That isn’t a problem with homeschooling, it actually is a problem with government. Do we really think government would do a better job in these situations than parents will? But okay, Hennessey’s exactly right. He says, “It’s a tired question made more so by homeschooling’s pandemic-induced popularity. Teaching your kids at home or in a co-op with other families is no longer out of the ordinary. That hasn’t stopped,” he writes, “the education BLOB teachers unions, bureaucracies, education schools, and their media allies when trying to put homeschooling back in a box.” He points to a media story from NBC News that stated, “Connecticut’s lax homeschooling rules could have aided boys abuse, some education advocates say.” So, there you have the direct finger, NBC News pointing at homeschooling and Connecticut’s lax homeschooling rules as the problem. Let’s do a little history here. It’s going to be really illuminating, because when you think about homeschooling in America you think of conservative Christians.

That’s exactly what the mainstream educational BLOB, as Hennessey calls it, wants you to think. They want you to think very conservative Christians. Is that true or false? Oh, it’s true, but it didn’t start out that way. Homeschooling didn’t begin on the cultural right, it began on the cultural left. It was then sometimes called “unschooling,” and it was an experiment undertaken predominantly in the Pacific Northwest back during the 1960s by those who would be identified as hippies. They had their own liberal fears about the educational establishment Hennessey calls the education BLOB, they didn’t want the government teaching their kids. They were opposed to the very idea of government education. They saw the government as the enemy, again, the cultural left, just think about the 1960s into the 1970s, and they didn’t want their kids taught by “the man.” But going even a little bit further back, the folks who really won the original legal precedence in the matter of parental authority here and homeschooling, it wasn’t on the cultural left in the case of the hippies, that’s what really began the modern homeschooling movement.

It was before that, the Amish, because the Amish also did not want to send their kids into government schools for all kinds of reasons having to do with their Anabaptist heritage. And they also traditionally have not educated their children, in particular boys, past a certain age, far earlier than the end of K through 12 education. And so, in some very significant cases, including a case known as Yoder, the Supreme Court actually made very clear that parents have the right, based upon their own worldview and convictions, to take into their own hands the education of their children. Now, those decisions didn’t stipulate fully whether there could be any government oversight whatsoever, but that’s where the conservative tidal wave of homeschooling comes in, really beginning in the 1970s, but gaining a lot of speed in the ’80s, ’90s, and then gaining an even greater momentum in the 21st century, just in the last 25 years.

And this was largely driven by evangelical Christians who had simply had enough with what was going on in the public schools. Some of them had an even deeper argument, and that deeper argument is somewhat like the hippies. It’s an alternative form of the same argument which is against the man, which is to say government exercising its authority over the minds and educations of children. And there were a lot of conservatives who said. And by the way, that shows you something about the transformation of government. At one point it was the Left that saw government as the repressive power, increasingly it is clearly conservatives who see the government as the repressive oppressive power. But then something else happened, and Hennessey is exactly right. It was COVID, COVID-19. It changed so much, and of course we’re looking now at just about the fifth anniversary of all of that. Five years later, there are a lot of things that we missed when they were happening, and in many cases couldn’t even see that they were happening.

A vast resurgence of what is legally defined as homeschooling began then not on the cultural left or the cultural right, but particularly among intact families of a certain socioeconomic ability, a social economic condition. They had the ability to pull their kids out of school, and of course they didn’t have any choice with the shutdowns of COVID. But once the schools went back into session, many of these parents and these families decided, “We really like this. We like the freedom, we like being able to take our kids on trips and have experiences with them. We don’t want to turn them back over to the educational establishment.” And many of them said, “Our kids are actually learning more, they’re doing better. And furthermore, we know them a whole lot better through homeschooling than by sending them for so many hours in the government run schools.”

So, there’s a lot going on here that has to do with sheer panic in the bureaucracy, and that’s a part of what’s going on. Part of it’s ideological, some of it’s financial. So, let’s talk about the financial, we all understand money, you can count it. And you have the public school systems that have lost a ton of money, and I mean a ton of money because the decrease in the census of the pupils in their schools. It has been a radical fall, and some of it’s demographic. People just aren’t having babies the way they should. And so, the net number of children coming in, say to kindergarten and K through 6 education, it’s smaller than it has been. And then, you have many districts in which people have been moving out and COVID accelerated that too. And so, you have a lower census, lower income from education taxes, apportionment really coming with a cost, and then you have homeschooling.

And quite frankly, a lot of that is simply tied to the failure of the schools. And I’m not saying every school everywhere is a failure, I am saying it’s a pattern of failure that’s now undeniable, and it’s a pattern of failure it is hard to believe can possibly be reversed. And that’s because the educational establishment, the government powers that be, they’re absolutely, absolutely opposed to anything that might correct the situation. But there’s another development here, and this is one we really need to watch. It’s the reconceptualization of the public schools into something other than a school. Now, this isn’t often discussed but I think this is just the right time to do it. The complaint that Hennessey is centering in on here, the NBC news story said that it’s Connecticut’s lax homeschooling rules that could have aided the boys abuse. In other words, had Connecticut had stricter rules, government oversight of homeschooling, maybe this abusive situation wouldn’t have continued.

So there you see, this really isn’t about education, it’s about a transformation in the mission of the schools into social service agencies, and to some degree in a way that people on the far left saw in the ’60s. So, they were wrong about most things, but like a stopped clock they’re right on some other things. One of the things was that where government comes, it comes with its own agenda, and government would like to get our kids faster rather than slower. And the transformation of the schools into, this is where the far left was very concerned in the ’60s, it’s just an extension of the police state. Well, in some ways it sort of is, and in some practical ways kind of has to be. On the other hand, the social service agency aspect of it is also just absolutely massive. An army of social workers, and others with particular social welfare designations, and professions, and job assignments, they populate the schools.

Now a part of this, let’s to be honest here, a part of this is because of a very real crisis among children, particularly in many situations such as the inner cities of many of America’s major metropolitan areas. But the problem there is the breakdown of the family. And in many ways, the most pressing problem is the disappearance of marriage, which means the disappearance of fathers. And so, looking at that you do see a lot of pathologies, you see a lot of behavioral problems, you see a lot of crime problems, and that’s why the most, say drug assisted hippie back in the 1960s, seeing the schools transformed into an extension of the police state, they can hardly imagine now when you go to a major high school and you see how many people are visible in uniform in many cases, with police cars often outside. And that gives parents a sense of comfort, but it also, you need to understand, gives government a real sense of control.

Now, one of the issues in homeschooling, parents need to be very aware of this, there are some really good homeschooling defense organizations, legal defense funds and other groups such as ADF, very much on this, and that’s absolutely necessary. And that’s because there are those who say, “You know what we need to do? In the name of the children as a responsibility of the state, the government, we need to have more oversight when it comes to homeschooling. And what would that oversight look like? Well, we need to find out which parents are qualified to teach. We need to find whether the curriculum they’re teaching is really substantial or not. We need to know exactly what is the health and say, the vaccination status of the children in these homes.” If you think that’s not an issue, I guarantee you, just know that this is what the government’s going to be concerned with when the government comes, and the government will come.

And I’m not saying that all these issues are illegitimate, I’m simply saying I don’t trust government to deal with them. I don’t trust government to be able to be more competent than parents, and families, and extended kinship in pulling this off. I am not saying that there are no situations in which government intervention is not called for, clearly there are such cases, but you need to know that what government will try to do and what the educational BLOB will try to do is to transform those incidents into an argument for what amounts to a government takeover of homeschooling. Hennessey concludes his piece by saying, “Bad people will do bad things. Restricting legitimate freedoms in hope of preventing rare or unusual crimes is a terrible approach to public policy, unless you’re the education BLOB and you have your own reasons for wanting to limit homeschooling, then it makes perfect sense.” Well, he nails it there. That’s exactly right. If you are the education BLOB, then intervening makes perfect sense.

Okay, one final issue just in terms of ethical responsibility here. I know there are people in the educational establishment who are believing Christians, faithful Christians, very much committed to the teaching of children and their welfare. I think it’s important that we all recognize that such persons are there, brothers and sisters in Christ, and we love them and we honor them. At the same time, that doesn’t make the educational BLOB any less a BLOB.

Part II

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Teaching Fertility in Sex Education? The Experts Say You Should ‘Trust the Experts’ on This – But Don’t Buy It

Okay next, while we’re talking about education, USA Today, when it came out it was sometimes known as McPaper. It’s not the most influential newspaper in the United States, but it doesn’t mean to be. It means to be a fast read, and it doesn’t do as much reporting, doesn’t have the kind of reportorial staff that a paper like the New York Times has, but USA Today is more well known for being a cultural barometer.

And they do some investigative reporting, and their attention is directed to some things that you wouldn’t see in the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times or elsewhere. And in this sense, from the very beginning it’s been a little bit more like television news than print media. And that means the topics are a little bit different, and the headlines are too. So recently, USA Today ran a piece, the headline is, “Experts say sex ed should include fertility.” Okay, so back to experts. Who in the world are experts? I think one of the things we need to keep in mind is that whenever we see experts in a headline, or we see the citation that experts say, all our intellectual worldview defense mechanisms should come right out and we should recognize this is an alarm. Let the bell go off. Who in the world are experts? What makes them experts?

Even by the middle of the 20th century you had people like Daniel Boorstin, who was the Librarian of Congress and a wonderful award-winning American historian, just very much a man of the cultural elites. However, he was very honest and he said, “Look, a part of what’s going on here is that everybody has to be an expert in something, and the experts certify themselves as experts. And in order to be experts, another expert has to say you’re an expert, and thus you have the society that’s kind of expert.” But the fact is, over time that word just becomes so discounted no one knows who an expert is. But you should suspect that when a newspaper on a controversial issue says, “Experts say,” you better look at who the experts are and what exactly is their expertise.

All right, so here’s the headline nonetheless. “Experts Say Sex Ed Should Include Fertility.” Now okay, I know what some of you’re thinking. Okay, we’re not going to go into anything too graphic here, don’t worry. But I am going to talk about sex education, and this is in the context of the schools. And now you have experts, according to USA Today, who are arguing that in a strange turn, maybe, maybe, maybe in the sex education in the schools, the sex educational that the mainstream BLOB, the establishment would bring, maybe we actually need to tell people not just how not to have babies, but actually how to have them. Okay, why?

Well, the demographics are a part of the problem here. There is a radical decrease in the birth rate in the United States, and you also have the fact that at least many people are looking at this and going, “Okay, we have genuine problems because there’s so many people who are delaying marriage, they’re delaying parenthood, and then they’re running into all kinds of fertility problems and all the rest.” But it is also based on the fact that evidently experts say that maybe in the sex educational curriculum in the schools you need to tell people how babies are made rather than prevented. But I also want to alert us to the fact that when you see sex education, all of your worldview alarm should go off. So, this headline’s just is pretty much one giant alarm, because you have the expert alarm, now you got the sex ed alarm.

What in the world is sex ed? Because the experts in the government and in the establishment, they will tell you that sex education is this, when that’s exactly what I think most Christian parents would say it better not be. And by the way, all that’s addressed in here. Wherever you have sex education, you have a worldview war. I can just guarantee you, wherever you have sex education you have a war over what it should be, what it should contain, what kind of worldview, what kind of morality is going to be taught. And the clash of morality is seen in the distinction in the different states on the question of sex education.

And so, you have an appreciable number of states in the union that are actually committed to abstinence only sex education. So, abstinence only sex education, which means they are not, at least not supposed to be, teaching about birth control, contraceptives, abortion, certainly not pushing that. And of course, abstinence-based sex education is based upon the idea that it should be to prevent what they would call premature sexual activity rather than to encourage it. Now, on the other side of that’s what’s called comprehensive sex education, and this is the norm in many liberal states and in many liberal school districts, where honestly it’s just about downright pornographic. And let me just say that its goal was not to tell teenagers and school students not to have sexual activity, but rather how to do so “safely,” and “safely,” of course, put quotation marks around that because that’s the entire regime and ideology of safe sex.

The assumption is coming from the Left, it is oppressive and morally wrong to say, “You just shouldn’t do that.” So, instead you tell people how to do it without unintended consequences, which by the way starts with a baby. Now, over against that is the abstinence-based, but I want conservative Christians to understand just because it’s supposedly abstinence-based doesn’t mean that it’s in any way consistent with Christian morality or the Christian worldview. Here’s a paragraph toward the end, and the person cited here is Robin Jensen, professor of communication at the University of Utah. We are told that Professor Jensen specializes in health, science, sex, and gender. Okay, here’s the statement, it’s a quote from the professor. “In abstinence-based states, which tend to be red states, you’re seeing less information about what fertility is and how to plan out sexual activity in light of your fertility goals.”

Now Jensen, we are told is lead author of the study that prompted the article. So, I just wanted you to hear the words, it’s coming right out of the professor’s statement here that in abstinence-based states, which tend to be red states, “You’re seeing less information about what fertility is and how to plan out sexual activity in light of your fertility goals.” Your fertility goals. Folks, we could be talking here about 10-year-olds. Okay, you’re also going to love a statement made by Emily Oster, identified as professor of economics at Brown University, and the author of the book entitled Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong and What You Really Need to Know. Well, that’s an interesting thing. Number one, it’s interesting that it’s a professor of economics who’s writing this, that’s just an interesting fact to this, but the article cites the fact that there are those who argue that “teenagers are less likely to retain the information because most of the material isn’t relevant to them yet.”

But Professor Oster had a response to that, and her response is that, “the same principle could apply to other subject matters taught in school.” Well, you got to love that. And so, at the end of this you’ve got someone making the point that maybe, maybe these teenagers aren’t going to know exactly what to do with this information and aren’t going to think is relevant to them yet. And then you’ve got the economist writing a book about fertility who comes back and says, “Yeah, but that’s true about a lot of the subjects they’re taught.” I’ll just say that as an educator I thought that wasn’t particularly the strongest response you might imagine. Yeah, that’s kind of true of a lot that they’re taught. True, however. Then the article concludes this way, “Jensen says, ‘A comprehensive plan about fertility should include the reproductive lifespan for both men and women when fertility is at its peak and when it starts to decline.’ It also should discuss when people are typically having their first child ‘to situate their own choices and what’s possible, and options for people who have fertility issues.'”

Now, my main concern with government-sponsored, establishment-sanctioned sex education curriculum, the entire approach is that it is mostly out of bounds. But when you see this kind of statement, I think it tells us this is not only morally, in worldview terms, out of bounds, it’s also being pushed by people who are, oh, I don’t know, out to lunch.

Part III

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Homeschooling Students are Not Behind the Educational Curve – Those Pushing That Narrative are Not Only Wrong, They Have Their Own Agenda

Well, all right, I didn’t plot this either, but I do want to say something going back to the homeschool issue. Many people in the critique of homeschooling say that homeschooling students just don’t perform academically as well as those from other schools. I want to say as a college president that that’s not true. It’s just fundamentally not true. And I want to tell you that if you take the students at our college, for example, at Boyce College, you’re going to find an awful lot of them were homeschooled. A very large percentage.

You’re going to find another large percentage were in Christian schools or Christian school educational consortia. And the big growth, of course, is in classical Christian schools. And I am thankful for all of those movements. But I just want to tell you, we also have kids who come from families that have made other educational choices, but who are looking for an absolutely committed Christian worldview college education for their kids. I just want to tell you, the good news is don’t let anyone scare you about the fact that homeschooling will set your kids back academically. That’s just fundamentally not true, and those who are pushing it have their own agenda. 

And all of that is why I want to issue again, as I did a few days ago, a very warm invitation to Christian young people considering college and to Christian families looking for the right college for their son or daughter, at Boyce College we believe that following Christ faithfully means equipping young people in every dimension of Christian faithfulness.

And of course, that’s centered in an unapologetic Christ centered education that is firmly grounded in the Christian worldview. One of the best ways you can find out about this is to come visit us on a preview day, and there’s going to be a new Boyce College preview on March 27 through 28, so there’s time still for you to come. And so, it’s just a couple of days, it’s the best way to experience Boyce College. You’ll tour the campus, you can sit down on classes, you can meet our Christ-centered faculty. I’ll look forward personally to meeting you, and these are very encouraging events to me, and we want them to be encouraging to Christian young people and their families. The Boyce College preview day registration includes two nights of complimentary lodging, and we’ll provide you some food.

We’ll provide your meals, and your registration fee is waived if you just use the promo code briefing. So, register at boycecollege.com/preview, remember the code briefing, I’ll look forward to seeing you there.