Harvard Magazine Homeschool Response

This guest post is from Joseph A. Kohm, III, Regent Law Alumni and current U.S. Army Officer with the 10^th Mountain Division:

          On June 18-19, Harvard University is hosting a “Homeschooling Summit” where they will discuss the “problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling, in a legal environment of minimal or no oversight.” In timing that can only be considered preparing proverbial food for thought for the summit, Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet wrote an article for Harvard Magazine in which she calls homeschooling a factory for racism, sexism, and isolationism. “Many homeschool precisely because they want to isolate their children from ideas and values central to public education and to our democracy. Many promote racial segregation and female subservience. Many question science. Many are determined to keep their children from exposure to views that might enable autonomous choice about their future lives,” she writes.

          Anyone even remotely acquainted with a homeschooler or his or her family can only conclude that Professor Bartholet has simply never met a single homeschooling family in her life, so false are her simplistic and inaccurate descriptions of them. This tragically typical elitist disconnect from average Americans leaves her piece open to multitudes of attack avenues from those armed with the truth, but I will restrict mine to those relevant to family restoration.

First, Professor Bartholet writes that “Homeschooling… violates children’s… right to be protected from potential child abuse,” presumably because public school teachers are mandatory reporters if they suspect a child is being abused in their home. Even in a hypothetical situation in which a homeschooled child is being abused, the actual homeschooling would not be at fault: the abusive parent himself would be. This is a simple mistake of logical reasoning that one would expect any Ivy League instructor not to fall prey to: because one abusive parent happens to homeschool does not mean every other good parent should be forced by the heavy hand of the government to send their children to public school. Professor Bartholet’s failure to understand this simple deduction is all the more troubling because she is the director of Harvard Law School’s child advocacy legal clinic.

          Second, most children are first exposed to pornography in middle school, by a peer, at the average age of 11.  The effects of pornography, arguably the greatest scourge of modern times, on family stability are universally considered nothing short of pulverizing. Anyone rooting for family restoration and flourishing should be rooting for an increase in homeschooling families. Here is a proper logical equation (take note Ivy Leaguers): if porn destroys families, and most kids experience porn for the first time in public school, it follows that homeschooling promotes family stability because it delays, and sometimes prevents altogether, a child’s first exposure to porn.  As a homeschooler until 9^th grade when I entered public school to be able to play high school sports, my testimony and that of literally every other homeschooler I have ever known (too many to count) proves the overpowering strength of this logic: all my public school peers were well acquainted with pornography by their freshman year of high school, but I and my homeschooled friends had not yet laid eyes on any form of it.

          I will conclude with a final anecdote from my own homeschooling experience. By the time I began my senior year of college at the Virginia Military Institute, three of the nine highest ranking cadets (students) in my class were former homeschoolers (either up to or through high school). At one of the very best undergraduate schools in Virginia and perhaps the most collectively challenging university in America, homeschoolers had far exceeded their per capita ratio within the top nine cadets.

There is no link between homeschooling and abuse, homeschooling families are more likely to be stable, and homeschoolers consistently outperform their public school peers. Parents have the right to direct the upbringing of their children, not the state, according to the United States Supreme Court; and with all this in mind, why wouldn’t parents with the means prefer to homeschool their children?