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Home-schoolers Under Fire from Darwinists
Fox News has a story up tonight from the Associated Press about disenfranchised home-schoolers. One look at the story tells you it’s a hit piece designed to lash out at Christians for dominating the home-school market. The story quotes a parent (ironically named “Mule”) whose kid got all bent out of shape because she read a chapter that disputed Darwinism.
From the piece:
“The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians,” said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. “Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program.”
Those who don’t, however, often feel isolated and frustrated from trying to find a textbook that fits their beliefs.
Funny. I have never read an AP piece about how others should cry for Christians who are subjected to-and therefore disenfranchised by-Darwin’s theory of evolution in public school. The piece does not bother to wonder why 1.5 million kids are being home-schooled in the first place. Must not be relevant that many, if not most, of the Christians home-schooling their children are doing so precisely because of the Darwinist slant in public education. Then there is the fact that many public schools just stink like three day old fish.
It ends with a story about a home-schooled kid who is not afraid to embark on a career in marine biology in spite of the field’s evolutionary bent. Mom even gets in an elbow at public school:
Nice shot, mom.
All the arguments in favor of a public provision of primary education prove to be unfounded and/or incorrect. The failure of the state to provide a high quality service to all (its explicit goal) has rendered public primary education illegitimate; and the immeasurable waste of resources and rejection of consumer desires has left public education borderline immoral. As well, if an educated citizenry is to be considered necessary for the operation of the republican government, then it is an inexcusable conflict of interest when elected officials are the ones in charge of providing that education. Furthermore, the argument of externalities and nonexcludability fails to buttress the case for socialist education. The only ethical, reasonable system for the provision of primary education is the free market.
Andrew Young and Walter Block, Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar, Endowed Chair of Economics Loyola University.
-This is just the concluding paragraph of an entire article about the many problems and inconsistencies of a state-run government. That includes the following:
The individuals entrenched in positions of power in the state are those with control over what children are taught concerning history, government, economics, and so forth.
The result is a citizenry educated by operators of the state on how to choose the operators of the state!
So, as a mother who is finishing her 3rd year of home schooling her child. I really need to reply.
First I am a member of a local home school support group and Coop the majority of this group is non Christian and they are a group of 1500 families in just the Littleton area. The biggest trend in home schooling stats right now are non Christians pulling thier kids out of school because of a lack in something thier child needs that the public school are unable or unwilling to provide. To say that home schooling is a Christian thing is totally wrong and shows a huge lack in the reporters research. Also, HSLDA is a Christian legal defense association for the rights of home schoolers, while there are probably non Christians as members. Most of the people I know are NOT members because of the Christian emphasis. There is no law that states these topics have to be taught. Parents do have the choice to skip them.
Second, the shear number of companies out there that provide curriculum from a Christian point of view are overwhelming. However most of (not all) the ones I have looked at still have the typical public school views in them. With the idea that these kids need to know what is being taught in the public sector so that they know how to defend it.
Third, anyone who beleives that home schoolers are under socialized and will never make it the real world or even in college. Need to drag themselves out of the 1970′s. All the new stats (national surveys done in the past 10 year and as resently as 2009) show that home schoolers have better grades and better understanding and recall of the materials that they learned. They have higher standarized test scores as well as SAT and ACT test scores. And colleges/universities around the world have stated that most home schooled kids are better prepared for thier higher education studies.
The whole issue of Darwin is nothing more than an attempt to slam Christians and to portray home schoolers as a group of crazy sheltered people. It drives me nuts when these stories are put out there without actual facts. My next stop will be to find this article and start making comments on it too.
Finally, the stat that 1.5 million kids are home schooled is an uneducated guess. That is the number of kids whose parents are in a situtation that they HAVE to report to the “authorities” what they are doing with their kids. But there is a huge population of kids who have never been in a formal school setting and therefore do not need to report to any “authority”. There are also a large group of kids that are being home schooled under the independent school law. They are registered with an independent school, but all that independent school does is keep records for each child. All the schooling is done at home by the parents. All of these groups are actually home schooling but will never show up in the system and therefore the actual number of home schoolers is much much bigger than the 1.5 million and at this point can not be accurately counted. Then add to that number to amount of kids who are publically counted as enrolled in private schools and the number of kids who are NOT in public schools is is huge. Which adds to the question, why are there so many kids NOT in the public school setting. There must be something wrong.
RevNev, I am surprised that you commented on it. I have never been sure of how you feel about this topic or even the fact that we home school in our family. I will appoligize if I have offended anyone, but this is one of my soap boxes.
Rev Nev Reply:
March 26th, 2010 at 6:02 AM
Hey Shauna! Thanks for putting in your two cents on this. I commented because it is another example of liberal bias against Christians. I did not know, perhaps had no way of knowing, that the trend is non-Christian parents pulling their kids out of failing public schools. That’s interesting to me. Still, those parents are better served by finding material that suits their worldview than criticizing Christian material.