You may not have seen the article in Harvard Magazine with the title “The Risks of Homeschooling” written by Erin O’Donnell. Risks to whom? Risks to the Messianic State. There can’t be any competition with the State and its total-control agenda by any other government, including the family, and the family is a government.

The following image went along with the article:

Two observations. When the article first appeared, the word “Arithmetic” was spelled as Arithmatic. So much for unschooled homeschoolers. It was later corrected.

In reality, the public-school children are the ones locked in their schools. They must pass through metal detectors. Some schools have armed guards. Have we forgotten school shootings? Sex abuse by teachers? High dropout rate? Drugs? Attack on religious freedom? Do they even have recess?

Public school kids are locked up from around 8 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon. Home-schoolers are usually done by noon giving them time to visit museums, engage in extra-curricular activities, specialize in particular areas of interest, take music lessons, play outside, gardening, building projects, join sports teams, get together with other home-school families, read at their leisure, interact with adults, and a whole lot more.

The author of the article uses the work of Elizabeth Bartholet who is Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of Harvard’s Law School’s Child Advocacy Program to outline what the homeschool risks are. The only risks are those that affect the educational establishment and the messianic State.

It’s obvious that the author didn’t do any research. Homeschooled children do just as well or even better than the national average. They have no problem getting into college and excelling. Even Harvard accepts homeschoolers.

Let me be clear, academic excellence and academic preparedness are not fundamental to Bartholet’s opposition to homeschooling. It’s all about control. It’s about the control of information based on a secular worldview. The State is Bartholet’s god, and she and her fellow academics are the high priests of the Statist religion. Rousas J. Rushdoony wrote about this decades ago in his book The Messianic Character in American Education (1963). Whoever controls the schools rules the world.

Rushdoony in the mid-1980s became prominent as an expert witness in homeschool cases. He was the primary witness in the most important of these cases, Leeper v. Arlington, a Texas case. In the cross-examination, he destroyed the hapless attorney who represented the Arlington Independent School District. The transcript is here. The court awarded settlement fees of about $700,000, or twice that in today’s purchasing power. The state appealed. The Texas Supreme Court voted 9 to 0 in favor of the plaintiffs. That ended the school districts’ harassment of homeschools in the state of Texas.

The author of the article says Bartholet “sees risks for children—and society—in homeschooling, and recommends a presumptive ban on the practice. Homeschooling, she says, not only violates children’s right to a “meaningful education” and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.”

Bartholet believes the national government should be the nation’s educator and people like her should decide what children should be taught. She is parroted some popular Statist goals:

  • “The State incarnates the Divine Idea upon earth” (Hegel).
  • “The State is the supreme power, ultimate and beyond repeal, absolutely independent” (Fichte).
  • “Everything for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State” (Mussolini).
  • “The State dominates the nation because it alone represents it” (Hitler).

Bartholet’s views are similar to a 1994 law review article entitled “Parents’ Religion and Children’s Welfare: Debunking the Doctrine of Parents’ Rights” (California Law Review 82:6, 1371). In the article, James D. Dwyer writes that “the fundamental civic relationship is not that between parents and children (the nuclear family) but between the individual and the state.”

“The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18? I think that’s dangerous,” Bartholet says. “I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.”

Did you catch the phrase, “essentially authoritarian control”? Who is seeking authoritarian control over the children? Bartholet and her Statist minions. The following comment was made on Facebook by Paul Terrell. It’s priceless:

So parents who are willing to make the sacrifices required to educate their own children WITH THEIR OWN MONEY are authoritarian, but those who support government schools with their compulsory attendance laws, truant officers, forced busing, and state-approved teachers and curriculum, all of which are funded by a coercive system of property taxation, are not. The mind reels.

In Bartholet’s recent article in the Arizona Law Review, “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection,” she “recommends a presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool.” ((Elizabeth Bartholet, “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection,” 62 Ariz. L. Rev. 1 (2020).))

What the State hates, Christians should love and use against the deification of the State and the abuse of us and our children.