The most recent issue of Harvard Magazine features an article titled, “The Risks of Homeschooling,” illustrated with a picture of a forlorn-looking child looking out of the barred windows of a house made of books (“Reading,” “Writing,” “Arithmetic,” and “Bible”) at the children happily playing outside. Offering a foretaste of Harvard’s upcoming Homeschooling Summit, an invitation-only event featuring a lineup of speakers who are openly hostile toward homeschooling, the article is a dishonest and alarmist attack on homeschooling.
Harvard Magazine draws on the research of law professor, Elizabeth Bartholet, who is organizing Harvard’s homeschool summit, and anecdotal evidence from Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, which describes her experience growing up in an isolated, survivalist Mormon family. Bartholet asserts that Westover’s experience should not be viewed as an isolated case, but a failure inherent to homeschooling. The article then claims that up to 90% of homeschool parents are "extreme religious ideologues" who question science, promote female subservience, and embrace white supremacy. None of the research cited actually demonstrates that any significant amount of homeschoolers hold to these views. Instead, the research shows that between ⅔ and ¾ of homeschool families are Christian and that up to 90% of homeschoolers are religious. To conclude based on that information that up to 90% of homeschoolers are racist, misogynistic, anti-science religious ideologues is not only a dishonest distortion of the data but also demonstrates an extreme hostility toward religion.
What Harvard’s article fails to point out is that 80% of homeschool parents listed concerns about school environment and 61% mentioned a failure to thrive academically in public schools as reasons for homeschooling. Other reasons for homeschooling listed in Bartholet’s findings but not even mentioned in the article include a desire to protect their child from bullying, as well as race-based and disability-based discrimination.
The choice to gloss over these findings reveals a biased double-standard. That parents have chosen remove their children from a public school because they have encountered bullying, racism, ableism, or educational neglect is not treated as a critique of public schools, nor are these problems viewed as being in any way indicative of a systemic problem in the public schools, but as an anomaly hardly worthy of mention. Abuse and academic neglect in a homeschooling context, however, is assumed to be the norm, even while using as evidence a story that is clearly an extreme instance.
The hostility toward families that choose not to send their children to public schools, and particularly toward families who value religious education is troubling, and suggests that the upcoming summit could have implications, not just for homeschoolers, but for school choice in general, especially where religious-based education is involved. Bartholet argues that the burden ought to be on the parents to prove that they should be to opt out of public schooling. In reality, the burden of proof ought to lie with those who assert that parents should not have the right to determine what education is best for their children.
