Photo by Jessica Lewis
In a recent interview and article, Elizabeth Bartholet recommends a presumptive ban on homeschooling because its practitioners are disproportionately conservative Christians, eager to shield their children from what they see as the pernicious influence of mainstream education:
A very large proportion of homeschooling parents are ideologically committed to isolating their children from the majority culture and indoctrinating them in views and values that are in serious conflict with that culture. Some believe that women should be subservient to men; others believe that race stamps some people as inferior to others. Many don’t believe in the scientific method, looking to the Bible instead as their source for understanding the world … As time went on, the conservative Christian wing became the clear majority of all homeschoolers. Estimates of the number of homeschoolers who are religious, or for whom religion is a primary reason for homeschooling, range from over half to 90% … These parents are committed to homeschooling largely because they reject mainstream, democratic culture and values and want to ensure that their children adopt their own particular religious and social views. … The nature of the homeschooling population presents dangers for children and society. It means that many of the children involved will not be prepared for participation in employment and other productive activities in the mainstream world. It ensures that many will grow up alienated from society, ignorant of views and values different from their parents, and limited in their capacity to choose their own futures.
Entirely missing from this picture is any notion of—or curiosity about—why homeschoolers are disproportionately conservative Christians. But there is an obvious reason why homeschooling has become increasingly popular in recent decades among the religious right: the educational establishment has become increasingly ideological and drifted further and further leftward. The views of these educators represent the same kind of rejection of “mainstream, democratic culture and values” that Bartholet attributes to the religious right.
Educators do not represent America. As of 2019, the political imbalances among teachers were startling:
Among English teachers, there are 97 Democrats for every three Republicans, with the proportion being even more one-sided among health teachers, with 99 Democrats for every one Republican … While there are slightly more Republicans among math and science teachers, among high school teachers overall, there are 87 Democrats for every 13 Republicans.
The most apparent explanation for this growing extremism is the radicalization of American teacher education programs, in which notions like white privilege and other concepts derived from Critical Race Theory and the Howard Zinn version of American history take center stage. The ten most frequently assigned authors at several representative American schools of education express political convictions that are left or far left (see here for a more thorough discussion of the radicalization of the education curriculum, though I would take issue with the author’s particular take on the vexed subject of cultural Marxism).
The leftward trend of the past several decades is part of a larger leftward lurch in academia, especially in the humanities. In 1984, the ratio of liberal to conservative university faculty members was roughly 1:1 (39% were left/liberal; 34% were right/conservative). Today that ratio is around 6:1 and the ratio of professors who donate to Democrats as compared to those who donate to Republicans is a whopping 95:1. At top liberal arts colleges, 78.2% of academic departments have either few or no Republicans.
Over the same period, liberals, particularly white liberals, have become increasingly unmoored from mainstream culture, as a well-researched 2019 Tablet article by Zach Goldberg documents. Pat Buchanan’s infamous declaration of a culture war on the floor of the 1992 Republican Convention shortly after the first mass wave of political correctness hit America in the late 1980s did not come out of nowhere. Pew surveys show that between 1987 and 2007, while America as a whole remained largely religious—with little change in respondents’ attitudes towards core questions about the importance of prayer or the existence of God (about 80% endorsed such views)—there was a growing political divide: in 1987, 71% of Republicans and 69% of Democrats embraced traditional religion, while, by 2007, those numbers were 79% and 62% respectively. The same surveys showed that those religious differences were correlated with an increasing divide on social issues, such as homosexuality and gender roles.
In recent years, such divides have become more apparent, as witnessed by the extent to which highly educated, wealthy, white progressives have distanced themselves from the rest of us. According to the Hidden Tribes report, an extensive compilation of survey data from 2018:
25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical … Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” … While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it. And while 87 percent who have never attended college think that political correctness has grown to be a problem, only 66 percent of those with a postgraduate degree share that sentiment … Among devoted conservatives, 97 percent believe that political correctness is a problem. Among traditional liberals, 61 percent do. Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a problem.
These “progressive activists”—50% of whom say they “never pray,” compared to 19% of the general population—are overwhelmingly likely to be among the educated elites that dictate, promulgate and implement dominant educational philosophies:
Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are.
On issues of race in particular, these wealthy white liberal elites have drifted significantly away from the mainstream in recent years. For example, 92% of “progressive activists” believe that Americans do not take racism seriously enough, a view shared by only 40% of Americans overall, and 60% believe that race should be considered in college admissions, a view held by only 15% of all Americans. While Americans as a whole are evenly divided as to the existence of white privilege, 99% of “progressive activists” believe in its existence—perhaps unsurprisingly, since “progressive activists” themselves tend to be both white and privileged.
Education is not insulated from the consequences of the prevalence of “progressive activists” in its ranks. The New York Times “1619 Project,” for example, reframes slavery and anti-black racism as the pivotal points of American history, by retelling the story of America’s founding from the vantage point of 1619, the year that the first slave ship docked. Despite multiple criticisms from historians, including one who helped fact-check the project, the New York Times has developed and implemented an educational curriculum built around its take on US history. Since the 1619 Project was unveiled in August 2019, the curriculum has been introduced to thousands of students, including K-12 and college students in all 50 states, and deployed on a “broad scale” in the school systems of Buffalo, Chicago, Washington D.C., Wilmington and Winston-Salem.
Given these growing disparities on core religious values and on fringe racial and pseudoscientific sexual ideologies, some progressive activist versions of which are now uncritically taught within the school system, is it any wonder that a disproportionate number of those eager to withdraw their children from school are religious conservatives? If public schools were to start teaching creationism and pseudoscientific racism, lots of secular left-wingers would undoubtedly start bailing out. We should avoid both scenarios.
There is a good argument against homeschooling, but it is not the one Elizabeth Bartholet advances. Disturbing statistics have revealed the extent of the average American’s ignorance of basic facts of history (41% of Americans did not know what Auschwitz was and more Americans could name Michael Jackson as the composer of “Billie Jean” than knew that the Bill of Rights is a set of amendments to the US constitution); science (26% of Americans think the sun orbits the Earth); mathematics; and many other branches of learning that might be taught in school and that should be taught to kids. Twenty-seven percent of Americans had not read even part of a book in the year preceding the 2019 survey, and, as of 2015, only 43% had read a work of literature in the previous year. The issue with homeschooling is obvious: how can we trust such people to teach their kids anything?
By attacking homeschoolers for their political and religious beliefs, while remaining blind to the extent to which schools are increasingly teaching leftist ideology from outside the American political mainstream, commentators like Bartholet prevent us from being able to make that simpler, better argument against homeschooling. We may have good reason not to trust average Americans to homeschool their kids, but the average American also has good reason to no longer trust the school system to discharge the task. The result is a no-win situation, in which Americans are increasingly fracturing into warring tribes without a common base of civic knowledge of the sort that is essential for a functioning democracy—and especially for a demographically diverse, pluralistic democracy in which citizens do not share an ethnicity, religion or other identity.
The only way that we can hope to fix this problem is by removing blatant ideology from education, so that all Americans can once again trust public schools to teach their kids the facts—and just the facts. This can never be accomplished completely. But, here as elsewhere, the perfect need not be the enemy of the good: the effort alone would be worth it.
19 comments
While I certainly would nor want public schools to indoctrinate kids into far-left cancel-culture “woke” ideology, such as the “white privilege” obsession anf the “Amerokka begin with the first African slaves imported in 1619” refrain, surely it’s not WRONG to teach a little basic decency? Is it really so terribly bad to tell kids that it’s not really very nice to hate Jews, Blacks, Asians, or Mexicans? Or that the ante-bellum Southern institution of slavery was not such a very good thing? Or that Martin Luther King has become a national hero for some good reasons? Should teachers simply let it go without comment if some kid makes an anti-Black or anti-Jewish remark in class? Or WOULD Mr. Zubatov wish to urge teachers to just ignore such things or just casually laugh them off as just healthy rambunctious juvenile high spirits?
Great comment by Boethius. The lockdowns have motivated parents to take a hard look at the indoctrination disseminated in Public school. With access to online learning tools, homeschooling is an excellent alternative to the BS promoted by radicalized teachers. If COVID-19 does anything to create a new normal, it will be a change in how we educate our kids. The control freaks did not think that out when they ordered wrongful lockdowns.
Elizabeth Bartholet is simply afraid that more children might escape from the indoctrination she supports. One doesn’t have to be a Christian to want to shield one’s children from the left-wing biases promoted by brainwashed ed school, unionized teachers who are largely in lockstep with the Democrat Party. The teachers being churned out these days are a reflection of K-12 indoctrination, undergraduate and ed school indoctrination by overwhelingly left-wing faculty, and union influences (visit the NEA or AFT web sites and examine their political positions that are all about growing government because bigger government will redound to higher teachers’ salaries and benefits). These teachers have been marinated in left-wing ideology so long they think it’s perfectly normal. My granddaughter’s SECOND GRADE teacher in the Guilford, CT public schools was taught that “oil is bad” because it causes global warming. She announced unapologetically on parents’ night orientation that she was an “activist”, as if that should have any relevance to her role as a teacher. Another parent told me that issues of race are introduced in science class. It is indeed ironic mention of God is banned in schools, yet teachers have no reservation about preaching a secular, left-wing ideology. If parents knew the truth, they would pull their children in massive numbers. Only the need for babysitting hold many back. The state-run schools have massively violated the public trust. None of this happened when I was in the 1950s and 60s. Not even close.
I used to be an ESL teacher at a Title I (majority low-income) elementary school. I am actually a conservative but have spent time outside of the US and generally like immigrants and other cultures. Anyway, my teacher training was not very good. The pedagogy was poor and did not prepare me adequately to teach ESL students in American public schools. It was also fairly biased in favor of Progressive views. It was not uncommon for me to feel discriminated against in the program. I did my best to tolerate it, knowing that it would only be for a short time – that I would get my degree and could then get out. Advocacy is one thing; denying other people a voice goes beyond advocacy. While in my teacher-trainer program, my views were generally unwelcome. In one class, my classmates were given credit on an assignment for writing our legislators in favor of DACA, wheras I opposed DACA and would not receive credit for espousing my views.I was given an alternate assignment that was much more difficult for me to fulfill than if I had been granted eqiuitable credit for being allowed to communicate my views. Instead, my views were basically not permitted. It was blatant viewpoint discrimination.
Later on, in the classroom – not at my first school, but at my second school – my evaluating administrator told me that I could not relate to my students because I was white. In essence, she was saying that because of my skin color, I could not do my job effectively. I was teaching French at that point, not ESL, and a certain number of my students were white. She said other things to me and about me that were extremely offensive – highly critical of my culture and character.
If I had known that she was going to treat me in such a manner, I never would have accepted the job. They hired me a month after the school year started. My students started the school year off with a sub for the first month. Management – both by HR and via admin at that school – seemed pretty bad, in my experience. Communication was poor. I eventually figured out that I was earning less than a sub per hour worked, and I was running high risk of ending up accumulating more expenses in healthcare from the stress than I was earning from the county, so I resigned.
Later, when I went to enroll my daughter for kindergarten in the same district – sadly, our own district – the kindergarten screening teacher treated my daughter and me worse than a son and mother of a different race and culture. She showed preferential treatment to the nonwhite son and mother, as opposed to my white daughter and me, and a white grandmother and grandson there for screening after us.
I got fed up, so I pulled my daughter last-minute and homeschooled her. My rising first-grader can now write in cursive and is beginning to learn multiplication. She reads at around a DRA 16. My dad has a Master’s in physics; we have three other family members who are engineers, including my husband; and I speak multiple languages and minored in Geology in college. We value a good education and will do our best to provide that for our daughter – hopefully without the Progressive indoctrination that has been taking over the education industry, except as a means of comparing differing viewpoints. I actually buy secular / “mainstream” public school textbooks, in the hopes of providing a decent education as well as opportunities to teach my daughter what Progressives believe, and why we don’t agree with them. So, I am applying my MEd – just in a completely different manner than I had originally intended. We are on our second year of homeschooling, and I hope to God that I’ll never have to look back – at least, so long as we are in a district that supports racism against whites like us.
do not be a SUCKER. this article is transparent bot BS – not about you guys. follow links, do your own research, but do not be a sucker.
It seems to me that it is an opinion piece by a human being who spent some time considering this issue. There is nothing wrong with that.
Yes, yes, but did any of you vote in your last school board election?
I did.
I’d like to second Shoshidge’s reply. Not Christian (or religious). Our school districts nearby do very poorly by all state metrics. Our private schools are all Christian. I thoroughly enjoy teaching my children to be critical thinking machines, they are always ahead on proficiency tests, and we talk about everything, including religions. I don’t know everything, which is why I have resources like The Well-Trained Mind, the spine of my program. The new homeschooling vibe you’re feeling may be caused by more than one set of circumstances.
As much as I despise the views of the identinarian left, and the fact they’re trying to the education as means of indoctrination the idea that this the reason conservative Xtians home school is laughable.
I thought most intelligent people knew correlation was causation.
We’ve home schooled our kids for three years now, and are as far from being conservative Christians as it’s possible to be.
I could be looking at it from a skewed angle, but it seems to me that the correlation between home schooling and extreme religiosity is lower than it used to be.
If anything is driving the rise in home schooling, it’s the trend towards more hands on parenting, and, more importantly, the increase in work-from-home options for parents as well as the availability of online teaching content and curricula, it’s just easier to do than it used to be thanks to the internet, regardless of your ideological leanings.
And while this pandemic has some parents counting the minutes until they can kick the little buggers out of the house again and have some peace and quiet, others are finding out that they enjoy it, the kids are thriving and most importantly, getting their classwork done in much less time, leaving more free time for other pursuits.
Both of my kids are two grades ahead in English and would be bored as hell in a conventional classroom.
Still, I know it’s not for everybody and I believe in the importance of a good public school system, but it’s time to end this stereotype of associating home schooling with religious fanaticism and science denial
There is more cultural, religious and political diversity among homeschoolers these days than there used to be. Just because someone is homeschooling, doesn’t mean that they are religious – or conservative – or of a given culture. Our family is mostly conservative, but we are only somewhat religious. We hold Master’s degrees in Physics (dad / grandfather), Engineering (husband / dad and sister / aunt) and Education (me / homeschooling mom). I majored in a non-romance language; minored in Geology; and used to have teaching endorsements in Middle School Math and Earth Science on my state’s teaching license – in addition to ESL and two languages. So, we value math, science and languages, among other things.
As for science, for what it’s worth, I am an old-Earth creationist, although I do not intend on teaching my daughter creationism when teaching her about the beginning of time / the Earth. My daughter will learn that the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, not about 6,000 years old – because that’s what I was taught as a Geology minor. We will discuss the religious aspect, but with the understanding that the concept of a period of time – such as a day – may be flexible – a period of darkness and then light, or a period of disorder and then order. As I recall, the Bible also used terms such as a millenium in such a manner as to indicate that the concept of time is likely flexible. This is why I can look a geologic history and the Bible, and reconcile the two on the issue of age of the Earth. Evolution, I admit: I’m not sure yet what to teach, or how; but seeing as how my daughter is only in first grade, I think I have time yet to research the topic and decide on a way of presenting the concept.
Perhaps my best course of action is to state that topics like these are somewhat controversial, and that the hallmark of a true scientist is to form conclusions based on current observations, yet always to be open to revising our understanding of the world, as new observations would challenge old assumptions.
I read a text on the same topic that I found interesting and that serves to corroborate and complement this
https://quillette.com/2020/05/23/the-fight-over-alternative-education/
One good side-effect of the coronavirus pandemic may well be that parents are now taking a much closer look at their children’s curriculum. If parents become aware of the elements that involve ideological indoctrination (like “mathematics acting as whiteness”) they can pushback against this as both inappropriate and a waste of time.
The ridiculous introduction of race theory into mathematics instruction in Seattle area schools is one reason I am glad I moved from that city in the mid-1980s. I earned my teaching certificate before this twaddle gained ascendancy in colleges of education. Some of the courses I took were fads that have since passed, but I cannot say the new ones are an improvement on educational taxonomies and Madalyn Hunter’s ITIP theory. I thought those a waste of time, but relatively harmless. These new theories that inject race into everything are not only false, they are actually detrimental to the learning process.
And to race relations – and the social development of our children.
I don’t support that. That’s why I pulled my daughter to homeschool her.
By the way, my daughter’s closest friends are African-American. They play together on a fairly regular basis, because we live on the same block. If anything, they play together more now because of COVID, whereas neighbor families were too buy with extra-curricular activities to hang out with us much before.
Thanks. Much useful data there, and a fine exposition of the problem. Do we have any data on outcomes of home-schooled kids?
By all academic standards, homeschooled children outperform their public schooled peers:
https://www.familyeducation.com/school/homeschooling-support/homeschooling-vs-public-school
Thanks. I know a few homeschooled kids and they seem to be doing very well.