NY Times Declares War on Homeschooling

Allowing parents to educate their own children at home puts them at risk of all sorts of problems and abuses without massive state “oversight,” declared an anti-homeschooling activist this week in the establishment mouthpiece of record. Home education is now firmly in the crosshairs of the educational totalitarians amid a push to create a police state.

The December 14 New York Times piece, headlined Home-Schooled Kids Are Not All Right, calls for massive new government controls over homeschool families. It comes just weeks after the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a report demanding such regulation worldwide under the guise of “human rights.”

The Times opinion essay was written by Stefan Merrill Block, who was promoting his forthcoming memoir “Homeschooled.” It uses an emotionally charged memoir of an unconventional and harmful home-schooling experience — his mom was extremely weird — to argue for sweeping federal oversight of all home education, nationwide.

The author recasts parental discretion and even worldview formation as abusive. “The choice to isolate a child from peers and outsiders seems to me plainly abusive,” says Block. “I would also characterize as abuse a parent’s decision to… indoctrinate a child into one mind-set or ideology without the possibility of other perspectives.”

Home education, family autonomy, and parental rights, meanwhile, are portrayed as a dangerous failure of the state to oversee everything. “Our home-school had fallen into a newly legislated invisible space, where a child could easily vanish from public view,” continued Block. “The country has passively endorsed a nationwide system of blind spots.”

Block portrays the state as the ultimate authority, arguing that parents cannot be trusted with their children absent draconian government supervision. He calls for “an authority outside the home” to protect children from their parents. And he makes the case that all decent people would want benevolent bureaucrats checking in on families.

The call for unconstitutional national restrictions, meanwhile, is clear and unambiguous. “To truly protect home-schooled children, we must put in place common-sense laws nationwide,” Block argues. “A good starting point would be… requiring parents to register their home-schooled child with the state.”

To avoid sounding silly as millions of highly educated homeschooled graduates make their mark on the world, Block acknowledges “most home-schooling parents do not abuse or neglect their children.” Still, he repeatedly portrays parental authority itself — particularly when exercised outside state control — as inherently dangerous, abusive, and suspect.

Critics lambasted the piece and the arguments made in it. Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), is the top researcher and academic focused on home education in the world. After reading the Times opinion piece, he systematically dismantled the arguments in response to questions from The Newman Report.

“Stefan Merrill Block’s opinion is an anecdotal story meant to tug at emotional heart strings for philosophical and political purposes,” explained Dr. Ray, who has studied home education for decades. “He wants the government to control private homeschool education with hopes that it will indoctrinate students in his worldview and reduce harm by parents to zero.”

Of course, Block did not provide any empirical evidence to show there is a significant problem for the government to address. Instead, his argument “operates from the philosophical assumption that children belong to the state and if only the state could intervene in all families’ lives, then all children would be safe from any alleged or real harm,” Ray said.

“All parents are assumed guilty until they provide evidence that they are not,” he continued. “Block wants to reverse American law and liberty so that parents and families are guilty until they prove themselves innocent.” On top of that, government schools were never created to be social workers or police agencies, but allegedly to educate, Ray added, further undermining Block’s argument.

Responding to Block’s claim that everyone should support his ideas, Dr. Ray noted that America has always operated on the notion that parents are to be trusted unless and until shown otherwise. Only if a parent harms a child is the state allowed to intervene. “We do not begin by invading the privacy of every home and family and put the burden of proof on them,” he said.

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