Utterly Meaningless

I penned this response to CS Monitor and emailed it to them via their website:

Regarding your piece entitled, “Homeschoolers keep the faith”, may I please remind you that if anyone has a captive audience that is being “indoctrinated”, it is the public school system. The children attending public school are “indoctrinated” with liberal and progressive agendas every day. They are also graded based on their compliance with those ideologies.
I would also like to remind the writer that not all homeschoolers subscribe to “Christian Evangelical” ideologies. Homeschooling families are diverse, and comprise every aspect of the political and cultural spectrum. What these families are teaching their children is that democracy works and that it is important to be involved in the political process. This is not something that is taught in a one semester course on Civics, it is lived every day in a homeschool family. I am willing to bet that homeschooling children are much more aware of their rights under the law as well as what is happening in government, than their public school counterparts, many of whom do not bother to register to vote when they become 18.

Another angle to this is the oft-heard position that we need to “take politics out of” something. I recently saw this argument in an op-ed column arguing for a ten-year term for the CIA director; by removing the president’s discretion to fire the director, it will “take the politics out of” the CIA. What this really means is that bureaucrats, not elected officials, will make decisions for people. That certainly holds for schools. Bureaucrats always view themselves as “non-political” and “non-ideological”.

But Daryl, all you homeschool parents aren’t making your six-year-olds read “King & King”. It’s a real problem.

“But critics are troubled by the idea of taking an organization – the HSLDA – that purports to support all homeschoolers and making it the feeder system for an evangelical Christian political network.”

Uhhh…didn’t you just say…

“Still, the public face of homeschooling is distinctly white, upper-middle-class, evangelical Christian.”

You can’t label homeschoolers as distinctly evangelical Christian and then be surprised when they act like one.

Where’s the love, the diversity, the open-mindedness, the tolerance?