ANOTHER ONE FOR ROB REICH
Jill emailed me this Op/Ed with the comment “This one is ugly.” She’s right:
It’s evident that the vast majority who teach their offspring in front of the television do so because they don’t want their children to be subjected to such dangerous doctrines as evolution, abortion, global warming, equal rights and other ideas abhorrent to the evangelical mantra…
There has always been something decidedly elitist and anti-democratic in home schooling. It smacks of a belief that privileged children should not have to associate with the other kids in the neighborhood and that by staying home, they would not be subjected to the leavening effect of democracy.
Moreover, it is apparent from the cries of the far right that there has been a specific policy in home schooling — to teach only the ideas acceptable to ideologues who fear the contaminating influence of what is commonly known as a liberal education.
Yes, we’re all elitist evolution-denying, anti-choice, global-warming skeptics who are against equal rights and democracy. And we all teach our kids to worship Bill O’Reilly. Pegged, they have us.
The piece would have been much more effective if they hadn’t out of whole cloth generated the factoid that the “vast majority” of homeschoolers are fundamentalist wackos. Yes, HSLDA has an agenda. But HSLDA and James Dobson are not the sum total of CA homeschoolers. I’d bet there are more than a few, perhaps even the majority, who are “evolved homeschoolers.”
I do have one final question. What happened to ethical servility? I was sure they’d throw that one in by the end of the piece. Perhaps it was too “academic” for the Times? Or has Callan lost his cachet?
One Response to “ANOTHER ONE FOR ROB REICH”
 Comment by Nance Confer March 15th, 2008 at 8:50 am |
Well, it reads like the author didn’t actually do any research so, if he didn’t already know about the big “ethical servility” problem, he couldn’t include it. It’s not easy to be completely accurate or even complete when you are just pulling stuff out of your ass. Nance |