20 Apr 2020

Harvard Law Child Advocacy Prof Wants Home Schooling Banned

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Elizabeth Bartholet moderates a panel discussion. Elizabeth Bartholet is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Child Advocacy Program (CAP), which she founded in the fall of 2004. She teaches civil rights and family law, specializing in child welfare, adoption, and reproductive technology. Before joining the Harvard Faculty, she was engaged in civil rights and public interest work, first with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and later as founder and director of the Legal Action Center, a non-profit organization in New York City focused on criminal justice and substance abuse issues. She is the author of many publications on child welfare.

Bartholet is a classic villain right out of an Ayn Rand novel. She recognizes the alarming possibility that kids might grow up Christian, or worse: Republican via parental influence. If kids are home-schooled that means they will miss out on crucial brain-washing and indoctrination at the hands of liberal teachers.

Harvard Magazine:

Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, sees risks for children—and society—in homeschooling, and recommends a presumptive ban on the practice. Homeschooling, she says, not only violates children’s right to a “meaningful education” and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.

“We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling,” Bartholet asserts. All 50 states have laws that make education compulsory, and state constitutions ensure a right to education, “but if you look at the legal regime governing homeschooling, there are very few requirements that parents do anything.” Even apparent requirements such as submitting curricula, or providing evidence that teaching and learning are taking place, she says, aren’t necessarily enforced. Only about a dozen states have rules about the level of education needed by parents who homeschool, she adds. “That means, effectively, that people can homeschool who’ve never gone to school themselves, who don’t read or write themselves.” In another handful of states, parents are not required to register their children as homeschooled; they can simply keep their kids at home. …

She views the absence of regulations ensuring that homeschooled children receive a meaningful education equivalent to that required in public schools as a threat to U.S. democracy. “From the beginning of compulsory education in this country, we have thought of the government as having some right to educate children so that they become active, productive participants in the larger society,” she says. This involves in part giving children the knowledge to eventually get jobs and support themselves. “But it’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints,” she says, noting that European countries such as Germany ban homeschooling entirely and that countries such as France require home visits and annual tests.

In the United States, Bartholet says, state legislators have been hesitant to restrict the practice because of the Home Schooling Legal Defense Association, a conservative Christian homeschool advocacy group, which she describes as small, well-organized, and “overwhelmingly powerful politically.” During the last 30 years, activists have worked to dismantle many states’ homeschooling restrictions and have opposed new regulatory efforts. “There’s really no organized political opposition, so they basically get their way,” Bartholet says. A central tenet of this lobby is that parents have absolute rights that prevent the state from intervening to try to safeguard the child’s right to education and protection.

Bartholet maintains that parents should have “very significant rights to raise their children with the beliefs and religious convictions that the parents hold.” But requiring children to attend schools outside the home for six or seven hours a day, she argues, does not unduly limit parents’ influence on a child’s views and ideas. “The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18? I think that’s dangerous,” Bartholet says. “I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.”

She concedes that in some situations, homeschooling may be justified and effective. “No doubt there are some parents who are motivated and capable of giving an education that’s of a higher quality and as broad in scope as what’s happening in the public school,” she says. But Bartholet believes that if parents want permission to opt out of schools, the burden of proving that their case is justified should fall on parents.

“I think an overwhelming majority of legislators and American people, if they looked at the situation,” Bartholet says, “would conclude that something ought to be done.”

RTWT

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4 Feedbacks on "Harvard Law Child Advocacy Prof Wants Home Schooling Banned"

Boligat

So, she doesn’t like parents having total control over their kids. I wonder if she wants parents to be held responsible if their kids are left on their own and then go off the deep end vandalizing the neighborhood.

Ms. Bartholet is the poster child for all the reasons parents need to home school.

The states would be better off developing three tests that they would want each child to be able to pass. One to graduate from elementary (8th grade), one to graduate from high school and one college entrance exam to get into all public colleges and universities in that state. At every level the students should be able to read at grade level, write a coherent paragraph with no spelling errors, and do basic arithmetic without the use of a calculator. The college prep test should include some algebra and an extensive grasp of history. The high school should also include an understanding of the U.S. Constitution and a comparison of different economic systems.

At no point should the students be allowed to pass if they can’t get the right answer even if they can show how they got what they got.

The tests can be taken whenever and can be retaken whenever (multiple versions). The tests, especially for college entrance, should be looooooong and haaaaaaard, preferable lasting over several days.

Oh, yes, no more remedial classes should be offered at the college level.

The state should not mandate how anything is to be taught, nor in what order. Last of all the scores (without names) for each district should be posted in the newspaper and online compared with all other districts in the state.

BYW, the GED and ACT and SAT exams are not adequate for what I have in mind.



Fusil Darne

Locally, the homeschooled kids test at a level far above their public schooled peers, and only approached by their private school peers. How does this idiot negate that fact?



Bettyann Legans

I homeschooled my five children in the 80s and early 90s. They consistently tested in the 98 percentile throughout. Today they are ALL in sound marriages with their own children, ALL went on to college, and all 5 if them are in professions that earn them 100k + a year. Now here is the kicker: I am a HS graduate only and was a single mother by the time the oldest was 10. Public school is a brain washing project led by globalists who want the family and all things solid and good for human lives like stable hetero marriages ended so they can control a depressed people. But we know how this story ends, and people like Bartholet LOSE.



Seattle Sam



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