Michael Farris of HSLDA is writing a new article and put a sneak preview of it, a small section, up on Facebook. In that way I became acquainted with a totalitarian trend in our law schools. (A friend recently said to me that he would have thought that law school was the last bastion of apolitical objectivity in the academic realm. I'm afraid somewhat bitter laughter is appropriate there.)
Catherine J. Ross, Professor of Law at George Washington University, has written an article entitled "Fundamentalist Challenges to Core Democratic Values: Exit and Homeschooling." It's part of a journal symposium with the ominous title "Families, Fundamentalism, and the First Amendment." I haven't yet obtained a copy of Ross's entire article, but this is the blurb at Lexis. (Yes, it really does cut off just there.)
This Essay explores the choice many traditionalist Christian parents (both fundamentalist and evangelical) make to leave public schools in order to teach their children at home, thus in most instances escaping meaningful oversight. I am not primarily concerned here with the quality of academic achievement in the core curricular areas among homeschoolers, which has been the subject of much heated debate. Instead, my comments focus on civic education in the broadest sense, which I define primarily as exposure to the constitutional norm of tolerance. I shall argue that the growing reliance on homeschooling comes into direct conflict with assuring that children are exposed to such constitutional values.I begin with a brief social and legal history of homeschooling in the United States during the twentieth century and then discuss the dominance of religiously motivated parents among homeschoolers in contemporary America. Section II shows that homeschoolers make broad claims for exemption from state oversight that are not warranted by the constitutional doctrine on which they rely. In Section III, I argue that the state's interest in educating children for life in a pluralist democracy trumps any asserted parental liberty interest in controlling their children's education. Finally, in Section IV, I argue that where parents do not live together and share legal custody of their children, the state should articulate a preference for formal schooling over homeschooling when the parents disagree. I urge states to engage in far more stringent oversight and regulation of homeschooling than exists in ...
Sounds charming, doesn't it?
Here is the further money quote that Farris cited:
Many liberal political theorists argue, however, that there are limits to tolerance. In order for the norm of tolerance to survive across generations, society need not and should not tolerate the inculcation of absolutist views that undermine toleration of difference. Respect for difference should not be confused with approval for approaches that would splinter us into countless warring groups. Hence an argument that tolerance for diverse views and values is a foundational principle does not conflict with the notion that the state can and should limit the ability of intolerant homeschoolers to inculcate hostility to difference in their children—at least during the portion of the day they claim to devote to satisfying the compulsory schooling requirement.
Is that clear enough, you intolerant bigots?
By the way, based on this article by one Robert Reich, I conclude that "exit" is a term of art which refers to kids' growing up to disagree fundamentally with their parents, especially on matters of religion. Liberal "theorists" seem to like to use it because it sounds like a technical psychological health word that refers to an important rite of passage and because it makes religious or conservative parents sound like they want to keep their children chained up in a dungeon somewhere. You know, some parents honor-kill their children. Some pray for them and are heartbroken if they leave the faith. Some home school or send them to religious schools to try to prevent "exit." It's all part of that fundamentalist plot to keep Autonomous Individuals from believing what we, the Supermen, want them to believe. From the regime we Supermen want to create, there is, of course, no exit.
It all reminds me quite a bit of some citations in this article, which has been around for a while and which all home schoolers should read.
What it comes to is this: Having failed to show that home schoolers aren't doing a good job academically, having failed to show that home schooled children turn out incapable of tying their shoes and otherwise living in "the real world," liberals are taking off the velvet glove to reveal the iron fist. The bottom line is just simply that they dislike home schooling for the very reason that a great many home schoolers like it, namely, that it permits parents to opt out of the leftist ideology in which leftist ideologues wish to indoctrinate all children. How dare we? So now leftist ideology is just going to be defined as "core values for democracy," and on that basis parents will be told that they can't teach anything contrary to this religion in their home schooling program.
Occasionally when some avant garde academic publishes something outrageous, there's a temptation to say, grimly, "Well, at least they haven't gotten around to legislating that."
No? Actually, in Canada, they very nearly have. Let me introduce you to Bill 2 in Alberta, which was just recently and possibly only temporarily defeated. Specifically, let me introduce you to some remarks made about the bill by Donna McColl, a representative for the education minister's office:
"Whatever the nature of schooling – homeschool, private school, Catholic school – we do not tolerate disrespect for differences,” Donna McColl, Lukaszuk’s assistant director of communications, told LifeSiteNews on Wednesday evening.“You can affirm the family’s ideology in your family life, you just can’t do it as part of your educational study and instruction,” she added.
According to McColl, Christian homeschooling families can continue to impart Biblical teachings on homosexuality in their homes, “as long as it’s not part of their academic program of studies and instructional materials.”“What they want to do about their ideology elsewhere, that’s their family business. But a fundamental nature of our society is to respect diversity,” she added.
Pressed about what the precise distinction is between homeschoolers’ instruction and their family life, McColl said the question involved “real nuances” and she would have to get back with specifics.
But in a second interview Wednesday evening, McColl said the government “won’t speculate” about particular examples, and explained that she had not yet gotten a “straight answer” on what exactly constitutes “disrespect.” She did say that families “can’t be hatemongering, if you will.”
Sounds like she'd been reading Ross, doesn't it? In fact, the resemblance between McColl's comments and Ross's prescription is so striking that I'm inclined to say it isn't a coincidence. That doesn't actually need to mean that McColl read Ross's article. What it could mean is that this sort of talk is much, much more common than the rest of us realized in a certain academic milieu, and that McColl and Ross are both either products of or part of that milieu and are just telling us what the liberal elite has in mind for us as the new normal.
Note that Ross's article and the near-passage of Bill 2 are mutually corrective of certain tendencies to complacency. On the one hand, when anything crazy comes out of Canada, American lefties who want to cry, "Peace, peace" (lulling us crazy conservatives into silence until they're ready to snap the trap shut) will tell us that everything is different in the United States and that nothing that happens in Canada is relevant. To that, Ross's article is an important corrective, because she is writing specifically and explicitly in an American legal context and in an American law journal.
On the other hand, as already noted, the actual existence of Bill 2 and of McColl's remarks thereupon shows us that this totalitarian proposal is no mere paper tiger. Real legislation is being drawn up to put it into effect. We can hope that First Amendment challenges in the United States would stave off any such legislation, but we cannot be sure of that. Obviously, the law professors are working hard to find ways around that.
Confirming both of these points is this case in New Hampshire, in which a judge adjudicating a parental dispute ordered a girl out of home schooling and into public schooling specifically on the grounds that her views reflected her mother's views too closely. Note too how this dovetails with Ross's prescription that the courts use the opportunity to interfere in education provided by divorce cases to force children into public schooling. The broad power of courts in divorce situations, a power created by dispute between parents, to micromanage children's lives and education for the "best interests of the child" places such cases largely outside the ambit of the First Amendment.
What we can be sure of is that direct regulation of home school content to enforce "tolerance" is a goal of a not-inconsiderable slice of the left-wing intelligentsia and that it will come to the United States as soon as they are able to make it happen.
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
Update: Thanks to a reader who has sent a link to an electronic copy of Ross's entire article. It's a peach.
Comments (28)
Your friend doesn't subscribe to any law reviews, does he?
This is not an originally idea of this Ross lady (at least not in this article). The idea of exerting some form of Gramscian control over the content of home schooling has been percolating around the academy for a few years. And if you can think of a wacky statist idea, you bet you can find a law professor willing to recommend it in a law review article.
Incidentally, for what looks like it might be a response, in part, to Ross's article, see 9 Ave Maria L. Rev. 123.
Ross's article appears to have been presented as part of a symposium on "religious fundamentalism and families in the U.S." See 18 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 883.
Posted by Titus | April 9, 2012 6:50 PM
Yep, I said that about the symposium. I give the title in the main post. Interested to see the Ave Maria response.
I was particularly struck by the strong resemblance between what Ross wrote and what McColl then said about a real law that came very close to passage. Essentially: To the extent that your home schooling is defined as real schooling, we will require you to make an entirely artificial distinction between what you teach "in school" and what you teach your children in "family time." During your "in school" time you must pretend that you are a liberal, must teach the liberal ideology we dictate, even on extremely controversial matters such as homosexual acts, and must refrain from teaching anything that contradicts that ideology. Thus we assert our prerogative to use all schooling of the young as a vehicle for left-wing indoctrination, and even if the parent himself is doing the schooling, he must become an agent of that indoctrination.
Now, this is so extreme that one might think no one would ever actually try to put it into legislation. But Alberta almost did, and McColl was not unclear about what it meant for home schoolers.
Posted by Lydia | April 9, 2012 7:07 PM
Addendum: I did read in one article about Alberta's bill that parents (this included parents of children in bricks-and-mortar schools) might be allowed to "opt out" of at least programs that actively promoted homosexuality. (Of course, when the comprehensive incorporation of celebration of homosexuality throughout the entire curriculum, as is happening in multiple venues including England and California, is carried out, this would be functionally impossible.) What this apparently would mean for home schoolers, bizarrely, was that they would be forced to _develop_ a program that affirmed homosexuality and then would opt their children out of the program they had developed! However, McColl's remarks also made it clear that they would be violating the law if they taught anything during "school time" contrary to the homosexual agenda! "They can't be hate-mongering, if you will."
Posted by Lydia | April 9, 2012 7:15 PM
Well "tolerance" is the new "common good". They're slowly chipping away at all we hold dear. I know I sound like a broken record but I'm going to say it anyway... the answer is to get the government OUT of education. (At least the federal government - and maybe the state governments too. I could get on-board with county government sponsored schools.)
Posted by Chucky Darwin | April 9, 2012 7:16 PM
Well, Chucky, the whole point is that our leftist friends are determined to get the government *even more* into education. That's what the whole post is about.
Posted by Lydia | April 9, 2012 8:56 PM
It is very important to push homeschooling growth as rapidly as possible. This sort of academy rot occurs over the scope of decades---someone once said something to the effect that Harvard 1965 = America 2000.
Homeschooling is growing exponentially and it is a massive threat to the existing power structure. A few more doublings and it should become politically (and militarily) unassailable. It's a race and the stakes are high. Even far left secularist homeschooling should be vigorously encouraged.
Posted by Jehu | April 9, 2012 9:47 PM
Many millions of children would have to be homeschooled by "religiously motivated parents" before the liberal "norm of tolerance", of which the worship is a pernicious cult, is likely to be successfully countered by values based on Christian ideals.
I didn't know that "exposure to the constitutional norm of tolerance" is an imperative in the education of American children. In any case, the concept of tolerance is so elastic, how is it limited as a constitutional norm?
As Chesterton observed, tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.
Posted by Alex | April 10, 2012 3:58 AM
One thing I found irritating in the article is the author's continuous use of words like "constitutional" to describe things that are purely ideological, and for that matter recent. The whole article simply takes for granted that leftism is the formal, official political orthodoxy of the United States of America as expressed (somehow, somewhere) in the Constitution, without ever acknowledging that most people don't agree. It assumes as politically normative the very thing that his policy recommendations seek to accomplish, without ever ceding that this would be a radical advance for a peculiar notion of what America actually is.
Posted by Sage | April 10, 2012 8:04 AM
In my experience, women tend to be the most vitriolic opponents of home schooling. Men tend to be dubious about benefits, but the only people I've encountered that speak in such stark terms about the need to crush individual freedom on this matter are women. It's another reminder of our need to vigilant against what John Adams called "the tyranny of the petticoat."
Posted by Mike T | April 10, 2012 8:12 AM
Mike, maybe you should read the article by Rob Reich, linked in the post. Also, a number of the totalitarians against parents cited in the First Things article that I also link are men. The education minister of Alberta, for whom Donna McColl is a representative, is male.
Sage, excellent point. "Constitutional," really? As a matter of fact, Ross wants to limit parents' own freedom of religion by demanding that they teach their children things against their own deeply held beliefs, which has pretty serious constitutional problems in itself.
Posted by Lydia | April 10, 2012 9:27 AM
Obviously, men are a big part of the problem as well. I recognized that in my comment. What I pointed out was that there is a demonstrable tendency that anyone who observes socio-political patterns can see that women tend to be the more enthusiastic, even zealous, gender toward liberal despotism. John Lott has done some interesting statistical work which shows that there is a recognizable pattern of increasing totalitarianism over each generation since women got the right to vote.
It's far more than that if you consider the various abuses that students actually suffer at the public schools. There are numerous ways in which the liberal state absolutely fails even its own mission, not the least of which is that most public schools have a Lord of the Fliesesque socialization pattern which is a miserable failure at creating adults. Home schooled kids seem "poorly socialized" only because they are prone to behaving like actual adults at earlier ages because their primary socialization comes from adults, not their peers.
Even liberals have very good reasons to pull out of the public schools. Socialization aside, you have the fact that public school kids are routinely treated like a class of quasi-criminals with regard to prison-style lockdowns, random searches of property, etc. Then there's the zero tolerance policies which formally declare the victim morally indistinguishable from his or her aggressor. The fact is that modern public schools do things to children which are morally offensive to anyone who cares about raising a child who is capable of being more than a passive drone indoctrinated to give blind obedience to authority and meekly take whatever comes their way.
Posted by Mike T | April 10, 2012 10:18 AM
The *educational establishment* is against home education. Men, women, no matter -- if they are involved in public education, they are more than likely to be vitriolically against home education (with a few refreshing exceptions). Even my colleagues at the college level, in a Christian college with one-third home educated students, are prone to assume that a student giving them hassles has been home educated before asking to find out -- and despite the clear fact that troubles come no more from the home educated than from the public or private educated. We *do* have a subset of home educated students who feel entitled and act arrogantly; sadly, the numbers of these are increasing. And there's another subset who learn lots of facts and never get around to making connections and applications, nor can they write a thoughtful paragraph or two. But these are certainly no more than the percentage of public educated students with the same problems, and at least the home educated students have not been thoroughly indoctrinated in liberal dogma.
This issue you've described doesn't surprise me, Lydia; those "in charge" are desperate to keep control and will keep looking for ways to do so. This is the worst I've heard in a while; it probably wouldn't fly right now, but the more subtle criticisms and control attempts will gradually erode resistance until this just seems like a logical, clear step to take.
God have mercy.
Posted by Beth Impson | April 10, 2012 10:22 AM
Ross is pretty clever, in a bad way. Her suggestion of a presumption for public schooling in divorce cases is a smart incremental step backwards in the direction of the general disapproval of home schooling that used to be enshrined in state laws. She even refers to the case of Amanda in New Hampshire which I mention in the main post. Ross's idea is approximately this: It was rather traumatic for the court and social workers to examine Amanda's personal beliefs and those of her mother and to conclude that she was reflecting her mother's beliefs "too much" and that this was getting in the way of her relationship with her father (because he was non-Christian and anti-home schooling). Now, if only the legislature had created in statutory law a presumption that where one parent wants bricks-n-mortar or even per se public schooling and the other wants home schooling, the public schooling will prevail and be ordered by the court, it wouldn't have been necessary to get into all this intrusive and distressing examination of Amanda's beliefs and the extent to which they correlated with those of the separate parents.
Isn't that clever? And I doubt that a constitutional objection to it could be sustained.
Posted by Lydia | April 10, 2012 10:56 AM
Instead, my comments focus on civic education in the broadest sense, which I define primarily as exposure to the constitutional norm of tolerance. I shall argue that the growing reliance on homeschooling comes into direct conflict with assuring that children are exposed to such constitutional values.
The most laughable part of all of this is that homeschoolers are, by a wide margin, the truest of all believers in constitutional values--actual ones that is, not Ross's made up ones. Most read the various documents of America's founding more as expressions of eternal truths, than as the cynically politcal, enlightenment hogwash that they are. So rest assured, Ms. Ross, homeschoolers believe in pluralism, civic engagement, and democracy even more than you!
Posted by anonymous | April 10, 2012 1:24 PM
I would hazard to guess that the percentage is substantially lower than in the public schools. Homeschooling families tend to be more motivated than the average public school at teaching their kids. Even if they objectively fail at a number of areas, it's unlikely that the failure could ever be any worse than a typical public school. There is something to be said for the inherent superiority of a dedicated parent coupled with a near 1:1 teacher student
Posted by Mike T | April 10, 2012 1:31 PM
I think what is going to happen in college is that there are going to be a few distinctive things that home schooled kids, including the good ones, are more prone to, but that these will pale in comparison to the problems public school students have. For example, some professors might be (even understandably) bothered by a student who tends to talk too much in class (not giving other students enough chance to interact) or to be a bit too outspoken and inclined to disagree with the teacher. On the other hand, if that same student has excellent grammar and writing abilities, works hard, is always on time, and wants to do well, the rough edges that are a result of a lot of one-on-one work and relative freedom to discuss and debate can be worked out.
It's funny that I should bring that particular example up, I suppose, given that Ross wants to portray home schooled students as parent-copying droids. My guess is that they are quite un-droid-ish and that this is one of the things college professors may find unsettling or may have to work to tone down.
Posted by Lydia | April 10, 2012 2:56 PM
Lydia, homeschool kids are TERRIBLE at some things. Like standing in lines. And not asking questions. ;-)
The whole Ross stream of consciousness is revolting, it makes me sick. You can see the full trend waiting in the wings: it is outright illegal to homeschool in Sweden and Germany, as shown in cases like this:
http://www.wnd.com/2011/10/352733/
Other European countries make it nearly impossible to do it, even where it is technically legal.
And Alberta, Canada wants to make it illegal to teach your own Christian values when you homescool. Give then another 10 years and I am sure that they will have proposed making it illegal to homeschool, or maybe making it illegal to be Christian. Ross is following right along in their footsteps.
These are are ordinary, foreseeable consequences of the liberal train wreck in government: officials just cannot keep their hands where they belong, they have to be busy-bodies and control everything, not just what government is supposed to govern. Heaven forbid if someone teaches something that the liberals don't agree with.
Posted by Tony | April 10, 2012 6:35 PM
Tony-
also "believing the teacher knows everything" and "just accepting what they're told." (I wasn't home schooled, but my mom used a lot of the same tactics-- the home schooled folks I've met end up with their kids NOT having total faith in every word from their lips as a natural outgrowth of kids growing up and questioning their parents.)
Posted by Foxfier | April 10, 2012 6:52 PM
It's comments like this that should serve a valuable reminder to conservatives that the left doesn't even truly embrace its own beliefs, but rather jettisons them whenever they become inconvenient. If they don't try to act on their principles, then why should we ever take it as a given that their value system is worth maintaining or acknowledging even just for the sake of argument? I would go so far as to say that at times we might benefit from opposing them for the sake of simply defeating an enemy, not because the thing which they seek is objectively unreasonable. We ought to encourage heresy and blasphemy against liberal dogmas whenever they aren't objectively evil.
Posted by Mike T | April 11, 2012 12:19 PM
**whenever the liberal heresies and blasphemies aren't themselves objectively evil. For example, even if we all believe that blacks and whites are literally equal in all regards, we ought to staunchly oppose the left on principle when they attempt to shut down any questioning of this. Because it is something near and dear to their ideology and questioning it will undermine their authority, we ought to oppose any effort on their part to keep anything which matters to them from being too sacred to skewer, question, etc.
Posted by Mike T | April 11, 2012 12:21 PM
I don't think you've done your homework on homeschooling parents.
Some do make it work, but a whole lot of them just don't give their kid the same quality of education as they would get in a public school.
But .... we don't really mind, as long as you keep paying your taxes. Less bigoted kids in school should make for a happier school anyways.
Ah, the classic racist strawman! Where have you been, I've missed you so!
The equality is about RIGHTS, not about ABILITIES, or TRAITS.
For example, Obama is a much more competent President than Bush ever was, Bush lied us into a war, and committed fraud about the cost of it all.
Obama saved the car industry and endured the most vicious and vile attacks of any president, living or death. And he's leading in the polls.
So, no one on the left claims that gifted musicians like Yo-Yo-Ma ARE equal to let's say, Joe the Plumber. But they do each get one vote in an election, pay the same taxes if they make the same amount of money etc.
Oh well.
Posted by Stella | April 13, 2012 1:25 PM
And how, exactly, would they police that - video monitors, to make sure you only teach values on "family time"?
Posted by c matt | April 13, 2012 4:04 PM
Obama? Competent? You mean the "Constutional Scholar" who doesn't even know its the Supreme Court's role to pass on the Consitutional muster of legisation? That Obama?
True, you did say "more competent than Bush", which I suppose is at least an arguable point depending upon what you view as competent (assasinating American citizens my be considered incompetent by some standards, but that may not include yours).
Posted by c matt | April 13, 2012 4:19 PM
Lady, I answered that in the lines immediately following the bit you quote.
Folks, Stella, whoever she may be, does indeed drag down the quality of our conversation. And like most of her kind, she's very good at taking the conversation OT in no time flat. I'm going to try the "ignore her" strategy from here on when I don't simply delete. Please help me out with this.
Posted by Lydia | April 13, 2012 4:50 PM
Some do make it work, but a whole lot of them just don't give their kid the same quality of education as they would get in a public school.
Of course not-- you've got to suck pretty bad to have public school quality education. Sure, kids that are motivated can still get stuff out of a public school, and there's the valuable lessons on how to deal with thugs... assault and theft that's left unreported, let alone being stopped... all kinds of things to miss out on!
Posted by Foxfier | April 13, 2012 5:13 PM
Matt, good question. Here's my guess: The first line of enforcement would be in relation to curriculum or any programs, such as distance-learning or correspondence courses, used to teach required subjects. For example, suppose you used Christian curriculum to satisfy a requirement by Alberta that you teach the subject of health to your high schoolers. If that curriculum treated chastity and heterosexual marriage as normative, and especially if it had any comments about "God's plan for marriage" and about how people have tried to change or pervert that plan, then that curriculum would, I'm guessing, be disallowed and you could be treated as non-compliant with the state home schooling requirements for using it for a required subject. Similarly if you used a co-op for teaching various subjects. Those, of course, could be more easily monitored simply because there would be more kids to talk about what happened and what was taught in the classes.
Eventually, I expect that Alberta will be on-board with what is already happening in public schools in California and the UK: Homosexuality is to be integrated throughout the curriculum and "heteronormativity" is to be rooted out. So, for example, if a mother used a curriculum for language arts that consistently portrays traditional families, fathers and mothers, and so forth, that might eventually be treated by Alberta as "hate-mongering" or as insufficiently compliant with the human rights law because it is "heteronormative," even if traditional sexual values are never explicitly broached as topics.
That would be the easiest way to monitor and to harass homeschoolers. Other, more intrusive, possibilities exist. For example, suppose a child plays with neighbor children and the topic of homosexuality comes up in their conversation and it comes out that the home schooled child or teen holds traditional sexual values. I suppose it's not at all impossible that if this were reported by a busybody neighbor (and can we really put this past, say, a militant homosexual activist neighbor?) to the local education authorities, the family could be put through the wringer as to whether this wrongthought was being taught to the child during "school time."
Posted by Lydia | April 14, 2012 1:50 PM
Of course not, we have neighbors being MUCH MORE intensively intrusive than that, so this is surely foreseeable.
Well, technically, if the state were to follow the law, then the state would be obliged to assume that the teaching had been taught outside of school hours, absent evidence to the contrary. Evidence that a kid BELIEVES Christianity isn't evidence about when Christianity was taught to him.
But we all know that liberal bureaucrats don't give a **** about the law. They would harass anyway, just on the off chance of being able to uncover dirt. They don't think that they have to stick to reason, logic, or the law in pursuing their agenda, because their agenda is Right, gosh darn it, and if it's Right then they can pursue it any old how.
And aside from that, the bureaucrats will (probably) be right about when Christianity is being taught, because pragmatically you cannot successfully overcome 8 hours daily of liberal propaganda that homosexuality is OK in the other parts of the day. At least, you cannot assume that will work.
Posted by Tony | April 14, 2012 6:12 PM
Depends entirely on how much supervision Alberta law gives to state actors over home schooling compliance. Perhaps no such presumption is built in. If there were regular interviews or inspections or evaluations to monitor compliance with all parts of the law, I don't see why such a thing couldn't come up as a topic for "questioning."
This sort of thing, of course, is why what's-her-name said there were "nuances." Basically, it's meant to be something of a vague threat of harassment without really clear enforcement mechanisms.
Posted by Lydia | April 14, 2012 10:59 PM