What happens when you’ve long been reliant upon a sub-par service, but then find out you can perform it better yourself? If you answer that you ditch the service, now you know the reason for one often welcome, COVID-19-inspired societal change: a surge in homeschooling.
Homeschooling has long been gaining in popularity. Numbering only about 850,000 in 1999, there were approximately two million homeschooled children in America five years ago and an estimated 2.5 million in the spring of 2019, with a growth rate of two to eight percent per year, according to recruitment service Mark in Style.
That is, until the virus made it go viral. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau told us in March that the rate of households homeschooling their children more than doubled during the six-month period from March to September 2020, rising from 5.4 percent to 11 percent.
More striking still, black American households led the way, with their homeschooling rate rising during this period from 3.3 percent to 16.1 percent.
Moreover, now that the ice has been broken and these parents have shed the mass-schooling illusion, most might have said goodbye to the education cartel forever.
The Associated Press reported on this issue Monday, admitting that “some parents are grateful” for the coronavirus-inspired homeschooling transition. The outlet mentions how the parents it spoke to cited religious or “special needs” reasons as inspiring their educational endeavor — and that some mentioned how schools were “flawed,” a description trivializing what studies have shown is the main homeschooling motivation: academic indoctrination.
Relating one mother’s testimonial, the AP writes, “‘That’s one of the silver linings of the pandemic — I don’t think we would have chosen to home-school otherwise,’ said Danielle King of Randolph, Vermont, whose 7-year-old daughter Zoë thrived with the flexible, one-on-one instruction. Her curriculum has included literature, anatomy, even archaeology, enlivened by outdoor excursions to search for fossils.”
As another example, “Arlena and Robert Brown of Austin, Texas, had three children in elementary school when the pandemic took hold,” relates the AP, citing one of the new homeschooling black families. “After experimenting with virtual learning, the couple opted to try home-schooling with a Catholic-oriented curriculum provided by Seton Home Study School, which serves about 16,000 students nationwide.”
“‘I didn’t want my kids to become a statistic and not meet their full potential,’ said Robert Brown, a former teacher who now does consulting,” the AP further wrote. “And we wanted them to have very solid understanding of their faith.”
Unfortunately, the Browns don’t reflect every black American homeschooling family. That is to say, the AP also cites those using something called the National Black Home Educators (NBHE) curriculum, which, the outlet informs, “provides content for each academic subject pertaining to African American history and culture.” This does, of course, sound highly racialized.
Nonetheless, the phenomenon does again illustrate the China virus-fired homeschooling boom — with the AP telling us that the NBHE had “about 5,000 members before the pandemic and now has more than 35,000” — and the children thus educated are still likely receiving better instruction than the government schools provide.
What the AP doesn’t present are examples of indoctrination-wary parents who’ve opted to homeschool; this is perhaps because Big Media and Big Education are ideological fellow travelers, and substantive criticism of the schools would equate to criticism of the AP itself.
More straightforward about its anti-homeschooling antipathy is British paper the Independent; it wrote Tuesday that the “number of children being homeschooled could soon become a serious problem,” citing “religious zealotry” as an issue. But there has been no recent Western rise in “religious” zealotry (save the Islamic variety); on the contrary, we’ve been losing our faith. But there has been a rise in opposition to “secular” zealotry. Parents aren’t suddenly having a Road to Damascus moment; they’re reacting to a pseudo-elite culture that’s becoming overtly hostile to Christian faith — and, put differently, to the Truth itself.
And the truth is that even many “secular” parents are recoiling at today’s schools’ full-throated leftism. As the Daily Caller reported in 2019, “Classroom Indoctrination Is Causing a Rise in Homeschooling.” Areo echoed this last year, pointing out that “educators” don’t represent the people they serve.
“Among English teachers, there are 97 Democrats for every three Republicans,” the site related, “with the proportion being even more one-sided among health teachers, with 99 Democrats for every one Republican.… Among high school teachers overall, there are 87 Democrats for every 13 Republicans.”
This is reflected in the “teaching” (twisting?), with students encouraged to go out and protest “climate change” and support neo-Marxist group Black Lives Matter, and being accosted with mental monstrosities such as sexual devolutionary perversion and Critical Race Theory (along with masking and the rest of COVID Ritual). In fact, 2020 could be called the year when Big Education jumped the shark of schooling surreality.
This brings us to a common but laughable anti-homechooling claim: that many children thus taught will receive a sub-par education. But while no education is highly preferable to soul-killing miseducation (“First, do no harm…”), this is hardly the homeschooling reality. As Mark in Style relates:
- Homeschoolers score 15% to 30% higher on tests than public-school students.
- Homeschooling erases racial disparities in academic achievement.
- Homeschooled students perform four grade levels above average.
- Homeschooled children engage in 5.2 activities outside the home.
(I am curious as to what two-tenths of an activity is.)
One activity they don’t usually engage in, however, is immersion in things such as Hate America First 101, Introduction to Soul Destruction, Sexual Perversion 2.0, and How to Become a Dummy for Dummies.
If the education cartel is upset about losing “customers,” or, as some would say, captives, they’ve no one but themselves to blame.
