Rise Of Homeschooling Highlights Flaws Of Public Schools
By Jack Minor January 04, 2016
The numbers indicate that although many in academia continue to oppose and even ridicule homeschoolers, the movement is increasingly gaining acceptance among many segments of society.
USA Today reported last year that in 1999, out of the entire population of school age children, a paltry 850,000 were being homeschooled. However, by the 2011-2012 school year that number had ballooned to 1.77 million, more than double the 1999 numbers.
Whereas federal numbers only cover up homeschooling numbers through 2012, the Florida Department of Education issued a more recent report showing that the state experienced its largest increase in homeschooling in the past five years.
"The number of homeschooled children in Florida saw its biggest increase in five years during 2014-15. Last year, the state counted 84,096 children in home schooling, up 9.6 percent from a year earlier," the report said.
Homeschooling has often been portrayed as something done by "fanatical Christians" or backwoods families who are white separatists, yet those who homeschool represent a broad cross-section of society as not just Christians, but even atheists, secularists and others increasingly embracing homeschooling.
The reasons vary, but at its basic level, the majority choose to homeschool for the same reason people will leave a company selling a product that they believe is inferior, dont like, or isnt meeting their needs.
One of the most common reasons is a realization that schools are teaching values contrary to those being instilled in children by their parents.
For example, in California a law signed by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger mandated that homosexuality could only be portrayed in a positive light. For example, "gay rights" icon Harvey Milk could only be discussed using glowing terms while mentioning that Milk had a strong desire for young boys is prohibited.
In addition, schools are increasingly teaching students that their parents are bigots for believing in traditional marriage and that transgenderism is normal. Christianity is also attacked in ways other religions are not.
A California court upheld the rights of a school district to prohibit phrases that supported Americas Godly heritage such as "One Nation Under God", "In God We Trust", and "God Bless America" while at the same time allowing teachers to display items promoting other religions including an image of Buddha, a poster with Hindu leader Mahatma Gandhis "7 Social Sins"; a poster of the Dali Lama and Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X.
This and similar actions, including students being told they cannot even read the Bible during recess or pray at the lunch table, have caused parents to realize that their children are attending schools that are openly hostile to Christianity.
In addition, the introduction of Common Core, with its emphasis on downplaying the greatness of the founding fathers and other American heroes while focusing on Americas faults and teaching globalism over American exceptionalism, has resulted in parents realizing todays public schools are nothing like what they attended.
I remember growing up in Elementary School in the 1970s where the Christmas music program featured a heavy emphasis on Christmas carols and we were taught about the daring exploits of Paul Revere, John Paul Jones, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and others.
In second grade I still recall listening as Mrs. Mills spent all year reading Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. This, among other things, instilled in me a life-long love of reading. Many of us went on to read the rest of the books in the series.
Yet this same school today is virtually unrecognizable. Several years ago when I was pastoring, I had helped research a book detailing the Christian influence on American History. I offered a copy of the book to a history teacher who was also involved with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
Despite the book being heavily footnoted, he thanked me and said he had to be careful in how he taught about the beliefs of the founding fathers.
Amazingly, despite these changes by progressive groups which they tout as being improvements, test scores continue to decrease with students reading at levels that would have been appalling during my generation.
Even non-Christian parents can see this and have begun pulling their students out of public schools. What is ironic is that while teachers and administrators criticize Christian students for old-fashioned values, they are often the first to complain when these same students are removed from the schools.
In the ultimate sign of hypocrisy, when these "troublemakers" leave to be homeschooled, school officials and even some pastors criticize these parents saying they are taking away the good kids from the schools and this is unfair to the bad kids.
My local district went so far as to criticize parents who pulled their children out of the failing system to send their kids to charter schools, saying these children were resources that the charter schools were influencing to leave.
MSNBC host Mellissa Harris-Perry said in a commercial recorded for the network that children do not belong to their parents, but rather belong to the community.
"We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we've always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of [sic] these are our children," she said. "So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities."
Can you imagine any other business saying to people they had a "duty" to force their kids to buy a product that would deliberately harm them for the good of society?
Such a company would rightly be excoriated for doing so, yet when it comes to the educational system, the media thinks nothing of them for saying similar things.
As our schools become more and more laboratories of political correctness to where now even disciplining students for mouthing off and disrespecting teachers is essentially forbidden, look for the numbers of homeschool students to increase even more.
Human nature will also follow the basic tenets of capitalism which involves the laws of supply and demand.
The reason homeschooling is on the rise is because parents like the product, namely students who are often better educated and have the same love of country they were taught.
As a result, this is nothing new but simply a return to the early days of America when parents took responsibility for the education of their children. By becoming more involved in the education of their children parents are following the tenets of scripture to train up their children in the way which is right.
That includes not just lessons from the Bible but every facet of their education.
