The Leftwing Media's Declaration Of War Against Homeschoolers

Home education and homeschool families are under vicious attack from establishment media outlets, with major propaganda voices on both sides of the Atlantic working to portray homeschooling as dangerous and radical. The anti-homeschooling screeds come as the number of families removing their children from government schools has grown by as much as 100 percent in recent years. 

The general gist of the escalating jihad against parental rights and educational liberty is that parents cannot be trusted with their children. Some might teach them to be Nazis without the state's benevolent hand to oversee "education," one major newspaper implied. Others might fail to teach their children enough LGBT propaganda. And some might even abuse their progeny, the propagandists claimed. 

The leftwing media declaration of war against homeschoolers -- by far the best performing and safest students in the United States, according to the data -- comes even as victims of government schools suffer from massive levels of illiteracy, innumeracy, mental-health problems, suicide, sexual abuse, gender confusion, and more. 

Federal data show less than one in three students in public schools are proficient in any core subject, with some government schools failing to produce a single student proficient in anything. Meanwhile, over 10 percent of children in government schools will be the victim of sexual abuse perpetrated by staff members of those schools including teachers and officials, U.S. Department of Education data show.

Leading the charge against home education in the United States was the Washington Post, the rapidly shrinking propaganda megaphone of billionaire Amazon extremist Jeff Bezos. The Post, ridiculed by conservatives as the "ComPost," has published multiple articles in recent weeks strategically attacking both home education and the leading researcher in the field. 

Last year, the Post published several articles detailing the steady exodus from government schools into home education, along with a silly anti-homeschooling "article" (almost a parody) in May about a Christian husband and wife who were homeschooled as children but decided to send their own children to a government indoctrination center. The goal was clear: Sound the alarm among leftists and the education establishment about this growing threat to their agenda and power. 

Then the attacks started getting more vicious. As the year was coming to a close, Post propagandists Peter Jamison and Laura Meckler wrote an article headlined "Home-schoolers dismantled state oversight. Now they fear pushback." Disguised as a piece chronicling legislative efforts to bring homeschoolers under government control, the article painted a deceptive picture while suggesting that public funding of home education would be the bait used by government to sucker homeschooling families back into the "system" they fled. That much is true. 

Another "article" by the Post just a few weeks earlier sought to discredit and demonize the top researcher on home education in the world, Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute. Dr. Ray, who has studied homeschooling in depth for decades and is meticulous in his research, happens to support homeschooling, an option the data show generally offers a far better education. But the Post used dishonesty to smear him. 

Under the headline "How a true believer's flawed research helped legitimize home schooling," the piece quotes a fringe fanatic at William and Mary attacking Dr. Ray for having an "ideological agenda" -- without mentioning that the professor believes the "parent-child relationship exists is because the state confers legal parenthood on people through its paternity and maternity laws." 

"The Post committed several logical fallacies that are aimed at basically all scholars whose research has found positive things connected to homeschooling," Dr. Ray told The Newman Report. "Many studies by a diversity of researchers show that homeschool students from poor and rich, rural and suburban, darker- and lighter-skinned, rural and urban, and secular and Christian families are typically performing above average in academic achievement and social development."

The broader undertone of the paper's attack on homeschooling also runs contrary to the basic values of freedom and liberalism. "The Post's series of supposed news stories reveal their philosophical worldview opinion that the state has first and final authority over children's minds and hearts, and parents do not," added Dr. Ray. "The Post's opinion is contrary to the history of classical liberal freedom in American history and biblical Christian thinking."

The Wall Street Journal took the Post's anti-home education propagandists to task, ridiculing them for trying to help the "education blob" maintain its monopoly over the minds of children. "The attack on home schooling is partially about money," said Matthew Hennessey, the Journal's deputy editorial features editor. "The education blob behaves like a classic rent-seeking special interest. But it's mainly about freedom. There's a certain type of person who thinks too much of that is a bad thing."

In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, the far-left U.K. Guardian, infamous for its hysterics on "climate change," ran a similar propaganda piece demonizing home education, taking special aim at the homeschooling community in the United States. The controversial article, headlined "Lack of home schooling oversight 'obvious danger' to children, experts say," paints a dark picture of homeschooling.

"Given that the majority of states do not monitor the quality of education home-schooled children are receiving, and 11 states do not even require parents to notify the state that they plan to educate their children at home, the potential for problems is high," claimed the Guardian's Adam Gabbatt, a far-left anti-Israel activist who writes about UFOs and shills for discredited Democrat Party front group Media Matters for America. His posts receive virtually no attention on X or other platforms.

This writer has been warning that these attacks would come as the trillion-dollar monster that is the "education" establishment recognizes the threat to its monopoly posed by homeschooling. Thankfully, it will take more than dishonest hit pieces by far-left newspapers to undermine home education as millions of homeschool success stories proliferate through other channels. At this point almost everyone knows homeschoolers, and everybody can see how well they do. 

The efforts of far-left propagandists at the Post, the Guardian, and other lesser smear machines -- along with the radical activists they are conspiring with-- would be better spent investigating the dumpster fire that is the government "education" system. If they were truly concerned about the wellbeing of children, that is what they would be doing. The fact that they choose to target the most successful students proves the real agenda has nothing to do with protecting children.

Originally published at Harbinger's Daily - reposted with permission.