I think it's time for us to start embracing home schooling

[bluestateguy]

The cause of home schooling has always been a cause for the Right. For whatever reason: they bemoan the "secular" educators, the lack of quasi-mandatory prayer in schools, sex education, racial integration or maybe they just don't like the curriculum (some people, for example, only want to hear America portrayed in a positive light).
Many liberals and many in the public education establishment have resisted the agenda of the home schoolers, seeking to delegitimaize their cause at every turn.

That was then. This is now. When I read about school districts being forced to revert to abstinence only sex education, or public schools being forced to turn over lists of names to military recruiters as a condition for federal funding, or school boards mandating "intelligent design" as the preferred theory of human development, one must conclude that the tide is turning. The State Board of Education in Texas has already approved textbooks that glorify imperialist US foreign policies of the past, belittle homosexuals and suggest that maybe slavery wasn't so bad after all or that maybe the South had a legitimate reason for breaking with the Union. Because of its size, books written for Texas are often used elsewhere in the nation.

I think we on the Left should rethink home schooling for two major reasons: 1) When conservative parents pull their children out of the public schools, that's one less fundie parent and one or more less fundie student(s) who can burden the rest of their particular local public school community. Wacko parents with kids outside of the public education system will be less likely to pester and annoy everybody else in their public school community to adopt school prayer in the classroom,to say "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, to ban "offensive" books or to demand abstinence only education. If these parents are encouraged to leave the public school system, most of them will abandon their efforts to impose their radical agenda on the rest of us, thus making the public schools more progressive and forward looking. 2) In some states and local school districts around the country, fundamentalist Christians are indeed very firmly in control, or taking control, of the public school system. They feel emboldened after the elections, and now feel as if their agenda has been legitimized. This is an agenda of militarism in the schools, quasi-mandatory Christian prayers in the schools, textbooks that whitewash the dark side of American foreign policies of the past, abstinence only sex education, creationism instead of evolution and absolute obedience for authority figures, rather than questioning authority. They will push this agenda. In some parts of the country they will fail, in other parts they will succeed, meaning that home schooling must be an option for liberal parents who either cannot find or afford an appropriate private school, and/or do not wish to subject their children to the indoctrination of the Far Right.