Recently we looked at Elizabeth Bartholet’s attack on homeschooling. There have been many excellent articles critiquing her thinking. One such, written by Kevin D Williamson appeared in the National Review. Williamson notes the reason many like Bartholet fear homeschooling and want it banned. School is an essential part of state monitoring.
Homeschooling inhibits the ability of the state to conduct surveillance on some families. “There is no way of knowing how many homeschooled children experience a childhood comparable to Tara’s,” she [Bartholet] writes. “But we do know that the homeschooling regime permits children to be raised this way.”
In addition, Williamson further highlights why Statists love public schooling, and fear homeschooling: public schooling is actually for the benefit of the State.
The economic argument is straightforward and points back to Prussia, the spiritual homeland of progressivism. From Frederick the Great and Johann Julius Hecker through the Progressive Era to today, schools have been treated as factories that produce what the state needs: able administrators and bureaucrats in the context of the emerging Bismarckian welfare regimes and, later, workers in the industrial economies. Schools organized this way do not exist to serve children or families: They exist to serve the state, and children are not the customers — they are the product.
Williamson argues that what is being fought over here is whether children are the property of the state, whether education exists for the student or the state, and whether there is any private realm.
Homeschooling is based on a radical proposition that is utterly incompatible with Professor Bartholet’s politics. Homeschoolers insist that their children are not the property of the state, to be farmed and dispatched in accordance with the state’s needs; the homeschooling ethos insists that the purpose of education is to serve the needs and interests of students rather than those of the state or of business; it insists that there exists a sphere of life that is private and not subject to state surveillance, and that this sphere covers family life and child-rearing unless and until there is some immediate pressing reason for intervention.
So what is the debate really about?
The debate about homeschooling is not really about educational outcomes — there are good and bad homeschooling practices, good and bad public schools, good and bad private schools, etc. — but about who serves whom and on what terms. Do American families serve the state or does the state serve them? Do we live our lives and raise our children at the sufferance of the state, or is the state an instrument of our convenience?