The Patriot Post® · Leftmedia Smears Homeschooling as Dangerous

The Washington Post recently ran an anti-homeschooling propaganda hit piece titled “What home schooling hides: A boy tortured and starved by his stepmom.” The article, which is part of a series the Post is running to smear homeschooling, notes the tragic story of a young 11-year-old boy whose repeated abuse by his stepmother eventually led to his death.

The obvious culprit and perpetrator of this crime is the boy’s stepmother, and she is now in prison as a result. The boy’s father was apparently not present, as he is also doing time in prison, but the article does not make clear whether his incarceration is related to the crime against his son.

The Post covers this heartbreaking story at the outset but then takes a rather twisted turn with the following loaded statement: “Little research exists on the links between homeschooling and child abuse.” What? It sure seems that the conclusion the Post wants to infer is that homeschooling is to blame for this boy’s death.

The biggest reason behind the young boy’s abuse and death had to do with his broken home life. But the Post avoids that glaring factor.

Interestingly, after observing that “little research exists” to link homeschooling and child abuse, the article then goes on to state, “But the research also suggests that when abuse does occur in home-school families, it can escalate into especially severe forms — and that some parents exploit lax home education laws to avoid contact with social service agencies.”

Does the research exist or doesn’t it? This game of sleight-of-hand “journalism” is played to inject an entirely unrelated study from 2014 as “evidence” to support the Post’s preconceived conclusion — the strong implication that homeschooling is more dangerous for children than public schooling.

If it weren’t so serious, it would be laughable, but the Post notes for the study that of more than two dozen children treated for torture from five different states, “17 victims [were] old enough to attend school, eight were home-schooled.”

Once again, homeschooling is the Post’s implied villain. Logically, one could just as easily point out that more than half of the 17 victims old enough to attend school went to public or private schools. So, we can now blame public or private schools for the abuse these children suffered?

Absent other specific criteria, that statistic is as meaningless as suggesting that more victims were from states with colder climates than warmer ones. Correlation is not causation, no matter how hard the Post plays like it is. In fact, there is no research evidence to date that solidly substantiates more or less abuse and neglect being experienced by the homeschooled.

The real reason for this anti-homeschooling hit piece is the fact that homeschooling has become an increasingly popular option for parents, especially since the COVID pandemic, when the vaunted public school system across much of the country bowed to the increasingly extreme and illogical demands of teachers unions rather than parents.

Furthermore, COVID opened many parents’ eyes to the reality of what their children were being taught. In many instances, they saw that their children were being indoctrinated in leftist ideologies like critical race theory. Schools also pushed the gender-bending nonsense of “transgenderism,” which resulted in preferred pronouns and accesses for “transgender”-identifying students to use the bathroom and locker room of their choice. Some schools are even pushing pornography. And don’t forget about all the ridiculous masking rules.

At the most basic level, schools are failing to educate children adequately. And then schools are dropping testing standards because they are “racist.”

Parents have every right to be upset and out of genuine concern for their children’s education and well-being pull them out of public school and homeschool if possible. Far from damaging their kids, the data overwhelmingly shows that homeschooled children test well ahead of their public school contemporaries.

The Washington Post, by contrast, would have readers think that government and public school officials have more love and concern for the welfare of children than their parents. However, the fact of the matter is that stories of parental abuse are far from the norm, as parents naturally have a greater love for their children than even the best teachers.

So why the spate of hit pieces against homeschooling? The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Hennessey says it’s simple: follow the money.

“The lockdowns and lockouts of 2020 dealt a reputational blow to the education blob — that quasipublic syndicate of teachers unions, government bureaucracies, brand-name credentialing institutions and their media allies whose mission is to keep taxpayer money flowing to public schools. Most of that money is linked to students, many of whom left during the plague year and haven’t returned. Now the crisis is over and the blob wants its monopoly back.”

(Updated)