The Patriot Post® · Why the Left Can't Stand Homeschooling

Loudoun County has been in the news quite a bit recently.

Why? Because parents in the Northern Virginia enclave are outraged over the baptism of their children in “woke” ideology. For example, last year the Virginia Department of Education enacted a policy that allowed schools to shirk their obligation to notify parents of a change in their child’s gender identity.

Some of those parents have been harassed, and at least one has received death threats.

But that wasn’t enough. The smear campaign against concerned parents got some help from the media. Namely, The Washington Post, which recently decided to run a hit piece on homeschooling by cherry-picking a disgruntled couple who’d been homeschooled themselves but decided later to enroll their own children in public schools to free them from what they now claim is the oppressive and abusive environment of a Christian homeschooling education.

The fact that the Post had to find a needle in a haystack to make a point is a testament to homeschooling and represents the lengths to which the enemies of homeschooling are willing to go. Meanwhile, it only takes a click of the mouse to unearth thousands of disturbing reports coming out of public schools each year about drugs, violence, sexual assault, critical race theory — you name it.

One of the more despicable undercurrents within the Post’s article is that Christianity is synonymous with child abuse. Besides basic observation of society all around us, at least one study refutes that dubious insinuation.

“What they want is for people to put their kids in government schools,” writes Joy Pullmann at The Federalist. “As this article shows, they’re willing to invest major business resources in smearing anybody who doesn’t obey. Since we’ve established it’s not because The Washington Post cares about child abuse — because if it did, it would go to war against dismembered marriages, the No. 1 risk factor for child abuse — we have to ask the real reason it is using such sharp rhetorical swords to herd people into this one childraising direction.”

The Post’s cross-town rival, The Washington Times, adds this: “We won’t do the couple a disservice by mentioning their names, but they were perfectly cast in this Post screed, which is anti-Christian and anti-home schooling. They’re probably nice people, especially since they were raised in Christian homes. But somewhere, the husband lost his faith.”

How convenient. But it’s nothing new. This is simply one of the strategies of the Left. When covering a political campaign, they’ll showcase the one pro-abortion Republican candidate, write an article about the one conservative librarian who doesn’t mind putting pornographic materials on the bookshelves, or fawn over the one church pastor who thinks Jesus was nonbinary.

What’s ironic is that the Post fully supported homeschooling for several years during the COVID-19 scare, praising the benefits of keeping our kids away from their teachers and classmates. Now, though, the Post thinks it’s dangerous.

In another irony, it was the pandemic itself that made many parents across the country realize that homeschooling was a better option for their kids. Data show that major public school systems across the board have lost a significant number of students who’ve never returned. Today, their parents are taking advantage of homeschooling or independent schools.

Educators should celebrate these trends, but a child who doesn’t attend public school is a child who can’t be controlled by the teachers unions, the activist teachers, or the cultural Marxist ideology that permeates the current public school curriculum.

For these reasons, the so-called progressive Left has done everything to scare parents away from alternative methods of educating their children. Indeed, for decades they’ve claimed that homeschooling is steeped in racism and child abuse.

Leftists fail to address why parents are pulling their kids out of public schools “because the fruits of the poisonous tree would lead back to these same failed leftist education policies,” as our own Emmy Griffin wrote last year. “More and more parents are unwilling to sacrifice their children on the altar of the leftist agenda.”

Parents who want the best for their children need not fear the Post’s attack on homeschooling because the movement to stand up and protect our children is growing larger each year — thanks to the Left’s very own noxious and destructive policies.