Homeschoolers: Trailer-Park Denizens or Modern Heroes?

It’s one of the more laughable attacks upon homeschoolers ever concocted.

And it came courtesy of a handmaiden of the mainstream media, a feminist legal theorist affiliated with the Georgetown University Law Center.

Robin L. West, in an essay titled, “The Harms of Homeschooling” (scroll down for the article), and published by the University of Maryland’s Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly, argues for greater government oversight of home schooling and takes a shot at fundamentalist Christian families who are short on mammon but big on procreation.

Here’s the quote:

The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner. These families are not living in romantic, rural, self-sufficient farmhouses; they are in trailer parks, 1,000 square foot homes, houses owned by relatives, and some, on tarps in fields or parking lots.

West provides no evidence of these exotic tarp-dwellers, which would have brought out the national media, anyway, if they actually existed. But I’m happy to supply an example of parking-lot homeschoolers.

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That would be the MacDonald Family Singers (mom, dad, grandpa, eight kids) who spend part of the year crisscrossing the country in a coach bus while performing gospel songs at churches and nursing homes. They’ve been known to park their vehicle, overnight, in a big-box store parking lot and sleep in the bus’s beds.

The fun-loving MacDonald children, who play the trombone, trumpet, piano, banjo, flute, guitar, tuba, mandolin, fiddle, and saxophone are required to bring schoolbooks on their road trips and participate in family devotions often led – gasp – by Mr. MacDonald. When not traveling, they live in a large home in western Massachusetts.

Adventuresome homeschoolers, who have gone on similar road trips or even traveled in a big rig or a sailboat, on a shoestring budget, would likely be enemy combatants in West’s world.

Even if her silly scenario was normative, what does West have against double-wide trailer dwellers or anyone who has lived with benevolent relatives in cramped quarters, anyway? And what’s wrong with a man daring to assume spiritual responsibility for his household and a wife not only honoring him in that role, but viewing pregnancy as a blessing, not a curse? Isn’t that far more preferable to being on welfare, living in subsidized housing with only one parent and several half brothers and sisters, and having gangbangers as your neighbors, all while attending an unsafe government school run by dues-paying teacher union members who rail against global warming?

And if government oversight could deter criminal activity and keep the educational standards of these homeschooling rubes high, which is part of West’s argument against the right to homeschool, why are there so many poorly educated miscreants in the heavily-regulated, lavishly funded public schools?

In 2005 alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, middle school and high school students were the victims of nearly 700,00 violent crimes, including rape and robbery. Meanwhile, The Detroit News recently reported that the Motor City’s public school test scores “were the lowest in its 40-year history.”

Railing against the harsh conditions that millions of urban schoolchildren endure daily thanks to the wonders of godless socialism, isn’t going to make the cut as an article for the Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly. But such are the fruits of a brand-name, institutionalized liberal education.

But wait; there’s more.

Their lack of job skills passed from one generation to the next, depresses the community’s overall economic health and their state’s tax base.

Mystery solved! All along I thought it was high property taxes and lack of decent-paying private-sector jobs that depress a community’s economic health. It turns out to be backwater homeschoolers with a conservative religious bent.

How then to explain Tim Tebow, the wildly popular University of Florida quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner, thrived in such an atmosphere.

Tim, age 22, grew up on a farm outside of Jacksonville, Florida and was homeschooled by Christian missionaries. Mom made him memorize Scripture; Dad made him do chores. All of the family (Tim has four siblings.) regularly took trips to the Philippines to minister at the orphanage that Tim’s father founded.

When Tebow gets drafted by the NFL this year, he stands to make millions and render mucho taxes unto Caesar, turning him into a one-man stimulus package.

American parents sometimes choose to make informed educational choices based on the Biblical belief that it is their responsibility, not the State’s, to train, educate, and protect their children. Even the Supreme Court agrees. (See Wisconsin v. Yoder)

Until those in media and academia figure out that what often drives these choices is love, not laws, attacks on the 20^th century’s greatest education reform movement will continue.