Hi, Iâm John, and my wife and I homeschool our children.
I hope in the future thatâs not how weâll have to introduce ourselves as a sort of public warning to others. But make no mistake, the phenomenally successful homeschool movement does have its enemies: enemies constantly working to turn public opinion against parents who have chosen this way to pursue their childrenâs education.
A recent and -obscene example comes from the New Republic, where writer Sarah Jones is using the horrible story of the torture inflicted by David and Louise Turner on their 13 children as a means to attack the idea of homeschooling itself. Under the inflammatory headline, âThe Turpins Wonât Be the Last: How Lax Homeschooling Laws Enable Child Abusers,â Jones argues that this horrifying case is representative of a larger trend of child abuse enabled by the freedom to homeschool.
Now folks, to use a phrase I introduced a few weeks ago on BreakPoint, this is nutpicking nonsense. Thereâs nothing inherent to homeschooling that creates abuse. Abuse happens in all educational, parenting, ecclesial, and for that matter, cultural contexts.
My BreakPoint colleague Shane Morris, a product of homeschooling himself, tackled Jonesâ cheap-shot article in a sharp-elbowed but necessary response to Jones at The Federalist. Iâll link you to it at BreakPoint.org. Shane writes, âIn [Jonesâs] mind, the fact that some homeschooling parents abuse their children is proof that something is wrong with liberal homeschooling laws. But we might also apply her line of reasoning to public schools.
âIn New Jersey,â he continues, â93 teachers pleaded guilty to sexual relationships with students from 2003 to 2013.â And âReuters reports that in 2014, âalmost 800 school employees were prosecuted for sexual assault.ââ
It would be absurd to conclude from these statistics that public and private schools âassist abusers.â No one thinks that way.
But thatâs exactly what Jones does to homeschooling, when she and other proponents for increased regulation worry that what they call the âstate of deregulationâ âactually assists abusive parents.â
Not surprisingly, Jones also questions the motives of groups like the Homeschooling Legal Defense Association and downplays the impressive academic achievement displayed by homeschooled children, as well as the research âthat shows homeschooling produces, on average, better-educated and more college-ready students.â
There are, as Shane writes, good schools and bad schoolsâschools that produce college-ready students by the boatload, and there are schools that graduate kids who can barely read. In the same way, there are parents succeeding at homeschooling and there are those that arenât. If youâre not calling for the state to abandon public education for the bad apples, youâve got no business calling for a crackdown on homeschooling because of the evil deeds of these two California parents.
In the end, I think Shane is right: âOn a more fundamental level, those who want to place additional barriers in the way of homeschooling families have a different worldview. They see the state, not the family, as ultimately responsible for rearing and educating children.â Thatâs a worldview that Christians donât share, no matter how we choose to handle our own childrenâs education.
Kids belong to God, who entrusts them to parents. Whether parents choose homeschooling, private education, charter schools, public education, or like many of us  do some amalgamation and combination of those options, the bottom line is, kids donât belong to the government.
And that means at least two things for us. First, Christian parents ought to take that responsibility just as seriously and intentionally as it sounds. And second, we should call out the lie that abuseâwhich sadly happens everywhereâdiscredits an educational choice thatâs blessed over a million-and-a-half kids. Instead we should ask whatâs broken in our society thatâs making abuse so common.
BreakPoint is a Christian worldview ministry that seeks to build and resource a movement of Christians committed to living and defending Christian worldview in all areas of life. Begun by Chuck Colson in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on todayâs news and trends via radio, interactive media, and print. Today BreakPoint commentaries, co-hosted by Eric Metaxas and John Stonestreet, air daily on more than 1,200 outlets with an estimated weekly listening audience of eight million people. Feel free to contact us at BreakPoint.org where you can read and search answers to common questions.