# Should Homeschooling be banned? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 13, 2020, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-homeschooling-be-banned/853721 "2020-05-13T15:49:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 4
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2020, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-homeschooling-be-banned/853721/4 "2020-05-13T16:22:07Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > Quite frankly the Harvard proff, her big problem is she wants the state to be in absolute control and destroy parents rights to educate their children. :rolleyes: Excluded-middle fallacy, and a rather pearl-clutching flapdoodly one, too. Even if parents were legally required to provide some non-homeschooling form of education for their children (as they are in, e.g., Germany and the Netherlands), that’s not automatically equivalent to requiring _“the state to be in absolute control and destroy parents rights to educate their children”_. Parents have plenty of control over and educational input into their children’s lives even when the children also receive some other form(s) of schooling. Here’s a less hysterical-vapors [description of the article in question](https://harvardmagazine.com/2020/05/right-now-risks-homeschooling): > [@](#): > > […] Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, sees risks for children—and society—in homeschooling, and recommends a presumptive ban on the practice. Homeschooling, she says, not only violates children’s right to a “meaningful education” and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society. > > “We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling,” Bartholet asserts. All 50 states have laws that make education compulsory, and state constitutions ensure a right to education, “but if you look at the legal regime governing homeschooling, there are very few requirements that parents do anything.” Even apparent requirements such as submitting curricula, or providing evidence that teaching and learning are taking place, she says, aren’t necessarily enforced. Only about a dozen states have rules about the level of education needed by parents who homeschool, she adds. […] > > [Bartholet] argues that one benefit of sending children to school at age four or five is that teachers are “mandated reporters,” required to alert authorities to evidence of child abuse or neglect. “Teachers and other school personnel constitute the largest percentage of people who report to Child Protective Services,” she explains, whereas not one of the 50 states requires that homeschooling parents be checked for prior reports of child abuse. Even those convicted of child abuse, she adds, could “still just decide, ‘I’m going to take my kids out of school and keep them at home.’” […] > > […] surveys of homeschoolers show that a majority of such families (by some estimates, up to 90 percent) are driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture. […] > > [Bartholet] views the absence of regulations ensuring that homeschooled children receive a meaningful education equivalent to that required in public schools as a threat to U.S. democracy. “From the beginning of compulsory education in this country, we have thought of the government as having some right to educate children so that they become active, productive participants in the larger society,” she says. This involves in part giving children the knowledge to eventually get jobs and support themselves. “But it’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints,” she says, noting that European countries such as Germany ban homeschooling entirely and that countries such as France require home visits and annual tests. […] > > Bartholet maintains that parents should have “very significant rights to raise their children with the beliefs and religious convictions that the parents hold.” [_Directly contradicting the OP’s paranoid exaggeration about wanting “the state to be in absolute control”, you’ll note._] But requiring children to attend schools outside the home for six or seven hours a day, she argues, does not unduly limit parents’ influence on a child’s views and ideas. “The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18? I think that’s dangerous,” Bartholet says. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-homeschooling-be-banned/853721)._