A Tough Read

I found an article which addressed homeschooling, and it was a bit of a shocker:

The Corporate Sovereignty of Home School Education

Home-schooling; the wave of the future; the practical design that allows you to prepare your child’s education within the modern world by the standards long cherished and protected as family values. Taken up in the 1960′s as a counter cultural movement toward early levels of higher education, the practice has caught on with the basic appeal of choosing your own environmental settings and allowing the child to explore academic potentials at his or her own pace. On March 17th., 2009, a custodial decision by Judge Ned Mangum of Raleigh, North Carolina suddenly turned media attention to the home-school community.

The case involved Venessa and Thomas Mills, a recently divorced couple. According to the father, Venessa has been home-schooling her children for four years, under the guide lines of the Sound Doctrine Church, which provides the educational material and spiritual guidance for its members. He states he originally agreed to home schooling, although only as a temporary structure, however it was her ties to the Church that had initiated their divorce. He stated that, “She became unrecognizable as the person I married, and, in the name of her religion, she distanced herself from me.”

That just was the beginning of it. After taking the reader through her overview of HSLDA’s work she presents:

No Quarter – No Compromise – No Retreat – No Regret (Statement at the web site for Sound Doctrine Church)

The necessity to separate Church from State is self-evident. Discriminatory laws attacking blacks and Native Americans, and which continue to be an issue today among those who successfully evaded the Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960′s, are founded on a Christian dogma that claims these racial distinctions are punishment of a vengeful God for past sins. The Monroe Doctrine; the biggest stain on American Democracy; sought to expand its Christian ideology through territorial invasion and forced religious education.

She pulled no punches in her overview of the current state of affairs. For those eyeing regulating homeschoolers she offers this advice:

Home schooling, which broke ground as an alternative to public education by producing college accredited students, should not be crippled by a political agenda based on religious motivations.

This is a real tough read. My sensibilities have always longed for a broad base of support for homeschooling (unattainable through a non-homeschooling agenda and a narrow base of support) and this issue is not going away. So, in the end, I welcome the exploration.

Reader Warning: Don’t go here if you do not want to read an article with the description: Without secular academics, we have an abolition of science, free religious expression and free speech.

The Corporate Sovereignty of Home School Education By Karla Fetrow

Tags: broad base of support, counter cultural movement, family values, home-schooling, homeschooling, HSLDA, Karla Fetrow, non-homeschooling agenda, regulating homeschoolers, Separation of Church and State

This entry was posted on January 8, 2010 at 5:51 pm and is filed under News-Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.