Washington Post hit piece on home schooling is thinly veiled attack on Christianity
OPINION:
Home-schoolers consistently outscore government school students in every academic area. It’s no wonder that the public school establishment hates and fears home schooling.
The clearest evidence yet came in this past Thursday’s Washington Post. “THE REVOLT OF CHRISTIAN HOME-SCHOOLERS” (all caps in original) is a voluminous, front-page article almost entirely about one Loudoun County, Virginia, couple who had home-schooled their children before opting to enroll them in public schools.
If you recall, Loudoun County is ground zero in the nationwide parental revolt against “woke” schools that indoctrinate children. Somebody at the Post had to act, so reporter Peter Jamison went to work.
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.
The Post has a knack for finding convenient dissenters. When writing about a Christian college, they focus on the campus heretic. In a conservative political district, they showcase the rare Republican who sounds more like Bernie Sanders than Ronald Reagan.
The mom and dad in this article were themselves home-schooled. Both said they had come to realize how awful and tyrannical it was. Apparently not one good thing came from their upbringing.
As children, they were kept abysmally ignorant of important facts. The only example cited is the existence of Punxsutawney Phil, the prognosticating Pennsylvania groundhog. According to the Post, when informed by his second grade daughter, the dad exclaimed: “Phil? Am I out of the loop?”
For the record, I know a lot of families who home-school their children, none of whom have been clueless about this weather-predicting rodent and whose grown-up children are acing their chosen fields. As for Phil, watching him on TV on Groundhog Day can be a teachable moment about discerning between fantasy and reality. You can use The Washington Post in a similar fashion.
The most cited example of oppression is spanking, a discipline method strongly recommended in the Bible and used by parents (including mine) for thousands of years. Scripture warns that if we spare the rod, we spoil the child. Sadly, a tiny minority of home-schooling parents, as with any population segment, overdo it to the point of abuse. We are given the impression that the parents of the mother and father in the story may have been in that category.
The couple’s children are now in public school and reportedly thriving. Good for them, seriously. There are some wonderful teachers and administrators in public schools. But let’s see what the parents do when confronted with “woke” sex education, pronoun policies and a curriculum that accuses them of being White supremacists.
Delighted to welcome the couple to functionally atheist education, Mr. Jamison sprinkled his article with gems like this: “Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view.”
The loaded term “binding” evokes coercion. “Fundamentalist” is a legitimate term often used to mischaracterize anyone with a biblical worldview.
Mr. Jamison also absurdly accuses home-schooling Christians of having “inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of ‘parental rights.’”
He is blaming the mugging victim for fighting back.
It wasn’t Christian parents who started the culture war. We’re not the ones who ply children with anti-American history lessons, critical race theory or drag queen story hours. We didn’t turn June, long known for marriages and Father’s Day, into “LGBTQ Pride Month.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to present their lessons online in full view of horrified parents, it triggered a sharp increase in home schooling, and not just among Christians. Home schooling doubled during the pandemic and is up overall at least 30% since 2019, accounting for nearly 4 million students. Christian schools have also experienced a pandemic-fueled “boom,” The New York Times reported.
As with most culture war issues, the left’s “concern” over home schooling is a thinly veiled attack on faith, especially Christianity.
The dad in the article had attended a Maryland church where “the minister exerted a powerful influence over his congregation and students, teaching that children live in divinely ordained subjection to the rule of their parents,” the Post grimly explained as if this were an outpost of the Taliban.
Yes, the pastor probably cited the Ten Commandments, one of which says, “Honor your father and mother.” He may also have cited the New Testament verse that says: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.”
The Fifth Commandment, “Honor your father and mother,” is the “first commandment with promise: ‘that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth,’” according to the apostle Paul.
“And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:1-4).
This is scary stuff for secularists who advocate children constructing their own beliefs and value systems — with “guidance” from “woke” educators.
The Post did contact both sets of parents and the siblings of the featured couple.
But they all “either declined to comment or could not be reached.”
Yep. When the mugger is at the door, you don’t open it.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
