I joined a homeschooling legal defense association

Actually, I joined the Homeschooling Legal Defense Association (as a rank-and-file paying member). Authoritarianism is on the march, and while homeschooling has enjoyed a golden age in the last couple decades, having achieved both acceptance (even a measure of prestige) and legal freedom, I’m worried that that might be changing. It isn’t any particular event, just the steady, low drumbeat of left-wing concern that people might be doing something with children that isn’t closely monitored and controlled by the state. “How dare citizens educate their children independently?” they think. “Surely, the experts in our government-run education establishments know best. Why can’t we be more like Germany and Sweden, which have superior public schools, while homeschooling is illegal?”

If people are becoming so ignorant or unsupportive of basic American civil rights and freedoms such as freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, Fourth Amendment privacy rights, and basic due process—depressing, isn’t it?—then we can predict that, within the next five or ten years, a major push to control or even eliminate homeschooling will get under way in countries where it is still legal (such as the U.S., Canada, U.K., Russia (!), Poland, South Africa, and Australia).


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Please do dive in (politely). I want your reactions!

4 responses to “I joined a homeschooling legal defense association”

  1. Mr. Sanger, do you consider much ‘affordable’ local church affiliated private schools as one sort of home-schooling in America’s MAGA era? Yes, No? or it all depends? … Our experiment on the separation of .gov .edu .law with .religion & .after-life is having an interesting time…

    1. If it’s a school, it’s not a homeschool. Homeschool means educating kids inside the home, with the parents as teachers.

      I think we should separate state and education for similar reasons we should separate state and religion: too much opportunity for abuse and mass indoctrination by the powerful, too great a threat to freedom of conscience.

  2. s.ye

    Well, in Princeton, one former public school history teacher and a number of others started this ‘homeschooling’ collaborative… a bunch of ‘troublesome’ kids, their parents drop them to a church building during week-days… they work together with one or two former teachers as supervisor… that is also one ‘new’ kind of home-schooling but parent-teacher alliance… the school has about less than 50 students, mostly middle school and UP…

    1. If there’s no set curriculum and the students determine what they’ll study, then that’s an “unschool.” Unschooling so closely resembles the unschooling approach to homeschooling that they’re lumped together. I still think they’re different phenomena, but allied in opposition to traditional schooling. I’m not a fan of unschooling just because kids can get through having learned little academics, which they do need.

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