I don’t know where you get the idea where it has anything to do with “parents who utilize their children as ’slaves’ to benefit their selfish desires.” Homeschooling is hard work. Shipping them off to public school would be a lot easier.

If parents don’t care enough to actually educate their children, I don’t see why they would even bother to attempt it. And those same children would be unlikely to do much better in the public school since the number one indicator of school success is parental involvement.

I agree that the freedom to raise your children is a basic human right…I’d say that it is your responsibility as well. It is fine to delegate that to another person through public or private school, but ultimately the parent should be the one disciplining, training and helping the child to be successful in school and in life.

State intervention over that presupposes that the education of the child is the primary interest of the state rather than the parent. That already, even if the intervention is minimal, usurps parental rights and makes educating your children a privilege rather than a right.

I like states like Texas where all you need to do to homeschool is not send your kids to school. I don’t mind it here in NE, either. All I have to do is turn in a plan and the state acknowledges that I homeschool (as opposed to giving permission). Technically, state law allows them to check homeschools, but they have decided to not do that at this time. And I have to keep attendance, but I don’t have to turn it in. Not too bad, and it helps with truancy issues, I guess.

Seriously, this is the logical conclusion of the Socialist mindset that pervades the American left. The Government knows what your health-care should cost. The Government knows what you should drink. The Government knows what you should eat. The Government knows what your kids should learn. The Government knows what’s OK to think. (Hey, I think I have the beginnings of a pretty bad song there).

Anyway, freedom to raise your (minor) children as you see fit is a basic human right. I know the proposed changes in state law aren’t going to *end* homeschooling per se, but adding state intervention in every homeschooling situation is the first step down a slippery slope.

I’m not sure if we’re going to home-school my daughter yet, but you *will* have to pry her from my cold, dead hands before somebody tells me I can’t.

To try to catch or minimize child abusers through enforced reporting of homeschoolers is completely absurd. Most homeschoolers are very deeply involved with the raising and educating of their children. In fact, they are more likely to be sensitive and very touchy about the ‘treatment’ of their children in schools. I personally know of a child who was hideously abused by her father since she was an infant. When she was 13, she told the school nurse what was happening to her at home. The father was arrested and after the trial put in prison. That is not to say that someone abusing their child might choose homeschool as a way to hide. Its just not the norm. They most likely would get found out some other way.

My sense of this ‘pressure’ on homeschooling parents has more to do with a political agenda to ‘herd’ people back into the system, much like the issue with vaccines. There are an increasing number of people simply not willing to hand over their children to government run schools nor subject them to possible dangers of vaccines. Freedom of choice has always been an American value. Let’s keep it that way!

I definitely agree with that and you make a very good point. All these cases are sad, but in all of them, homeschooling itself played little or no role. While I can imagine some abusers would and do pull their children from school to hide abuse, my main point was that is not true in any of these cases. They were homeschooling for other reasons. And Paddock’s seems to be the only one in which long-standing abuse which perhaps could have been noted by authorities in a visit was occurring. Sean was only four, but if I remember correctly, she had older children who were of school age who had also been abused and were covered in bruises (I’d check that, but my quirky computer isn’t opening the link at the moment).

You’re right about the source of the association; but the fact remains, if we’re talking about regulation (which seems to mean the state, generally in the form of the local public school bureaucracy, looking over the shoulders of homeschooling families), the red flag must be raised when tragedies like the Yates or Paddock murders are trotted out as having been avoidable through increased regulation.

Both the Yates and Paddock cases involved children under the age for compulsory school attendance. When we start talking about a need to “regulate” families with preschoolers to make sure they aren’t abusing their children, we open a Pandora’s Box that even opponents of homeschooling must see will affect *all* families, whether they eventually send their children to school or not.