This is a post for homeschooling’s “old guard,” the people who first started homeschooling and unschooling back in the day. Writing this post has been hard to do. I do not want to make enemies of the old guard unschoolers and homeschoolers. I just want them to do the right thing. Sadly some of the people that seem to be fighting against dealing with the issues at hand are people who I think should be on my side already.
They sure don’t seem to be on the side of homeschool kids and former homeschool kids as a population though and that’s what I don’t get. You have certain people like Shay Seaborne of Homeschooling is Legal (I don’t mean to single you out, Shay – you just provided a good direct example) who are “old guard unschoolers and homeschoolers” who profess to be all about children’s rights, who are pushing back against the HSLDA monstrosity, and who have signed the petition going around to get HSLDA to address child abuse in homeschooling, but then they go on a former homeschool blogger’s site and say things like this:
In what world do you find this acceptable or accurate? This kind of commentary totally could go on my list of 20 things not to say in response to a homeschool horror story and it obviously needs to stop right away. The reason you don’t hear about this kind of abuse in Texas or Arkansas is the same reason you don’t hear about it in Louisiana, my home state. It’s because it’s silenced, not because it doesn’t exist. It kind of boggles my mind that people who have been championing unschooling and homeschooling would ever believe such things themselves, much less think saying such things to former homeschool kids speaking out about abuse is okay. It just seems so out-of-touch and tone deaf to me. Then I remember that the old guard is coming at it from an entirely different perspective (they chose to do homeschooling, we just had it happen to us) plus there’s the generational divide. We obviously need to bridge some of those gaps, but first I think the old guard needs to have a crucial confrontation with some hard truths before we are able to even begin thinking about being on the same page.
Please understand that I am not trying to play the blame game here, but rather trying to start dialogue that can potentially lead to a reconciliation and recovery process. The first step is admitting that there is a problem (some of you *ahem Shea* apparently haven’t made that step yet) and the second step is taking stock of what factors led to this mess. This process is all difficult and awkward (and so worthwhile!) but this second part involves something most people feel particularly squicky about – outlining where failures in responsibility have occurred and are occurring within a project or community that they are directly involved and emotionally invested in.
The following are some facts that you need to hear and demands (a long time in coming) that need to be made of you and that you need to take heed of. Maybe you won’t like this. Maybe it will seem threatening or upsetting or hurtful to some of you. Maybe you feel some of what I have to say pertains to others but isn’t something you yourself have done or have had a role in. Maybe you’re right but please understand that I am generalizing here and try to listen anyway without freaking out. I will be blunt because I truly feel that we cannot move forward without addressing these issues and clearing the air.
1.) Change is inevitable and some change is sorely needed. So many of you seem to think that homeschooling needs to stay the way you built it, that my generation needs to hush, quit making waves, and tow the line. Well, we will not. We grew up in it so we naturally look at it differently. Some of you really need to look at the unintended consequences of what you built, understand why we feel the way we do, and then, if you are able and willing, join up with those trying to make repairs and modifications.
2.) Homeschooling was hijacked under your watch. You made homeschooling a reality (yes, the iteration of it as it exists in modern times) and so you let “those other children,” children like me, be raised by their parents under the same system you created to ostensibly “liberate” children. This system you helped create, with seemingly good intentions, had a few serious built in bugs. One of the major ones is that it is a framework where parents have all the power, all the choices as to what this supposed liberation of children might look like. I get that you were idealistic back in the day and you thought (hoped?) that homeschooling parents would use this power wisely, put children first. Obviously many did not. You soon saw that bad things were happening to some of us, heard what extreme things some of these parents thought was “good” for children (being hit with objects, arranged marriages, religious indoctrination, and educational discrimination against girls). You noticed that a large and well-organized faction of the homeschooling world turned disturbingly authoritarian and fundamentalist and was recruiting new people quite quickly. Most of you said little and did nothing about it besides feel disgusted and distance yourself. Homeschooling got divided into two groups (one for you, one for them) and the fundamentalists took over the politics of homeschooling. You let them. Getting what you want and then ignoring repercussions, overlooking fraud, waste, and abuse, and forsaking those who it hurts is poor leadership, plain and simple. Instead of fighting for the rights of the children like me, you took detours and drove around the proverbial ghetto in the homeschooling city so that you did not have to look at it.
3.) This child abuse problem is a built-in homeschooling design flaw. The power dynamics within the niche you helped carve out were inherently not in favor of children. Vulnerable populations do best when there are multiple checks and balances tasked with ensuring that they are well treated by the dominant group (in this case, adults). Sometimes this still fails but it is the best we’ve got in this complex and difficult thing that life and human nature is. Putting a vulnerable group 100% under the “protection” of one kind of leadership leads to one of those “absolute power corrupts absolutely” type situations. You were afraid of government authoritarianism but ignored the other kinds of authoritarianism that can be just as much of an issue – those that crop up within church and family. We were left relying on our parents alone for protection and some of us had parents who really hurt us, whether intentionally or not. Other parents got caught up in and were hurt by dysfunctional churches and rigid beliefs (some introduced to them through their homeschooling social circles) and there was often nobody to step in and put a stop to the insanity or often even offer alternative viewpoints. That needs to change. You need to stop being so scared of government that you don’t allow it to do the job we elect people and pay taxes for it to do, which is to keep citizens (including children) safe.
4.) Children’s rights are not compatible with your children “belonging” to you. Kids belong to themselves and you are a caretaker, a parent, a loved one, not an owner. Kids are not pets and they are not servants or slaves or even “blessings” designed to augment your lifestyle. They are human beings in their own right. You need to understand that anytime you say something that remotely sounds like you think your kids belong to you as property or chattel, God-given or not, it is very triggering to those of us raised under an extreme version of this degrading and negating perspective.
5.) You personally benefitted from something that hurt kids. You could have joined Raymond Moore and put up a fight against the fundamentalist takeover but it seems that you didn’t. Many of you distanced yourself, ignored and denied the issues, and let this stuff happen because rocking the boat might have messed stuff up for you. You concluded that a free-for-all was fine as long as your family was ok and you blogged about your idyllic family homeschooling life while kids you never met (and perhaps some you did) got beaten and left illiterate due to the lack of outside oversight you helped create and a serious lack of internal policing of boundaries within the movement. If you had stood up to this, called people out, advocated for children to have true rights protected by law, you might have stood to lose a modicum of power, face more outside scrutiny, file a bit more paperwork, and have a few more bureaucratic hassles for your own little corner of the homeschooling world and you obviously didn’t want that. You thought nearsightedly about the hassles of your own paperwork, and you didn’t think about how this was a much bigger deal for many of us kids, that it might be a matter of a good childhood education versus a toxic childhood education or even a matter of life and death for some. This was selfish and wrong and very very harmful. We needed you to stand up for us and you were not there.
6.) You helped perpetuate harmful myths. The idea that parents always know best and that because teachers are paid for their time that they don’t care are both toxic things and both untrue. Plenty teachers care deeply and plenty parents definitely do not know or do best. Government also does not always equal tyranny. In fact, a lack of government creates a wild west type setting where a different type of tyranny can occur – tyranny of the strong and socially connected over the weak and defenseless. You perpetuated these myths and ignored the dark side of what can and does happen within many families when there are no outside influences encouraging people to do the right thing.
7.) Questioning you is not abusing or disrespecting you. The fact that people might question you as to what you did and didn’t do regarding these issues and wonder what you are doing and aren’t doing in regards to the issue of abuse or socialization reflects positively on them. They care. They’re curious. They want to know. Defensiveness and acting like you are persecuted just by having questions directed at you is ridiculous. You are an individual, with individual rights, but you are also answerable to your community and your society when it comes to what you do to other members of society, what policies you help usher in, recommend, and stand behind. Many of you have actually enjoyed a position of unrivaled privilege for many years, an expert role, so to now claim persecution is offensive, obtuse, and obnoxious. Just answer the questions and if you cannot do so satisfactorily, that should tell you (and the rest of us) something.
8.) Deflecting to your “public school problems” talking points when speaking with former homeschool kids gets you nowhere. Public school is your default comparison. For most of us, it’s not ours. That’s because you homeschooled us. Most of the former homeschoolers I’ve been talking about this issue with were homeschooled K-12. Many couldn’t give a flying fig about what the local public schools were doing or not doing during their primary education. That just wasn’t their world or their sphere of knowing. Also, I am one of the few former homeschool kids speaking out who did get the opportunity to go to a public high school and personally I found that it had its problems but sure wasn’t the bogeyman some of you made it out to be. What I had to deal with at home, a fundamentalist, authoritarian, abusive and neglectful environment, was so much worse as to belie comparison. Instead of bringing up public schools and what they do and don’t do every time a conversation is started, understand that for many former homeschool kids public school experiences are somewhat of an unknown quantity, something only experienced through movies and books and friends’ stories, and it often doesn’t seem so bad to many of us, who experienced much more extreme bullying, authoritarianism, and rote learning in our homes with people who were supposed to love us, day in and day out, for years. Most of us also simply do not have the passion for the issues of public schools that you do due to this unfamiliarity. We have strong feelings for the issues of homeschooling, so when we discuss homeschooling issues, please try to stay on topic, thank you.
9.) Y’all got the socialization thing quite wrong, so stop saying socialization is not a problem. Kids need peer interaction and not all peer interaction among groups of kids is damaging or results in bullying. Spending time with people your own age is an intrinsic need and should be facilitated as conscientiously as balanced meals. Making same-age friends of your own choice is amazing and not being able to do so is lonely and painful. John Holt himself minimized the importance of this peer to peer interaction and the fundamentalist Christians intentionally preclude it as much as possible, only engaging in supervised family-to-family gatherings so that kids from different families are almost never alone together. What did it do for kids raised like this? We spent years craving same-age companions and when we did finally get them, we discovered that we did not fit in. We were strangers, outliers, oddballs. Too many of us were left us feeling somewhat like immigrants in our own country. That is not okay, it is not something you as a parent who went to public or private school (no matter how much of an oddball you might have been) are likely able to identify with, and personally the pain from that was some of the hardest to overcome.
10.) You need to be open to homeschool kids’ true stories of bad homeschooling. Your generation created homeschooling, ostensibly to liberate children from rote learning and to protect them from negative influences. We are the generation of homeschooled children and we are saying that too many of us were exposed to negative influences 24/7 at home, exposed to controlling, dysfunctional, authoritarian environments where we were not allowed to be the people we inherently are. I get that it is hard for you to hear that the education method you helped create to protect us from the things that hurt you or others in public school went on to hurt us badly. Still, you need to listen to the truth. Did you hear that? We said it was bad homeschooling that kept us from fully blossoming into what we were meant to be and we had to do catch-up once we were out. It’s reality. Please deal with it.
11.) You are not the victims here. So many of you seem to have lived in your own little middle class bubble with your Lake Wobegon effect, only wanting to hear the good stories of homeschooling so that you could continue on saying to all who would listen that homeschooling was the best thing since sliced bread. You convinced yourselves that teaching your own family, occasionally sharing tips, and being a part of a group or the occasional homeschool fair (or even selling curricula) was all that was needed of you. Now that we say that you did not do enough to help marginalized homeschool kids, do not whine that you are being maligned, persecuted, or have been given the short end of the stick. Have a sense of perspective. The true victims of this are the little kids who are still going through what I and people like me endured. There are homeschool kids dealing with that kind of environment right now at this very moment, there are kids who wound up dead, and there are adults you will never hear from because maltreatment in a homeschool setting effectively left them stunted, or even worse, still imprisoned in an abusive home environment. You might be upset to hear that homeschooling isn’t 100% above average like you thought it was, but have a sense of perspective please.
12.) You cannot disavow us. Far too many of us had mediocre to awful experiences, and yes, we call ourselves homeschoolers. Now that we are of age to speak about what was done to us in the name of homeschooling, you are beginning to realize that you cannot just keep saying “those other homeschoolers” or “that wasn’t real homeschooling.” The general public, the non-homeschoolers, (rightly) do not make such a distinction. They agree that we are homeschoolers because our parents claimed to be homeschooling parents, no matter what they did at home. You need to recognize this too.
13.) You cannot claim us as “successes.” You may be impressed by our moxie or you may be going for a version of the “no harm, no foul” argument. It’s hard to tell. Either way it doesn’t work to try and claim us as “doing well” because of the quality of our homeschooling experience. You certainly can find ways to say that through our activism we must embody the best of what homeschooling teaches – free thinking, independence, a counter-cultural bent, but I have some ugly news on that as well. People who come from public school, private school, and utter lack of school do that stuff too. It’s a human nature thing, a personality thing, and a socialization thing. Counter-cultural ideas are more easily picked up by some than others and they gain traction when there is something in the culture that is not meeting human needs. Also, there are much better ways to create these “free-thinking” traits without the abuse, heartache, and pain that many of us endured. Many of us developed these traits the hard way and many of us (those you never hear from) did not develop them at all. Those of us who are now out running our mouths about this often have a bit of survivors guilt as well. We know and love people who never made it to this point. That’s right, I personally know former mistreated homeschoolers who you would never call “counter-cultural” or likely even notice at all. They are still like I used to try to be – keeping their head down, not rocking the boat, just trying to pass for normal, and struggling every day with a lack of education and/or certain health problems resulting from their upbringing that they are still deeply ashamed of and hurt by. Are you going to claim them as “successes” too? I didn’t think so.
14.) Misleading and “liar stats” do not help your case. So many of you are still trying to deflect and leave us as unclaimed baggage, saying that abuse in public school settings is more prevalent or that homeschooling is almost perfect in comparison. The issue of negating our experience by doing this should not be overlooked, but your use of numbers and blanket assertions that have no scientific backing is a huge problem. For example, you can say “there is more abuse in public schools than within homeschools” because, sure, when you look at the numbers of people in the population, homeschooling is certainly a minority. However, when it comes to the percentages within each population (homeschooling and public school), the truth is we just don’t know. Nobody has studied it. It’s a big question mark. You certainly can say that you think homeschooling is the most awesome education method ever but you cannot use data to back it up because that data doesn’t exist. I can’t tell you how many times old guard homeschoolers assert such nonexistent “data” or hearsay as fact or who use Brian Ray’s bogus NHERI research to back up their assertions. If you are going to claim the fundamentalists’ “data” are you going to also claim what the fundamentalists did with their liar stats too? If not, if you want to differentiate yourself as not being included with “those people” then stop using their debunked numbers on your blogs and websites, and stop making up or regurgitating “facts” and “data” that simply do not exist. If you want such data, it will have to be collected. Until then, hush it and admit that you are as in the dark on the breakdown of these numbers as the rest of us. You are guessing. You may want it to be true or think it likely is, but you do not have proof.
15.) If you are defending an institution sooner than defending flesh-and blood people who are hurting and could use your help, you have lost your way. Yes, homeschooling is an institution, and its politics have trumped the people it was meant to serve – children. Isn’t this the exact complaint you have about public school? That teachers unions, employment concerns, and the tendency for uninvested workers to cut corners often leave things bad off for children? Well, nice job recreating that mindset in your illustrious alternative. Who speaks for the population of children in homeschooling? Well, some of us homeschool graduates are trying mightily but many of you don’t seem to want to hear us, preferring to label us as something undesirable so you can continue on with your eyes on the holy grail of the homeschooling lifestyle, stepping on the toes of (and sometimes outright stampeding over) all the homeschooled children who aren’t your own offspring.
16.) If you care about children’s rights, you need to champion the effort to address child abuse within homeschooling. All of the unschooling parents and the non-fundamentalist homeschooling parents should be standing right there with us, have our backs in this, but too many of you are being quiet. I know some of you do have our backs wholeheartedly and others have our backs conditionally, but sadly not enough do. We get lumped in with the “anti-homeschoolers” instead, labeled a threat to be defended against, our concerns brushed off as being overblown or misdirected. I know many of you are scared, still living back in the late 80’s when the legality of homeschooling was precarious. But today we are in 2013 when that’s been settled and it’s children’s rights within homeschooling that are precarious. Some old guard homeschoolers have have recognized this and begun to get behind us. Pat Farenga (John Holt’s right hand man) is one of them. He passed on Rebecca Gorman’s change.org petition asking the HSLDA to address child abuse and he blogged about the issue. You know what happened? He took some flack from other unschoolers who preferred to continue on with the “la la la la la, I can’t hear you or see you” strategy when it comes to such problems within homeschooling. I guess in their eyes Pat wasn’t being properly defensive of homeschooling as an abuse-free zone or towing the unofficial line about casting blame elsewhere, so I say good for him. Pat Farenga’s initiative and public support for addressing the issue (although he has not called for any major changes or any added outside oversight) stands in stark contrast to a lot of the defensive posturing we’ve encountered in this effort to address child abuse within homeschooling.
17.) You need to support outside protections for children or this won’t get better. So many of you are into gentle parenting. So many of you are into children’s rights. So many of you are anti-regulation nonetheless. Why? How? Do you think that we can just go ask everyone “pretty please will you do the right thing?” Sure you can do that and generally they’ll do the right thing, just as generally parents will try to do what they feel is best for their children. Thing is, this is not some hard and fast rule about life and anyone who believes it comes across as incredibly naive to me. Policy for an at-risk group can’t be based on the “honor system” and when it is, you can’t expect something good to result.
18.) You need to have awkward conversations in order to confront the issues. Some unschoolers (like these at Home Education Magazine’s unschooling.com) are trying to discuss abuse within homeschooling and unschooling, attempting to have that talk. The first tries may seem a little stilted and we might learn some things that we find shocking or surprising. For instance, the idea that some might consider structured environments and mild authoritarian behavior as being inherently abusive, or that a discussion on homeschooling can so easily sidetrack into a discussion of Franciscan priests and attachment parenting, but it was good to see it as a start. It’s opening dialogue, shedding sunlight on the matter, and that is what is so desperately needed in such a situation. Can you write something better? Share something more? Build on this? If you can, please do.
19.) Not all less-than-perfect parenting or structured childrearing is abuse. I shouldn’t even have to say this, but there are some people within the homeshooling and unschoolng communities who have been deflecting the child abuse conversation by saying that all parenting is abusive or anything besides their favored brand of attachment parenting is abusive, or that telling your kid that they can’t drink juice right before bed even though the kid gets upset about it is abuse. This is foolishness and I’m going to call it for what it really is – child abuse apologism. Because if everything is child abuse or frivolous things are called child abuse then we really don’t have to deal with it, do we? Real child abuse (beatings, psychological torture, sexual coercion, withholding sustenance, etc.) can then flourish. We all must take a hard and analytical look at the underlying causes of the actual authoritarian and abuse-tolerant homeschooling culture that exists today. Once we have done that, we can do the part that we all look forward to – creating and implementing effective changes that make homeschooling better for kids.
20.) Doing these aforementioned problematic things does not mean you are a “bad person.” You are an ordinary human being with your own struggles and you may have fallen into a trap that catches many people. You are not alone in making mistakes or letting idealism blind you when working with something. This is incredibly common. What else is incredibly common is for people to double down and deny that it exists, that they had any part of it, refuse to discuss it, blame others, and claim to be so misunderstood that they are now the ones being hurt. So let me just say that this stuff happened and we need you to do something else besides respond like that. The kids need you to suck it up, overcome your pride, and get to work fixing the problems.
I know that most of the people who helped create this mess likely did not intend to build something that would ever be used to hurt kids, and most would have been outright horrified if they’d known that something they started in good faith was seen and then used as a weak point for extremists to exploit and widen so big that they could practically drive a freight train through our society. The thing is, this happened. This is real. It sucks but it is serious and we have got to fix it. Us as former homeschoolers and homeschooling parents. Us as Americans. Us as the world. Us as individuals. It is a human rights issue. It is a Christian issue. It is a parenting issue. It is a gender issue. It is an educational issue. More knee-jerk defensiveness and spreading unfounded myths of homeschooling exceptionalism (and there has been lots of both) will get us nowhere. If you have done or contributed to some of the things I listed above, you do not need to say you are sorry or even feel compunction. We can let the past be the past. Just step forward to try and make it right. Whether you had any role in creating this at all, if you love homeschooling, if you love children, you need to be first in line to start addressing the serious systemic problems that are coming to light today.
Also, if there is something you want to do to help immediately, you could read “Jennifer’s” story here (she is the little sister of a friend of mine, name changed for privacy) and pitch in for some of the things she is in need of. She recently turned 18 and just escaped a bad homeschooling situation with a police escort and little more than the clothes on her back.
Becoming Worldly 
Would you mind if I reposted this on my blog https://responsiblehomeschooling.wordpress.com/ next Tuesday? I’d like to have the full text, but of course I’ll provide proper attribution and a link back here as well.
Hi Karen, sure – that’d be fine! 🙂
Thanks, Heather. It’s scheduled to post tomorrow (June 4).
Thank you for this post! I was not homeschooled but I was brought up in an abusive environment and I know that were people who knew what was going on and did nothing to help me, so I can imagine how it must feel to have a whole section of society close their eyes to the abuse happening under their noses.
I have seen how vehemently some homeschooling parents defend their choices and deny that abuse happens, I have seen how they throw up those false statistics and call No True Scotsman when people tell their stories. And I find that enraging, I am sure for those of you who lived it it must be 1000 times worse. I hope this post starts opening some cracks in that wall you’ve all been banging on, I hope it makes some of those homeschooling parents think about the children and young adults they failed with their silence.
Heather,
Like Karen, I do not have the time right now to give your post a full response. Yet I would like to take the time to address one glaring misconception you put forth and offer a hard earned perspective.
Many of the old timers – very notably Shay Seaborn – did not and do not deny the abuse you describe, and did join in Dr. Moore’s fight, both in general terms and in specific abuse situations.
(As examples please see http://homeedmag.com/closerlook/homeschooling-freedoms-at-risk/, http://homeedmag.com/seelhoffvs.welch/truth.html, http://homeedmag.com/newscomm/and-micheal-pearl-laughs/)
The unfortunate situation, which brings up the thorny issue we ‘old timers’ have wrestled with for 30 years or more, is that the vast majority of abuse cases have come from the community Dr. Moore most associated with.
Speaking plainly, the vast majority of the abuse cases can be attributed to extreme religious beliefs and practices.
For your part in urging action I applaud you. However, 30 years of political activism tells me that no secular institution can truly address this issue. It is the religious community that is not only uniquely suited, but the only community which can confront this abuse issue in fundamental, life changing ways.
Mark Hegener
Publisher, Home Education Magazine
Religious communities simply aren’t equipped to address abuse. Abuse is a legal issue: victims must be encouraged to report abuse to the police and pursue complaints through the legal system. This is totally outside the purview of a church congregation or ministry. And the stories coming out of the homeschool movement are evidence that religious communities have failed, utterly, to recognize and address child abuse when it occurs. When you consider the stories posted by Heather, and by organizations like Homeschoolers Anonymous, alongside the sex abuse scandals roiling Sovereign Grace Ministries, ABWE and others, a clear picture emerges: the American church has failed abuse victims.
If you are truly concerned for the welfare of children, you will agree the homeschool parents need to be held to the same standard as trained educators. That includes training in child abuse recognition and prevention. And you do abuse victims a disservice by suggesting that the very communities that often collaborate in abuse coverups are best situated to react to abuse.
Mark, by “community Dr. Moore most associated with” do you mean the Seventh Day Adventists, “Christian Homeschoolers,” or something else entirely? I have seen Dr. Moore’s “community” described as both (depending on the time period you are referring to). As a homeschooler of 12 years, I’d never even heard of Dr. Moore until this year when I started researching homeschooling.
If we’re singling out communities or leaders for rebuke, why don’t we discuss those who ascribe to the teachings of Michael Pearl or Bill Gothard? Almost every ATI alumni (myself included) that I communicate with had at least a hefty dose of spiritual abuse, if not physical and sexual abuse.
I agree with you that the “vast majority of the abuse cases” probably are in families associated with “extreme religious beliefs ,” or as I call it fundamentalism. The issue at hand is that the religious fundamentalist homeschooling patriarchs (Pearl Phillips,, Farris, Harris, Ham, etc) were (and still are) the leaders of the Christian Homeschooling movement. Hamm and Phillips are keynote speakers at this year’s CHEA conference in CA. You can’t tell me that these sexist, fundamentalist voices do not continue to influence tens of thousands of Christian homeschooling families through “official platforms” like giant homeschooling conventions.
Oddly, it was the Home Education Magazine (May-June 1991) that featured a number of articles relating to Christian homeschooling leaders and their attempts at co-opting homeschooling. The articles warned that some Christian leaders were inaccurately, and unjustly, attempting to speak for the homeschool movement as a whole. This is not some issue of the past, relegated to a few religious zealots. The problem is that religious fundamentalists have taken over the homeschooling movement, especially the Christian Homeschooling movement. .
At a “Leadership Summit” in 2009 Phillips, HSLDA, and others of the patriarchal homeschooling ilk meet to discuss plants to co-opt the homeschooling movement, institute theocracy, and END CPS. Read more here: http://goo.gl/ADhwT HSLDA actively lobbies against anonymous tip protections in CPS and even called a man who caged his children a “hero.” http://goo.gl/Yyk3G
I do believe that secular homeschoolers and mainstream Christians make up a larger portion of homeschoolers than they used to, but I certainly this this is an on-going struggled and not easily dismissed as an out growth of merely Dr. Moore.
I dunno. I’m not sure that religious homeschoolers abuse their kids more than non-religous homeschoolers. It just kind of exists, and needs to be dealt with.
Lana, by sheer numbers a logical person could conclude that religious home schoolers would also be a majority component of abusers even without Google. But it only takes a bit of internet research to uncover the grisly truth.
All of the home schooled children I know about who were murdered by a parent or who murdered their parents or wives/girlfriends/neighbors (Coudy Alexander, for one). (http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/articles/EPRU-0503-104-OWI.pdf ; http://poundpuplegacy.org/node/20821) were religious. There could be some non-religious home school murder out there, but the preponderance are religious.
Mark Hegener: You said:
As a 20+yr homeschooling mother of seven, may I respectfully ask you to remove your head from the sand. I had a hard time reading your comment.
Please identify the abuses connected with Dr. Moore.
When we are discussing abuse issues, many of them are crimes. The religious community has no business trying to handle them (feel free to read countless church abuse stories on my blog). The Bible is clear that Christians are to avail themselves to the God-appointed civil authority (Romans 13:1) for matters of criminal nature.
Julie Anne
SpiritualSoundingBoard.com
Mark, just to be clear, I wasn’t deferring a “full response” to Heather’s post to a later time. I think what she has to say is very important, and rather than diminish the power of her words with my own paraphrase, I was asking her permission to reprint this post in full on my own blog. I’m not doing so to debunk or even challenge what she has to say, but to help get this message out there. What exactly homeschooling reform should look like is certainly a matter for debate, but I don’t challenge the assumption that reform and regulation are needed.
Hi Mark,
Thank you for your response and I am interested in potentially talking with you more about these issues if you’d have time. I think we have reached a point where there are no longer 2 factions in the homeschooling debate (fundamentalists v. inclusivists), but rather 3. Homeschool kids have come of age and we look at things differently. Also (and while I certainly can’t speak for everyone) many of us don’t look at regulation the same as you do at all. You look at a deregulated environment as freedom. We look at it as a lack of necessary checks and balances and a loss of our civil rights – that we are citizens deserving of civil protection too, same as anybody else, and that was stolen from many of us as defenseless little kids by the deregulation efforts that both the inclusivist and fundamentalist sides of homeschooling engaged in.
I don’t know if the regulation issue is a mountain we can overcome with dialogue, but I do think its in all of our interests to start some real good coordinated anti-child-abuse work within homeschooling ASAP and that is a doable goal. As the editor of HEM, you are certainly in an excellent position to help with that if you so choose, and so I am quite glad to hear from you and to learn that you are considering these issues and feel strongly that child abuse within homeschooling is unacceptable.
As someone raised within the extreme religious beliefs and practices side of homeschooling, I was rather unfamiliar with the more secular side of homeschooling until I was older. I also hadn’t heard of Raymond Moore by name but my parents were influenced by his “better late than early” ideas before the HSLDA side of the thing got their hooks in them. It seems to me that Raymond Moore was a very conservative Christian but nonetheless an inclusivist – he did not believe that homeschooling should be a gated community behind a statement of faith and he loathed the power-hungry HSLDA-type cult monstrosity. He also didn’t strike me as particularly anti-regulation. Rather he wanted a sense of community on a local level and often interceded to help settle disagreements and explain homeschooling to school superintendents who didn’t know much about it. To me this looks like such a preferable alternative to the adversarial, fearful climate we have in homeschooling now and something I’d like to see homeschooling turn back towards.
I have read the posts you linked on Home Education Magazine (had seen most of them before) and I do applaud that you are still trying to get the word out on how organizations like the HSLDA are not actually into real homeschooling but are pretty much exploiting homeschooling as a crack through which to ram their Christian Reconstructionist freight train and a way to make loads of money off of scared homeschoolers meantime.
However, that is where our perspectives largely diverge. In my opinion, Shay Seaborne’s words in the quote I included above come across as categorically denying the extent of the abuse problem and removing homeschooling from the equation when homeschooling is the setting these things are occurring in. I find that quite problematic and also way too common (see Heart Sees comment below for a more extreme, yet still common, version of this). Shay made assertions that cannot be backed up and she acted like Texas and Arkansas didn’t have a systemic problem simply because she didn’t see it. I think if she and others (as I said before, I wasn’t meaning to single her out, just use her speech as an example of prevalent commentary us former homeschool kids run into) want to do the right thing here, the first start would be to familiarize themselves with what systemic child abuse issues look like (hint: they generally don’t look as extreme on the outside as they are on the inside) and learn what kind of dialogue is generally seen as constructive in addressing abuse so it can be faced head on and properly dealt with in the homeschooling community now that awareness of the issue is being raised by those of us who experienced it.
Like I said in my post, the factionalization of homeschooling that happened where the two main types diverged and built disparate support structures did the opposite of help at-risk homeschooled children. It was easy for one group to call any family they felt suspicious of as “those other homeschoolers” or “not real homeschoolers” and kids like me were left out to dry in some no mans land. What’s sad is homeschooling was originally supposed to be about the kids, all kids!
So while I wholeheartedly agree with you that religious leaders need to address the child abuse issue head on (particularly clarifying what they think “the rod” means in the bible, IMO), I strongly disagree that this is something that faith communities alone should tackle. We cannot pass the buck. It must stop here. Homeschoolers should tackle it too. Also, while I’m sure I could learn a lot from you and your 30 years of activism on the issue, I and other former homeschool kids do bring something powerful and new to the table that for a long time was unavailable – our experiences, our narratives. I started speaking out and am very happy to have met all these others like me, ready to fight for other homeschool kids to have it better than we did.
I think the best chance for solutions is if we all do our part to deal with it, counteract the fundamentalist message on what homeschooling should look like on multiple fronts. Perhaps this could be done with Home Education Magazine leadership, since you already have a history of it? I think so many homeschoolers are so scared of government (largely due to HSLDA fearmongering) that they simply don’t interfere when they see something amiss in another family. Also, some don’t know what the signs of abuse are or what it might look like within a homeschool setting, so maybe you could address that too, have an expert speak on it. This issue is particularly a problem for conservative Christian homeschoolers if they’re surrounded by other homeschoolers who have been influenced by Pearl and Ezzo discipline methods. Without hearing pushback against these ideas within the homeschooling community itself, too many come to accept it as normal or even adopt some of these methods themselves.
As it is, you probably know we were petitioning the HSLDA to address child abuse – say what it looks like, how you might notice it in a homeschool setting, and what people should do when they see it. Of course the HSLDA won’t do this for obvious reasons, but if you want to take on the issue and do it (show em’ how it should be done), that would be great. Also, if you want to work on it together with some of us newly-minted homeschool reform activists (many of us, including me, who have personal experience with the types of abuse you’d be addressing), I think that we could definitely find some common ground on a “see something, say something” type of campaign even if we don’t agree on everything.
Anyway, let me know what you think and email me at becomingworldly (at) gmail (dot) com if you’re interested in talking further.
Sincerely,
Heather Doney, MPP
Heather,
I agree 100% with everything you have written. I will back off of #13, the one thing I have believed and said in the past. I did not see how it was problematic or hurtful to home school grads, and I will stop saying it anymore. ( Not saying I bear no responsiblity for other points, just that’s the only one that I did not understand was a problem that I was currently doing.)
We need better home school regulation. It would be admirable and proper for this demand for better regulation to come from within the home school community.
I disagree with Mr. Hegener that the religious community is uniquely suited to deal with the problem of abuse in home schooling. I do agree that most of those committing these crimes against children are religious, but saying that those causing the problem are the only ones who can solve it is untrue.
We don’t ask people who commit crimes to police themselves. We have laws and a police force hired by government to enforce those laws. Saying religious home schoolers are the only ones who can stop abuse is like saying that drug dealers are the only ones who can end the meth problem.
Fortunately society didn’t pretend that would work, and we have laws regulating the sale of ingredients used to make meth and keep a legal record of those who buy them. People purchasing Sudafed for the legal use have nothing to fear and do not mind complying with government regulation. It has cut way down on the meth problem here in NC. If we were still waiting for actual meth producers to police themselves, the problem would only have gotten worse.
Home schooling needs to be better regulated, by the government. It’s the only way we can provide protection to home schooled kids. People who home school legally, ethically and safely need not worry about increased regulation. In fact, they should welcome it!
We should welcome it because the number one goal of home schooling is well-nurtured, well-educated, healthy children. Right?
This post is nothing if not the blame game. Discussion might be good, but not given the avalanche of accusations and judgments which comprise this opening throw-down. The problem is not, never was and never will be homeschooling. The problem is that some parents abuse and neglect. Religious parents abuse, secular parents abuse, atheist parents abuse, parents abuse. Much of the time when they abuse and neglect, they have no idea that’s what they’re doing. If there is to be regulation, the focus should be in that direction, on regulating who should become parents in the first place. Since there is no way to predict, though, who will be a good parent and who won’t before the fact, such regulation is not possible (if it were desirable, which I very much doubt many would think that it is).
There is nothing new about young folks growing up and attacking their folks for the way they were raised. That’s an old story. What’s new is the internet and the potential to blast parents internationally and publicly for their failures and shortcomings, their bad and harmful decisions, and yes, their abuse and neglect, and to get all kinds of support for that. Nothing good — let alone “recovery” or “reconciliation” — can come from this kind of thing. There is no generic “homeschool parent”. There is no generic “homeschooled child.” There are infinite numbers of individuals, situations, personalities, connections, families and contexts, infinite numbers of backgrounds, histories, lifestyles and sets of beliefs. It makes no sense, therefore, to focus on homeschooling as though it is the problem; it wasn’t, isn’t, and never will be the problem. I’m sorry you’ve taken this path. I don’t think this was a good decision. Still, I wish you well.
Your heart sees? You are heartless, so I don’t really see that could possibly be. Blame game? If the shoe fits, ma’am or sir, I suggest you repent. If not, how on earth could you respond with anything other than compassion, respect and a desire to help if you did indeed have a heart. Nope, Heart Sees is a clear misnomer.
Hey, “Heart Sees”
This is not a blame-game. This post is a list of hurtful things said by numerous people who seem to want to ignore this foul gangrene instead of cutting off the leg and preventing sepsis to the whole body.
WE are not attacking our parents. I received a stellar education, although my parents homeschooled illegally, not reporting anything in a state with a lot of regulation. However, along with a great education, both of my college-degreed parents heaped on a lot of mental and spiritual abuse.
If I can prevent anyone from suffering like I did, I will keep telling my story and encouraging people like Heather to do the same.
While non-religious people can also abuse their kids, abusers who are parents will FLOCK to a system that allows them to hide the abuse. My father was anti-authority and accountability. He loved being an independent pastor and homeschooling his kids. But it was a recipe for disaster– and disaster is what happened to his children.
This is the only way we are allowed to communicate. We homeschooled kids are told to shut up and to protect the ‘legacy’ of our parents. This is the only discussion we can have. Please open you eyes to what is really going on. Abuse is rampant. If you cant see it you are choosing not to.
I’m sad for what you went through. I’m also dismayed that you chose Shay as an example in your argument. I am happy to say that Shay has worked tirelessly for decades for the welfare of children in and out of homeschooling. There couldn’t be anyone less appropriate to tar with an abuse accusation.
Hi Elizabeth,
I certainly did not tar Shay with an abuse accusation and I don’t know where you got that from, frankly. Although I did use her words as an example of what not to say, I was careful to note that I was not singling her out. I definitely do not have any reason to imagine or expect that Shay is an abusive parent. Rather I think Shay (and many others) are out of touch regarding the issue of abuse because they do not recognize the form it often takes in the homeschooling world, are quick to distance themselves from the issue in general when they do see it, and defend the institution of homeschooling rather than defend the actual kids that get hurt. It is a common problem but also a lack of proper priorities. It does not indicate Shay is an abuser, rather that she (and many others) really need to do some background work and figure out how to be part of the solution. Comments like the one she made are a huge part of the problem and that is why I chose to include it. We need leadership that addresses the abuse head on or homeschooling will have its own version of the Catholic Church abuse scandal.
I bear Shay no ill will and if she wanted to meet for coffee and discuss these issues I’d happily meet with her.
Oh NOOO! I had gotten to #10, and went to check what the Lake Wobegon effect was and lost it all!!!
I do want to engage in this conversation with you, Heather. You deserve to have the dialogue. I can fill in some of the blanks here. And I will :::sigh::: redo what I wrote, and finish the second half. I was going point by point.
I’m not sure you’d really consider me “Old Guard” enough, but probably you would. My kids are 24, 22, 19. We started homeschooling in 1996.
More soon.
Wow, that sucks. Yeah, if I make a long comment I usually cut and paste the thing I’m responding to, write it up in Microsoft Word, and then paste my response into the comment box. I’ve had that happen too. Anyway, looking forward to hearing what you have to say and sorry you’re having to write it over. 😦
OK, 2nd try. 😉
Heather, I’ve read through your post, including all the links. I’d like to address each point you’re making one at a time. I think that will the best way to really open a dialogue. Some of which, you’ll see, I agree with you.
But first, I want to tell you that I know Shay Seaborne. She might have been an easy target for you to use to make a point, but it’s not accurate. And asking her to hush, but rejecting it when others ask you to, makes no sense to me. No one should be asked to be quiet when we’re trying to get to the bottom of something. Secular homeschoolers probably do not have all the information about the situations you and others endured, and I’m not sure you have an accurate idea of what secular homeschoolers (and non-fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers as well) did/do/etc.
So hopefully, I haven’t gotten us off on the wrong foot by starting with that. Yes, I did read your 20 things not to say, but hopefully, since this isn’t telling your story and you are actually inviting dialogue, it will be okay.
First, let me say that, as a mom, I’m so sad to hear of abuse. And as a homeschooling advocate, I do NOT want to brush it under the rug or pretend it didn’t happen to keep “homeschooling” untarnished in the public eye. Grown homeschoolers have voices that should be heard. I believe this so much, I’m in the process of writing my own book with over 70 homeschooled teens and grown homeschoolers participating, sharing what it was like to homeschool as a teenager. So, you don’t have to convince me that you, and others, should be heard.
OK, so let’s tackle this…
1.) I believe that all things evolve. And homeschooling is no exception. And, I’ve already said how I am not one to ask you to stop making waves.
2.) There’s a lot in this one. I agree that homeschooling was hijacked by the fundamentalist Christians. They were only able to do that through the funding and support of HSLDA. The secular homeschoolers had no such entity. The National Homeschool Association, which I think might have been late 80’s, early 90’s, tried. But they wanted to do everything by consensus, and they couldn’t make the progress they wanted. Homeschoolers had too many diverse opinions. I wasn’t part of that, since we didn’t start homeschooling until 1996. I was aware of the fundamentalist homeschoolers being a force to be reckoned with, but I wanted to homeschool my kids. So I was willing to pick their brains, gather what info I could, and strike out on my own. I discovered other homeschoolers only loosely connected once we began. Because I’m an organizer, and because I wanted good experiences for my 3 kids, I created new support groups. (We were military so I did this a few times when we moved.) The internet was pretty new, and we were just getting connected. By 1999, I, along with many others, created the National Home Education Network. http://www.nhen.org . We were, in fact, trying to show the world that people were actually homeschooling for all kinds of reasons. And the religious homeschoolers were just better organized. We created an organization where everyone was welcome. And some Christian homeschoolers actively participated in NHEN, trying to detach themselves from the fundamentalists who wanted only partriarchal, authoritarian “school-at-home” homeschooling families in their groups. Many actively worked to shut down our organizations, reminding their more moderate members to “be not equally yoked” with us. Remember, we were just volunteers. Moms. Trying to homeschool our own kids in a climate that really wasn’t yet as it is today. Our focus was try to make it better for all homeschoolers.
I can remember in the days of AOL, (mid-90’s) there was much talk of quiverfull families. It was the first I had ever heard of it. I found it all bizarre. I grew up Catholic, later became Episcopalian, married an atheist. I differed from the True “Old Guard” in that I was a suburban soccer mom. I had no intention of homeschooling my children until I saw what it was like for them in school. So my focus was about creating a nurturing, inspiring, creative environment.
I didn’t feel disgusted or push away from your family’s ways, they were always welcome to participate in our groups. They didn’t want to be near us. They created the “us” & “them.” We weren’t “driving around the ghetto,” we spoke up wherever opportunities presented themselves. No children that needed rescuing were even IN my path, so I wasn’t focused on that.
3.) Your religious upbringing has influenced your ideas about humanity. I do not share your belief in the inherent evil of man. I believe people are inherently good. My parenting styles were enormously different from your family’s, and any of those in the fundamentalist churches. I do see that their giant distrust of all government does create a spot for people to take advantage of the situation. I just don’t believe more *homeschooling* regulation will do anything to change the parenting styles of these people who are acting on some warped religious doctrine. When I looked around on your website, I saw that your abuse continued even after you went to school. I’m sickened to think that that happened to you. But it leads me to believe it’s a bigger problem than homeschooling.
4.) I agree 100%.
5.) By the time secular homeschoolers were organized enough to do much, Dr. Moore’s white papers were already written. As a non-fundamentalist, I felt like my role was simply to share that information with anyone who would listen. I hoped that any moderates in your family’s homeschooling circles would come to their senses and many did. Obviously, not enough. We weren’t being selfish. We tried SO hard to keep that gate as wide open as possible so as to let people see we were not of the devil. Some did. Some didn’t.
6.) I’m with you that govt does not = tyranny. But I do not think the school system is the best way to learn. Not because I fear Big Bad Government. And I certainly did not teach my children to hate all things governmental. I agree that some teachers have good intentions but the system is somewhat antiquated, doesn’t implement its own research about learning, and often prevents kids from truly reaching their potential. I can see how, for you, it was a relief to be there – of course it was an improvement from what you had at home. Sadly.
7.) I have never shied away from anyone questioning what I’ve done. So maybe you’re talking about someone else. This is where I have a little problem with this list you’ve made. Some of the problems are directed at secular homeschoolers. Those I can address. Some should be addressed to the mothers that were your mother’s friends, those in your circles. I’m sure they want you to be quiet – just as we watched moms leave their circles and were completely maligned. It’s a pretty mean crowd.
8.) I don’t really want to mesh the pros and cons of public school with the real issues of child abuse that are happening in homes across America. But I can see how some people might want to talk about it in using it to defend why they chose to do something. In sharing their stories of abuse, I agree that giving people room to talk and be heard is all that matters. In a dialogue such as this though, people ought to be able to speak their mind and intentions. It’s the only way to really get to a resolution.
9.) I can completely see how your family’s style of homeschooling would not make socialization in the real world easy. It wasn’t our experience. My kids were out in the community socializing with kids from school and kids from homeschooling.
10.) I am. That’s why I am working on that book. It’s not hard to hear that this happened. I’m sad that it did. But I don’t feel defensive about homeschooling over this issue. I do feel like everyone didn’t have your experience though. And all voices should be heard. Granted, no one is trying to shush the voices of the kids who had happy homeschooling lives. You should be able to tell your true story. Good, bad, whatever it was. That’s an obstacle that I’m interested in helping you remove (people thinking you should be shushed.)
11.) I never really was one to believe that homeschoolers were better than everybody else. We had advantages school kids didn’t have, but we made sacrifices to get them. I don’t feel maligned or persecuted by your sharing your truth.
12.) I don’t consider you “not really homeschooled.” You didn’t go to school (for some of your childhood). Your parents did what they did because they considered it homeschooling. It’s not what I would have done, but it’s not “not homeschooling.”
13.) I don’t categorize grown homeschoolers as successes or not successes. I don’t want anyone to really be a poster child for homeschooling. In my world, homeschooling is unique and success is subjective.
14.) Liar stats… no kidding! For years we’ve talked about NOT using Brian Ray’s statistics. Reporters would call begging for numbers and we knew they did not exist. Not accurate ones, anyway. We told them that, but they were never happy. NHERI was created as an arm of HSLDA so they could give those numbers out and sound impressive. And their numbers were all skewed because they were only asking their members – white, PE’s (Protestant Exclusivists, as coined by Dr. Moore), school-at-home types. But the reporters lapped them up. We spent years trying to explain to people how these statistics were bogus.
But here are more facts for why these numbers are not true. California, one of the largest states in the country, with WAY more homeschoolers than probably anyone else, doesn’t have “homeschooling” as a legal option. There are a variety of options homeschoolers choose to be legal, but they don’t count as “homeschoolers.” The census or Patricia Lines’ report are much more accurate representations. Still, you’re right that we just don’t know.
15.) I hope you can hear this with the intent I am aiming for: Who cares if they think you’re undesirables? You ARE the facts. You lived it. It’s your story. It’s not everyone’s story, but you exist, and your story is real. Homeschooling isn’t an entity anyway. It’s full of all kinds of people homeschooling all kinds of ways, some communicating with each other easily, and others not. And your voices help to shine light on those dark corners that really do exist.
16.) Politics is a weird thing. I’m not sure we’ve gone over the crest to be able to be complacent about homeschooling. We’re close. It’s nothing like it was in the ‘90’s when we started. I’m glad Pat Farenga addressed this issue at GWS. I think more conversations will start. I don’t think everyone is defensive. As you’ll see, it will be tough to get agreement on what should be done – but welcome to the world of non-fundamentalist homeschooling. We have a lot of chaos on our end.
17.) I can understand that your basic core of beliefs sees me as naïve. I don’t believe people are inherently bad. BUT. I do believe you make a point that something has to be done to help these kids in these fundamentalist families. On this point, my question would be (because I simply don’t know), what happens with the kids who are raised fundamentalist but go to school? They still endure abuse and brainwashing, right? Before we say it only exists in homeschooling families, we should get clear on which children are really at risk. I hope you’ve gone into social work, Heather. I think that’s possibly where some of this could be fixed. But, I’m open to hearing what suggestions others have.
18.) I haven’t participated in the Home Education Magazine talks in a long time. “Abuse” is a term that is sometimes subjective. And email lists do go off on tangents.
19.) I agree 100%. We used to call them trolls. People would come in to deliberately derail touchy conversations. It takes thick skin and real effort to not bash the other person while trying to make a point.
20.) I’m here. I have no intention of glossing over what you’re saying happened to you, and others you’ve linked to. It’s terrible. I am sorry that we didn’t have a way to swoop in and rescue you from abusive families. All we knew how to do was spread accurate information, for those who wanted it. Obviously, your family was too entrenched in what I would call a cult religion. It gets so complicated when we talk about religious protection in the U.S.A., and even the rights of privacy. Still, I agree with you that we, as Americans, have to find a way to prevent anyone from going through what you went through.
I’m about to leave for a week in California (my daughter is graduating from a film school). So if I don’t have quick replies, it may just be timing. I may write something at my blog, Lifelong Learning, http://www.suepatterson.wordpress.com, linking back to this, next week when I get home.
Sue’s #3)
What you believe about humanity is totally irrelevant. This isn’t a philosophical debate about the inherent nature of the human animal. It’s about helping kids whose abusive parents home school.
#6)
You are making the old guard mistake of assuming more regulation means outlawing home education. It’s not an all-or-nothing world. People can and do submit to all kinds of government oversight in many areas of life. Any adult can drive, for example, but they have to prove capable by means of government regulation. Because some adults drive illegally doesn’t mean the regulation isn’t needed or isn’t working. Having government regulation that includes safety inspection means that not all cars will pass, but it does not mean that people can’t own or operate cars. Chill with the “regulation=no home school allowed” dogma.
#12) I think by not home schooling, Heather means she was not being given the resources, time and instruction necessary for learning. I can see how unschoolers might find her terminology problematic, because they don’t have set times for instruction, set curriculum, etc. However, from what I have read, unschooling parents work hard to make sure resources, time and opportunities for instruction are available. Of course, I admit that I am not a fan since meeting a ten year old boy who couldn’t read well enough to know what a Mario video game was asking when he needed to choose style of play (one player or two). That boy was a seething bundle of resentment and racism, and his mom was an “unschooler”. So, not all unschoolers are the stuff of dreams. I don’t see how a bit of government accountability would not benefit even unschoolers.
#17) Kids from fundamentalist families who go to public schools have 180 opportunities a year to tell someone about any abuse going on. They also have 180 days a year where they are exposed to alternative points of view. Kids from any kind of abusive home have some opportunity to tell others if they are in public school. However the greatest difference between an abused home schooled kid and an abused public schooled kid is the opportunity to see that everyone does not live by their parents rules. This experiential learning opportunity has nothing to do with academics, and everything to do with the experiential learning unschoolers are famous and right to uphold as the best teacher of all. HOWEVER this topic is a RED HERRING. It’s not an either/or dichotomy. See my response to your #6) point.
#20) If all you knew to do in the past was try to warn people away from the rocks, then lucky you! Home school grads are proposing new opportunities to put up warning flags and police the shipping lanes in order to offer government protection, so that even people who do not read your magazine can avoid shipwreck. I am sure you will welcome this new opportunity, no? =D
Have fun in CA! Enjoy your family and the sunshine. Peace and good will, SS
SS, thanks for responding. Turns out I do have internet access at the hotel, so I can still be in the conversation. If it helps. Which I’m not sure it will, at this point. I feel like you (and maybe Heather, but she hasn’t responded to my comments yet) are only looking for one answer: government oversight. And if others express concern or offer explanations of why things happened in our homeschooling community, you totally dismiss it with sarcasm and just plain “my way or the highway.”
Heather’s 20 “truths” aren’t really truths, per se. Her experience, as I said before multiple times, are real and I’m sorry she suffered. Those are *her* truths. She made some pretty incorrect assumptions about what we, as “Old Guard” were doing, and called them “truths.” My explanations were to help get to the truth, hers and the reality of what was going on in the homeschooling community at the time.
So, here’s what I think about your points:
#3.) What I believe *does* matter. It shapes how people want to go about addressing a problem. When you believe that all people are trying to get away with something, you want some parental figure (government) to step in and make them act right. I was simply offering that everyone doesn’t see life in the same way… not trying to shift to a philosophical discussion.
#6) I agree that it’s not an all or nothing world. I already said I am not fearful of the government or share any ideation that all govt. is bad. But I’d offer this as something to think about as well. We have wives abused by their husbands, but we don’t regulate marriage. We don’t send out inspectors to check if they’re acting right.
If crimes are committed we have government entities to intervene. And, yes, they’re not that great. How many times do we hear that police or social workers went to homes only to be convinced they were safe, when they were not. Personally, I believe that we should focus on improving the systems we have in place to deal with criminal acts.
#12) Really? You make all these assumptions off of one not-yet-reading unschooler? Tossing in the anti-unschooling angle is only going to complicate the issue.
Hopefullly, Heather will respond here to what she felt was not being offered. Still, all schools do not offer all things. So kids can be resentful that their parents sent them to *that* particular school where they missed out on something.
I do believe that the religious homeschooling community needs to stop supporting the anti-community angle of their world. I’m not sure they will, because it’s kind of built into their cult-like ways. But maybe within their community, more moderate religious homeschoolers could stop tolerating the likes of the Pearls, the Ezzos, Phillips, etc.
#17 I don’t think it’s a red herring at all.
#20. I’m not sure what magazine you’re referring to…the Hegeners? We certainly did more than write a few articles in HEM to “get the word out.” And, the fact that we spoke on panels in educational communities, answered daily calls from reporters who got better facts about what homeschooling was like than what was being put out there by HSLDA, helped start organizations in communities nationwide – people are still free to ignore that, circle their wagons and believe whatever wacko religious belief they want. Regulating homeschooling families will not change that.
SS, can you tell me your connection to all of this? Are you also a grown homeschooler? What years were you homeschooled?
We are having fun in CA – learned about the “June Gloom” (kind of interesting. 😉
Thank you for taking the time from your busy trip to write this, Sue. I read it, then smiled and said aloud, ‘Yeah!’
The problem is not homeschooling. The problem lies in the philosophies promoted by extreme religious conservatives who champion religion-based homeschooling because it provides parents more control over their children. Whether these folks homeschooled or not, they would still view children as they do, and those among them who are prone to abuse, well, they would still abuse, not because they homeschool but because they are abusers who have bought into the lies about what God wants them to do.
Ok, well the fundamentalist philosophies have surely become a homeschooling problem. Guess who the keynote speakers are at the upcoming CHEA homeschool convention this year, one of the biggest conventions in the country? Two wingnuts. Ken Ham, an obnoxious science denier who built a “creationist museum” to prove that humans and dinosaurs coexisted in biblical times and who sometimes gets banned from fundamentalist events for being too big of a jerk there; and Doug Phillips, a sexist, racist, child abuse apologist who rails against “effeminacy” and said blogging is the “female sin of the Internet.” Yeah, they are not headlining big fundamentalist conferences. They are headlining big homeschooling conferences. Tell me again how homeschooling isn’t the problem?
Now I get that homeschooling doesn’t have to be a problem. It’s not inherently a dangerous or bad thing. In fact, lets say its like a knife. It’s an excellent thing to have when you’re cutting vegetables. It’s a terrible thing for a scary threatening person to have in their hand. The moment a knife falls into the wrong hands it becomes a problem. So homeschooling is currently a problem because of its being wielded like a weapon. Homeschooling needs to be wrested away from the fundamentalists to be a good thing again and I support that happening.
Also, you don’t have to preach to me about what the fundamentalists believe and do in these situations. I lived it. I know. What I also know is that in my personal experience when homeschooling was switched out with public schooling because my grandparents demanded it, my parents beliefs about my role didn’t change but their control over enforcing it sure did.
So nice try trying to say homeschooling is not an issue and only fundamentalism itself needs to be dealt with, but nope, I just don’t think that’s how the story goes in real life.
I am one of those old timers this post is addressed to. I have not been active for some time, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in issues which affect homeschooling. I was homeschooled, my kids were homeschooled, and my grandchildren are being homeschooled now. It is part and parcel of our lives.
Abuse is a heartbreaking issue, but it is not a homeschooling issue. It is a human issue. To attempt to tie it to homeschooling is disingenuous, and a dangerous precedent. For anyone wondering about my use of the word ‘disingenuous’ in this context, I’m going with this definition: “…giving a false appearance of simple frankness…” because that is what I see happening here. I believe your intentions are sincere, Heather, but your methodology is faulty. Your writing gives the appearance of “simple frankness,” but in fact it is calculated to achieve the ends to which your arguments invariably lead: That homeschooling be blamed for the wrongs done to you and to others, and rules and regulations should be enacted to “protect” against it. Volumes have been written about why that is a bad idea, I’ve written many of those volumes and they’re all online, so I’ll not beleaguer it here.
Hi Helen,
I assume you know your husband left a comment on this post as well and I’d written a response to him asking for help in publicizing what child abuse in a homeschooling context looks like and how to handle it in Home Ed Mag. That request still stands.
Maybe you are upset right now but your message comes across as rather antagonistic, so I won’t beleaguer my point either. I have no problem with homeschooling being a big part of anyone’s lives. I have no problem with homeschooling/unschooling as an education method. I have a serious problem with homeschooling being a free-for-all where kids can get hurt and people do nothing. As it is, I’ve written quite a bit on the issue as well. Not published or made public (until this blog) or sold for money, but in my teenage diary on how it was done wrong in my everyday life and later as formal papers in grad school implementation and capstone classes. In grad school I studied the issue from an academic angle, still thinking it was my family and some people I’d known that had just had messed up situations, not expecting to see the systemic mess that I found. It wasn’t that I was hurting and out looking for patterns to blame people. I blamed my parents and the state of Louisiana for having a private school exemption that they could take advantage of. The “big picture” pattern across the country was there for the easy finding though and people a lot more dispassionate and removed from the issue of homeschooling than I have found it too. It all kind of blew me away though, really, and so I decided I had to speak out.
The work I’m professionally trained to do is policy analysis. That involves research, information synthesis, and reporting. I look at current public policy, available policy options, and the socio-political reasons as to why things are the way they are and make recommendations accordingly. I’m doing the same thing here, just in a more informal, blog-based way. I am not some angry person out making sloppy half-baked associations, I can assure you, and I know the difference between correlation and causality. This correlation between deregulated homeschooling and child abuse is a rational one to make and one that many others have picked up on.
So while you may be an expert on the practitioner and advocate side of homeschooling, I think I know quite a lot about this other side, and I will state it point blank: when a homeschooled kid gets hurt or killed within the home, by the people who are supposed to be teaching the child…it is inherently a homeschooling issue. That’s right, its a homeschooling issue because homeschooling or claimed homeschooling is involved and that is one ostensible reason for the child being there (the other reason being that they are the minor children of the parents). Its also a homeschooling issue because certain ideas that flow through one of the main homeschooling subcultures are inherently abusive (Pearls, Ezzos, Vision Forum, Gothard, etc). You can keep repeating that it isn’t a homeschooling issue but I just established a framework for how it most definitely is and you did not establish a framework for how it isn’t. I seems to me that you just don’t want it to be one because the idea would be upsetting. Which I find disingenuous. Also, its still upsetting and still real whether you claim it as existing as a homeschool problem or not. It’s just that when it goes unclaimed the abuse can continue much more easily.
Also, if a kid gets hurt or killed in the course of any other activity, the adults that were with the child, the adults that saw the child nearby, and the institutions that that child was part of all get scrutiny. None are blameless or immediately let off the hook. Perpetrators are prosecuted. Everyone else is asked to do better, implement better practices so it doesn’t happen again. Some, if they are found at fault for fostering a climate that allows abuse, are required to make major changes, or prohibited from engaging in the activity in the future. This is just simple, standard stuff that happens.
Pat Farenga sees the pattern here so I don’t see why you don’t. He said in a post on HA just this week that homeschooling needs to get a handle on this abuse problem or it’ll be like the Catholic Church or Penn State scandals. I think you’d do well to heed what he says because he’s right. Yet you can’t seem to see the forest through the trees. Instead you call what I am doing disingenuous. I think what is disingenuous is the attempts to decouple the education method from the harm that it can sometimes enable.
If you would like to talk more about it I am open to discussion, but for now please excuse me. I have about 40 more cases like this to enter into the Homeschooling’s Invisible Children database.
Abuse that happens in home schools is a home schooling issue. It’s so obvious I can’t believe I need to put it print. It is.
Heather hasn’t tied abuse to home schooling. The home schooling parents who abuse their children did that. Home schooling gave them protection from social scrutiny, while the home schooling books/support groups/conventions they accessed promoted abuse (the Peals, Douglas Wilson, Ken Hamm, et. al.).
It is very much a home schooling issue, whether you like it or not. Denial won’t change that.
I will just say this, I was abused and I was homeschooled for part of my educational career. The homeschooling did not cause the abuse and going to public school never afforded me any more help or protection than homeschooling did. I am sorry for what happened to you, but this is not a homeschooling issue it is a religious issue and a “your parents abusive assholes” issue. And while I wholeheartedly believe that we need to do a much better job of protecting abused children I can tell you that public school is not the utopia many homeschooled children believe it to be and it does not mean that you will get help. My father was reported over and over again and we still could not get any help and that is a problem with the good old boy legal system and not with homeschooling.
Hi TeachingBrady,
I am sorry to hear that things were bad whether you were homeschooled or in public school and I think that says a lot about the role children have in our society today. Lets face it – I’m focusing on abuse within homeschool settings but if I wanted to pick other settings I would have quite a range of choices. Children are often treated like second class citizens, their feelings and perspectives on life an afterthought.
My personal experience going from homeschooling to public school was quite different from yours though. Yes, I endured bullying for being the awkward homeschool kid and yes there was busywork and weird arbitrary authoritarian stuff, but it was sure nothing compared to what I’d had at home.
Because my parents were into Quiverfull ideology, something that is spread to ordinary Christians largely by way of fundamentalist-led homeschool organizations and member families, I noticed a huge difference when I went to public school (the abuse didn’t stop but life was suddenly about 5x better and there was a light at the end of the tunnel). The Quiverfull way of controlling daughters can’t hold up quite so well when the kids are independently getting out of the house. I agree with you that public school has its problems too, but that’s my point – all of these options have certain varieties of problems and the problems need to be addressed in each so that people have viable choices. Homeschooling has an abuse problem because it is quite deregulated and fanatics have largely taken over the political leadership.
Just saying “the homeschooling did not cause the abuse” in response to me saying homeschooling has an abuse problem is nearsighted and not connecting all the dots. Of course homeschooling didn’t cause the abuse. People did. Homeschooling is a powerful tool in the hands of an abusive or neglectful person though and they shouldn’t have it.
Also, it is a direct homeschooling issue because of certain powerful segments of homeschooling leadership. Sure reforms are needed in CPS (I imagine you may know on a more personal level about exactly what reforms are needed there than I) but fact is you have someone like Doug Phillips, who in 2009 said that CPS should be abolished and children would be safer, and who also said that the only reason we tolerate children’s rights is because we tolerate feminism (in addition to a bunch of other disturbing things) headlining the CHEO homeschooling conference this year. That’s right. The guy is rewarded for his insanity, racism, child-as-chattel views, and blatant misogyny by headlining a big homeschooling conference. I’m sorry, but homeschooled children of parents influenced by guys like that are in danger (I would know) and the homeschooling people who are not into that crap better stop ignoring it and step up and fight it along with the kids who were raised in that mess and can attest to exactly what it does to children.
I am not asking for a utopia anywhere. I am asking for basic human rights to be acknowledged and a system in place to do something about it if those rights are being ignored and I’m starting with asking for this in homeschooling because I see a huge problem here. The homeschoolers who are not fundamentalists, particularly those who helped usher in homeschooling, have a moral duty to try and correct the issues I outlined above but its hard work so most are ignoring it, distancing themselves, and letting kids suffer. Whether they choose to act on it or cast blame, pass the buck, it is ultimately their decision but I think that if they love children and love homeschooling, they need to do something about it.
I do understand what you are saying. I was a fundamentalist Christian. I understand well who the players are and what they are selling. I also homeschooled my children, but that was while I was on my way out of the fundamentalist Christian scene, so they were not homeschooled in any religious based way. In fact, we mostly unschooled except for state-required basic exams. I was peripherally involved and testified in a federal lawsuit against some religious right homeschooling leaders back in the late 90’s. Just so you understand…I get it.
I was also once a battered wife. My first husband brutally abused me over six years and I fled to a shelter and found freedom. I am using this as an analogy because I think it fits. Marriage and homeschooling are both forms of “institutions” in our society. I don’t see marriage as a breeding ground for abuse nor do I see homeschooling as a particularly dangerous environment. Abusers will isolate their victims. It’s what they do. Abuse happens to wives (and husbands), but it also happens to girlfriends (and boyfriends) and you don’t have to live with someone for them to abuse you. Same is true for children who are homeschooled and those who attend school. The problem is with the abuser(s), not the institution. (Not that there aren’t problems inherent in marriage or schools or homeschooling, even, as institutions, but you get what I’m saying.)
Big name Christian homeschooling leaders have always keynoted at large homeschooling conventions. This is nothing new. There has always been resistance and outcry over the abusive philosophies, “training” materials, teachings, etc. I was interviewed on television and for a national womens magazine article as an opponent of the Ezzo’s parenting propaganda back in the day. I hate how our homeschooling organizations were forced to distinguish ourselves from the co-opters, the Christian homeschoolers, because homeschooling and Christian began to be seen as one and the same and even more nutty because of the association with extreme religious folks. But as you well understand, no amount of secular backlash makes a dent in those folks. In fact, it has the opposite effect — it convinces them they’re on the right track because the “enemy” is opposing them. And there’s where you have made your mistake. Regulating the hell out of homeschooling will not do what you want. These people will just take the next step outside the “man made rules” to live the way they believe God wants them to live. They will ALWAYS create an environment in which to abuse children. Some will abuse and some won’t, but they will create that environment because they believe God has given them the responsibility to do so and will bless their efforts.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to combat this very real and horrifying issue — abuse of children whose parents homeschool them — but it seems obvious that you haven’t analyzed this from the perspective of not only the Christian fundamentalist mindset, but the fundamentalist abuser mindset as well. History is a good teacher.
As a Canadian evangelical (which some would call fundamentalist) homeschooler, I’d like to say that the situation in the “Bible-belt” United States is very different from here.
The HSLDA Canadian branch is headed by someone who was homeschooled themselves, and I have found them generally realistic in their assessments of government regulation, very occasionally a bit alarmist. Bureaucrats are great at red-tape and terrible at actually fixing problems – for that reason I don’t think government regulation is going to fix the problem of child abuse in homeschooling environments. In my experience (and I’ve had some in my line of work), abusers will be the ones who pass with flying colours while families doing their best will get run through the mill. Abusers are usually great liars.
It can be done better. There was a family in our church who was neglecting their children and calling it homeschooling. Various pressures (including some from church) caused them to put their kids back in public school. (I don’t think everyone should homeschool and they were prime examples of why not.) A year after, someone in our church reported them to children’s Aid (CPS) and their children were taken away — all in a province that allows completely unregulated homeschooling. Children’s Aid is now making a mess of the family – I’m sometimes not sure it’s any better, but at least the kids know outside people care and that it shouldn’t be the way it was [Children’s Aid just demonstrates that a bureaucracy does a really poor job at dealing with these kinds of problems.]
I think the most effective approach to ending homeschooling abuse is for there to be open discussion about recognition, prevention and reporting at all levels of society.
[I should also mention that up here I have never met a single home-schooling family who doesn’t have their kids in lots of situations where they have peer friends. This idea that all peer relationships are bad is nuts. I do think peer relationships should be carefully monitored, though, because bullying is an equally abusive and even more common occurrence—and kids are often just as silent about it until it’s almost too late to help.]