The Federalist Block claims to just want to protect children from abuse and neglect, but his nebulous ideas of what that means would put all homeschoolers at risk of being unjustly targeted by government officials.
A man ought to have a really, really good reason to write a New York Times piece trashing his dead mother. Stefan Merrill Block did not, but he went ahead anyway, with a piece headlined “Home-Schooled Kids Are Not All Right.”
Block opened dramatically: “By my third year of home-schooling — in 1994, when I was 12 — Mom’s project of turning me back into an infant was nearly complete.” To demonstrate this, he informed readers that his mother “had been applying lighteners and hydrogen peroxide to restore my brownish hair to the bright blond of its baby color.” Also, after “reading that a crawling phase might help an infant develop fine motor control, she determined that, even at age 12, it might not be too late for me to crawl my way to better handwriting.”
That’s it? Bleached hair is harmless and might even have been trendy at the time. Having a 12-year-old crawl to improve fine motor control is nutty, but Block does not share how long she tried this, which would be an important bit of information to give readers. Regardless, as crazy educational ideas go, it’s still less insane than trying to teach kids to read without phonics, which the education establishment has been doing for decades.
And that is the necessary context and contrast. Homeschooling can go wrong. Government-run schools constantly go wrong, from sexual abuse to abject academic failure to ideological insanity (of which gender ideology is only the latest, most loony expression). And despite Democrat claims to prioritize education, the very worst schools tend to be in solid blue cities and states. While he acknowledges that abuse at schools does happen, Block wants to use the few years he was homeschooled to attack homeschooling as a whole, and he does not spend much time addressing the alternatives.
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Read Full Article Here…(thefederalist.com)
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