Harvard Elite’s Anti-Homeschooling ‘Propaganda’ Rebuked by School Choice Expert

“I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority,” she said in an interview for the magazine’s May-June issue.

But Corey DeAngelis, director of school choice at the libertarian Reason Foundation and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, finds Bartholet’s anti-homeschooling comments to be rife with hypocrisy.

“This statement is beyond parody,” he told The Western Journal in an email Thursday, referring to Bartholet’s claim that homeschooling gives parents “authoritarian control” over their children.

“Constitutional rights protect us from government abuse of power. It’s unbelievable that she doesn’t realize that using government force to take away parents’ rights to educate their own children at home is the definition of authoritarianism,” DeAngelis said.

Bartholet also drew the ire of school choice advocates when she suggested in an Arizona Law Review paper last year that some Christian parents who want to focus more on faith-based values are “extreme religious ideologues,” and even went so far as to imply that some homeschooled children could be at risk for abuse.

“They are also at serious risk for ongoing abuse and neglect in the isolated families that constitute a significant part of the homeschooling world. Mandated reporters are key to child protection, and compulsory education has served to protect many children against maltreatment,” Bartholet wrote.

“Or maybe [parents who homeschool] just want to protect their children from the abuse and violence that too often occurs in government schools?” DeAngelis fired back.

He pointed out two federal government reports showing that abuse is all too common in public schools.

“The latest report from the U.S. Department of Education on the subject estimated that 1 in 10 children in government schools will experience sexual misconduct from school employees by the time they graduate high school,” he said.

“A 2018 report from the U.S. Department of Education found that 1 in 5 students between the ages of 12 and 18 were bullied and that 79 percent of government schools recorded that one or more incidents of violence, theft, or other crimes had taken place in the most recent school year.”

DeAngelis also took issue with the Harvard Magazine article’s “propaganda” cover image, which was meant to be a metaphorical representation of the dangers of homeschooling.

Woah.

I just noticed the bizarre cover image used for the Harvard Magazine article.

It shows a sad homeschool child imprisoned in a house while the other kids are outside playing.

Notice the house is made of books, one of them being the Bible 😱👻 pic.twitter.com/IZfaVuIA0G

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) April 18, 2020

“Along with Harvard Magazine’s bizarre anti-homeschooling propaganda image of the homeschooled child stuck in a house made from a Bible, this is fear-mongering and an appeal to anti-religious bigotry,” DeAngelis said.

“Although I am not a religious person myself, I understand and respect that all Americans have the 1st Amendment right to exercise their religious beliefs even if some Ivy League elites don’t like it.”