The liberal Washington Post reported yesterday on the results of a survey of some 360 school districts around the country:
[Our] analysis reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools [once Covid restrictions were lifted.]
With the number of young people being schooled at home jumping by more than 50 percent (while public-school enrollment dropped), the Post was forced to admit its “arrival as a mainstay of the American education system, with its impact … only beginning to be felt.”
According to the Post, the practice of schooling at home “embrace[s] a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe.”
The growth in real numbers is both impressive and reassuring. There is now, according to the Post, “at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools … [which signifies] a sea change” in how young children are being educated in school districts across the country.
That “sea change,” according to the Post, could mean that the kids might not learn, or might be abused, the paper suggested: “There is little or no regulation of home schooling in much of the country, with no guarantees that kids are learning skills and subjects to prepare them for adulthood — or, for that matter, learning anything at all.”
But the present public-school system, in districts around the country, is already failing them. In Baltimore, for instance, according to the New York Post, “None of the students at 40% of Baltimore’s public high schools tested proficient on the state’s math exam … with a staggering three-quarters [of them] earning the lowest possible score.”
At Patterson High School, in Baltimore City, for example, just 12 students out of the school’s 628 students enrolled there were reading at grade level.
The Post failed to mention the reason why, but according to another study done by the Post and George Mason University, the real reason is obvious. Half of all U.S. parents who homeschool do so because “local schools are influenced too much by liberal viewpoints.”
Although John Dewey is often reported to have had an undue influence on American education, it was Horace Mann who is called “The Father of American Education” for inflicting the present public-school system onto the country. In 1837, he became chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and from that moment on devoted his entire energy toward removing religious influence from schools. He persuaded his fellow “modernizers” to push for tax-supported elementary schools, with one of the primary principles being “that this education must be non-sectarian.” The purpose, according to Mann, was to “equalize the conditions of men” by teaching them early “obedience to authority.” He publicly declared that “our Public Schools are not Theological Seminaries” and made sure that books that were “calculated to favor the tenets of any particular set of Christians” were proscribed.
Once the poison of relativism, evolution, humanism, and scientism was introduced into the culture through the schools, it was just a matter of time before the Bible and prayer were “proscribed” as well.
The rise in homeschooling is good news for Americans aghast at the inroads progressivism is making into every corner of the culture. Homeschoolers typically outperform their public-school peers in every aspect of life, they are also vastly more politically active.
As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his groundbreaking book The Tipping Point, there is the “law of the few.” He writes:
There are certain, special types of people who are much more effective at broadcasting [their] ideas and getting people to listen and to follow suit.
With one in every 10 students being schooled at home as the Post now admits, we’re close to, if not at, that perfect inflection point — the “sea change” that the Post writes about — where the tide begins to turn in the other direction.
