Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School, managed to break through the endless COVID-19 news cycle when she was quoted extensively by Harvard Magazine, citing her recently published article: “Homeschooling: Parents Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection.”
Bartholet’s "concern for children", which she is using as a bludgeon to attack conservative Christians, is symptomatic of the left’s manic need to substitute the state for the parent, or more accurately, for the traditional Christian parent.
Masking her disdain for conservatives behind a veneer of "concern for children’s welfare", Bartholet’s argument concludes that "homeschooling threatens not just children, but society", because the majority of homeschoolers are conservative Christians, and thus indoctrinate their children with religious ideology and antidemocratic notions.
“It’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints,” Bartholet asserts, before arguing for a presumptive ban on homeschooling parents, specifically those guilty of not agreeing with tolerant progressives.
She gives the game away when she lists the potential costs of her proposed restrictions on homeschooling.
Bartholet’s only real concern is not that children may be subjugated to failing school systems or become victims of bullying, reasons commonly cited by homeschooling parents as their motives for pulling their children out of school. These concerns she dismisses out of hand.
No, Bartholet’s largest worry is that since some public schools may reflect the conservative regions in which they are located, students may still be forced to attend “Some schools that teach views and values that mirror those of conservative Christian homeschoolers.”
It’s very difficult to argue you’re just trying to protect the kids when the biggest worry you can conjure is that some students may still need to interact with religious folk.
To her, homeschoolers’ true crime is being conservative and, worse, Christian.
Although nearly all homeschoolers do not fall into this category, Bartholet is blissfully unaware of such an inconvenient fact. But again, children’s safety is not truly her concern here. If it was, she would not have spilled so much ink fretting about the nefarious Christian parents.
Her worry, and the worry of all those who argue for weakening the parent-child bond, is that these parents will raise children who adhere to a vision of the good that differs from the morally acceptable viewpoints held by academics in their coastal conclaves.
Bartholet is a clear example of the distortion at the heart of leftism’s corruption. She is fabricating abuse to undermine parents who may seek to raise their children according to a different set of beliefs from hers.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/23/harvard-law-professor-wants-to-ban-homeschooling-because-christians-do-it/
