Homeschool Moms Rock The Political Scene

The hand the rocks the cradle rules the world.

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Homeschool Moms Rock The Political Scene

Proverbs 6:20 concludes with this: “Do not forsake your mother’s teaching.” There is a group that can be said to be taking this quite literally: the homeschooled.

The homeschool population wasn’t exactly challenging to the public school system prior to the 1970s, mostly just a few religious folk educating their own. When the state of Wisconsin insisted the Amish stop educating their own children and send them to public schools, the Amish resisted.

This led to Wisconsin vs. Yoder in 1972, wherein the Supreme Court ruled that “parents have a fundamental right to establish a home and bring up children along with the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience.” Beyond the religious group involved, this decision paved the way for a much larger movement to come. It basically stated that government could establish educational standards, but parents reserved the right to meet those standards by their own methods.

The public school system suffered a set back in terms of mandatory enrollment, but not in terms of their own ambitious agenda. For the next twenty years government schools became increasingly bold and to many parents, intrusive. Among the political left who gravitate towards employment in the fields of government and academics this intrusiveness was intentional. They believe it is their duty not just to educate children, but to educate them to think like they do. The ultimate goal is to prepare them for work in government. With the backing of the United States government, professional educators molded public schools into the kind of social belief centers they wanted them to be.

By 1990, many parents taking note of how much power school systems were presuming began to be disturbed. First there was an almost complete exclusion of anything referring to Christianity. Following this was the introduction of social beliefs contrary to their own. Certain sexual teachings parents objected to were made mandatory. Academic results were declining. Added to this was school violence, drugs, sexual promiscuity’s, and on and on. A movement began as a forum of resistance seeking course correction but schools didn’t listen or respond. Moms felt they had a right to protect their own children and to educate them properly. The Wisconsin vs. Yoder decision allowed them a means to do it themselves and school their children at home. So they did.

Though it was more a by product than intentional, homeschooling has actually become the most successful political movement of the past twenty years, accomplishing what legislators, fundraisers, lobbyists, and political activists could not and did not. Homeschool moms overcame a corrupted system by simply withdrawing their children from it.

Since 1990 the homeschool movement has trended upwards rapidly, from 400,000 to 800,000 homeschooled students by 1997, to an estimated 1.5 million by 2007. A survey taken in 2003 by the DOE confirmed the obvious; that 72 percent of homeschooling parents said they wanted to instill religious and moral instruction. 85 percent said they were concerned with the social environment of public schools. Another US Census survey revealed 14% objected to what schools were teaching and 11 percent thought schools were not academically challenging enough. The truth is the opposing camp is not arguing these positions. They are just hoping it will all somehow go away.

The results are success on all fronts for the homeschooled kids. College exams and required SAT exams reveal they score consistently higher than their public schooled counterparts. Studies show them to be more socially adjusted. Homeschool classrooms are not crowded, the students are not absent, teachers are not inattentive, the environment is not gang or drug infested, and the teen pregnancy rate is nonexistent. As upsetting as it may be to the political left, they cannot tarnish those enviable results.

To protect and educate their children, Moms did not engage politically. They didn’t spend 200 million on lobbying, wining and dining congress like Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. They didn’t request, require, or demand government funding. They dropped out and did it themselves. They didn’t set out to rock the system per se, but they did.

So rock on homeschool moms! Perhaps politically the rest of us can watch and learn how it’s done.