A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Government moves to target homeschoolers October 7, 2014

As the left likes to say, never let a crisis go to waste.  While they could not enact any gun-control restrictions in the wake of the Newton, CT shootings by a long time mentally ill man, they can target their next favorite group: those who opt out of the sexular pagan left indoctrination centers public school system by homeschooling their children:

In Connecticut, Governor Dannel P. Malloy’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission has returned a curious and controversial draft recommendation: the state should increase its oversight of homeschooled children with emotional or behavioral challenges.[Nothing but a foot in the door for state involvement, testing, and oversight of ALL homeschooled children.  Even more, this may be the start of an attempt to make homeschooling so onerous and ineffective that parents give up.  The teachers unions, most in academia, and the left generally view homeschooling as a grave and growing threat to their ability to shape the cultural and political landscapes of the future through left-wing indoctrination in the schools.  They are determined to find a way to crush this growing movement.]  The proposal has outraged the state’s homeschoolers, who, like homeschoolers everywhere, are keenly aware of their sometimes conditional freedoms. In Connecticut, as elsewhere, the law allows parents to homeschool if they choose. But the practice has always been viewed as threatening by left-wing academics, social architects, and teachers’ unions—all well represented on Malloy’s 16-member panel. Sadly, this is only the most recent assault on the rights of Connecticut homeschoolers.

Established to investigate the causes and consequences of the 2012 massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, the Sandy Hook commission issued an interim report last year that nodded appropriately to gun safety, school security, and emergency planning, but made no mention of homeschooling. Now the panel has determined that among the things that went wrong in the run-up to that tragedy was that the killer, Adam Lanza, was homeschooled briefly as a teenager. They are recommending that the state give local officials approval power over parents who wish to homeschool children with social, behavioral, and emotional challenges. “Given the individuals involved in the tragedy that formed the basis of this commission, we believe that it is very germane,” said commissioner Harold I. Schwartz, psychiatrist-in-chief at Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living. “The facts leading up to this incident support the notion [that there is a] risk in not addressing the social and emotional learning needs of [homeschooled] children.” Schwartz admitted that the commission didn’t have access to Lanza’s school files and medical records. But he maintained that those records would support the commission’s proposals. [So this is nothing but a naked, baseless assertion, informed only by Herr Doktor’s political inclinations.  In fact, as the next paragraph shows, homeschooling had absolutely nothing to do with Lanza’s break with reality. There is much more evidence that psychological/sociological treatment, if anything, harmed more than helped Lanza. In addition, how do these self-anointed experts know children outside their control are not being helped or treated in some other way?  Do you note the underlying assumption of incompetence and/or oddity regarding homeschooling parents?]

But while Lanza’s abnormal social and emotional development surely contributed to his crime, homeschooling neither exacerbated his mental illness nor obscured it from local education officials. Lanza attended traditional public schools up to the eighth grade. From the beginning, everyone knew he was different. As Andrew Solomon detailed earlier this year in TheNew Yorker, Lanza suffered from sensory issues and received speech and occupational therapy beginning in kindergarten. At every juncture of his early life, he was analyzed and agitated over by psychologists, counselors, behaviorists, and other state-credentialed educators. Yet Lanza’s troubles deepened, and his anti-social behavior grew worse.

The article goes on to raise a number of other important points: that Lanza’s homeschooling was a response to the manifest inability of schools to educate him, deal with his profound emotional problems, and effectively diagnose and treat his condition.  The Lanza’s actually conducted their homeschooling with close state and district supervision and laison.  The boy remained under treatment all the time.  So there is absolutely nothing in this case that would justify the assertions made by the panel of academics, teacher’s unions bigwigs, and general leftist twits.

And I reiterate, I think it quite likely that modern psychology/sociology, steeped in leftist materialism and godlessness as it so frequently is, could have harmed this boy as opposed to doing any good.  The evidence certainly shows the mental sciences, so full of hubris, failed miserably in this case.  Takes quite a bit of cheek to point the finger of blame somewhere else, then, doesn’t it?  Especially a convenient political target like homeschooling?

While the recommendations of this panel have not yet been implemented, this matter certainly bears watching.  We are fortunate in Texas to have the state take a rather liberal view towards homeschooling, but that has not always been the case and is not guaranteed to remain so.  Eternal vigilance, etc etc.  I, for one, will have to be dead before I allow the state to take my kids and fill their heads full of contraception, aberro-sexuality, general leftism, hatred of God, and all the rest.