Homeschooling: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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tonight

concerns school, for some it is the place to make friends for life and enjoy first crushes, while for others now I will not name names, it is no different, specifically we are going to talk About

homeschooling

during the pandemic, many parents were suddenly forced to. to do it and while some struggled, others like this family absolutely thrived a b c d e f g h i j k a l m o p q r s t u v w x y y z now you know your ABC's which is clearly great, but it's also a pretty bad way to make other parents look total because that's significantly better than anything else.

I did it with my kids during the pandemic, it was a lot less singing certified alphabet songs, they are a lot more hiding in the closet praying they don't find me, I also quickly thank the baby on the counter living his best life, he has no idea of what is happening. But yet, there she is at the center of it all, like Mariah Carey in a New Year's broadcast, now that the family, like many, has finally sent their children back to school, but for some, education in home is not just a pandemic-era necessity, it's a way of life and You may have heard the stereotype that homeschoolers are conservative Christians who oppose what children learn in school settings public and I admit that those people exist.

Take this man who offers this rather shaky rationalization for taking his son out of school. I think the type of content about what they are teaching about sex or anal sex that my third grade daughter should not be in a classroom where a teacher or someone else is teaching her about it and that was her experience at school, I told it through friends in other places who had been kids of those ages because mine was only in first grade when we got them out, that sounds total, although I guess I basically agree with him that things that are definitely not happening They shouldn't keep happening, but the truth is that the

homeschooling

community is much broader than just right-wing parents afraid of hypothetical third-grade Lube rallies.

By one estimate, there are now about 2 million homeschooled children in this country and parents can choose that, for all sorts of reasons, perhaps their children have social or health problems or disabilities that are not being accommodated, such Maybe families with legitimate fears about school safety or who are in the military and move around a lot and there are also a growing number of black parents opting for Hom school due to whitewashed curricula and zero tolerance policies in schools that disproportionately criminalize your children at a young age, so there are many reasons to do it and the fact is that for some children being homeschooled can be genuinely transformative at 15 Victoria asked her mother Bernita to take her out of schools from Detroit, she says they were harassed me relentlessly about her appearance and it didn't seem like her managers cared, which made me not want to ask questions, you know, or not want to ask specific questions because I'm like, Are they going to call me stupid?

When do you make the transition? homeschooling, how did you start to feel about yourself? I felt safer, it was kind of like the sun, like the clouds opened up a little bit, that's cool, it's really nice and I know that's not something you normally hear me say after a clip on this show it's usually a variation of that is horrible, it's heartbreaking or shut up, Baby lawn DS, so frankly this is a welcome change of pace, the point is that the limit of how good homeschooling can be is very high indeed, but the defect of how serious it can be is basically non-existent because, to a degree you may not realize, in many parts of the country homeschooling is essentially unregulated, which can result in enormous harm, so

tonight

let's take a look at homeschooling and start with In fact, there are a lot of things we don't know about homeschooled children, from exactly how many there are to what they're learning when I said there are about two million Of those, the reason it is an estimate is that, depending on the state, homeschooling families might not have to report what they are doing in these 26 states.

Parents simply have to submit a notice once a year to officials to inform them that they are homeschooling their children. In these 13, they only have to submit a notice once without the need to report. re-register and in the remaining 11 they don't have to notify anyone at all and when it comes to the education itself, filing a notice is generally where oversight ends as in most states there is no oversight or evaluation by part of no one. Proponents of academics and student progress and homeschooling will tell you that that's not a concern and that parents will simply come up with all kinds of innovative ways to teach their children.

Here is a father enthusiastically explaining how he taught science to his children. I can't tell you how many times, you know, in my house, at our kitchen table, we've dissected, you know, sheep eyeballs or frogs, uh, kitchen, kitchens are great laboratories for this kind of thing. Where did someone get a sheep eyeball? Well, John. you can just google sheep eyeball for homeschoolers, a lot of people are absolutely fine first, kitchens are the best laboratory for this kind of thing. I think labs are probably the best lab for this kind of thing. I'm just saying, maybe you're not going to dissect sheep eyeballs. in the same place where you cut olives for salad don't Google sheep's eyes either despite what that man just said I did it and I'm not even going to show you the result without blurring because it's too nauseating suffice it to say that it looks like What would happen? if an oyster had an anus, and while that man was clearly willing to go to great lengths to get lessons in atomic science, doesn't everyone have the time or resources to develop a curriculum from scratch?

That's why there are big publishers offering materials specifically designed for homeschoolers and much of that market is dominated by these three Christian textbook publishers who promise to learn through a biblical filter and seem like it's absolutely a parent's right to educate. their children with religion if they wish, but the quality of some of these books can be worrying, for example an ABCA current history book says that the beginning of the 20th century witnessed a cultural collapse that threatened to destroy the very roots of Western civilization. The cause of this dissolution was an idea or philosophy known as liberalism, meanwhile, an AC workbook celebrates Confederate General Robert E le as a devout Christian who practiced his Christianity in all his dealings with others, and a scientific book by Bob Jones University states that biblical and scientific evidence tends to support the idea that men and dinosaurs existed at the same time. and if you're wondering what that would look like, AC actually had a workbook with this depiction implying that not only did men and dinosaurs exist at the same time, but they were totally cool with each other, hey Hank, cool with shirt tucked in, see?

That dinosaur over there Bob sure loves those jeans, by the way, should we run? No way, these dinosaurs are calm, let's keep hitting these blades with that sword knife you brought, but while all that is quite worrying, the truth is that in many states. The rules and supervision may be so LAX parents don't have to teach their kids anything, just watch how this former homeschooler breaks down her daily schedule. This is my actual to-do list. We have the date at the top. First it would have been 12. We have classical music, which was just playing classical music in the morning so everyone could hear it.

We have to listen to the Bible. We have writing and math. That's pretty normal. We have to memorize the Bible. we had poetry memorization uh poetry was mostly hymns we had exercise that's good it's usually just walking around the block um and then all the rest of the list is housework and cleaning chores that's right most of it of his lessons simply involves household chores and just look at that list there are a lot of cleaning demands, who was his father? This guy, I mean, don't get me wrong, he's an absolute zad, I would do it and take a few seconds, but as sexy as he looks doing CHS. is not a suitable alternative to schooling, although I will say that it is even a preferable alternative to the worst homeschooling curriculum we found, whose creators enthusiastically promoted it on a podcast in which we are so deeply committed to ensuring that that child becomes a wonderful child.

Nazi and homeschooling, let's get that done right, that's terrifying. You never want to hear a mother lovingly utter the phrase "My kids are wonderful Nazis," other than maybe if they're praising her son's performance as Ral in The Sound of Music and Even then, just say to the wonderful Rolph, what's the matter? That woman and her husband launched their own dissident homeschooling online community in 2021 after she had difficulty finding Nazi-approved school supplies for her homeschooling kids and you know what. That probably works. In fact, it's not an easy Google, if you search for that it should probably be corrected automatically.

You mean how do you take me to jail? At one point, Distant Homeschool had almost 2,500 subscribers and included ideas such as writing exercises that involved writing down quotes from Adolf. Hitler, which I think we can all agree on, is just awful typing exercises, it's just cruel, they should work on their keyboard skills through the game, as if Mavis Beacon taught the final solution, not that actually don't do that, that's horrible, the channel also posted. tips to ensure your parents were in full compliance with the law so the state wouldn't interfere, but as you've already seen in most states, they don't have much to worry about because when it comes to homeschooling, basically anything goes, as?

The fact is that, in large part, it is due to a very powerful homeschooling lobby, whose most prominent player is the Home Education Legal Defense Association or hsld da, and this is where I will concede some ground because An environment emerged that was in many places too restrictive of homeschooling with some states and local school districts banning it entirely in Texas in the early 1980s, homeschooling families were actually prosecuted, but were produced a turning point after several Texas families filed a class action lawsuit against their school districts and ultimately won and around that time, the hsld was formed with the goal of expanding the rights of homeschoolers throughout the states and from the beginning had a strong conservative evangelical perspective.

Its founding president and president, Michael Farris, has referred to public schools as an ungodly monstrosity and here he is back in 2004 speaking to the Christian Coalition and outlining his long-term hopes for the Next Generation. Nowadays, it's not absurd to recognize what's going on between the promotion of homosexuality and the promotion of other kinds of things you and Walter Jones heard about. I have heard many other times that it is a deplorable reality that we cannot tolerate. I can't wait for the day when our young people defeat the enemy with a 5-4 vote to overturn Row versus Wade and, uh, where we defeat the same-sex specter.

Marriage, that is the standard of victory, okay, there are many things that are difficult to accept. In that clip, that's his wish list, he already got half of it and it says: Defeat the enemy despite looking less like a warrior and more like his imposition. Over the years, the HSLD DA has lobbied widely from a far-right perspective on issues that have nothing to do with homeschooling, opposing everything from vaccine mandates to same-sex marriage. sex, but it speaks to how important a force it is that even some parents who are uncomfortable with their political leanings feel they have no choice but to be members.

Here is a mother who started a homeschool group to offer an alternative to what she saw as a whitewashed curriculum, speaking out about her relationship with the hsld whenever there is a threat in any particular state to her right to homeschooling oh, you'll see us come together, you know, we may not be staying together, but we will come together because we all desperately need our right to homeschool and that's the nuanced aspect of Being in the World of homeschooling, the people you have to work with tokeeping what you value is also the people who crush you, it's true, hslds have become so powerful that many parents continue to work with them even if they don't. according to everything they defend is a dilemma also known as the Tom Cruz enigma, on the one hand, a billion dollars at the box office, on the other, a billion year contract with an alien mafia.

It's complicated, right? It's complicated, what are a group of young Hots? do more for what's worth, like Tom Cruz, will probably never die as a lobbyist. It has had surprising success in four decades. Their efforts are credited with rolling back existing laws governing homeschooling in state after state and the argument that What will always do against any regulation is that you are simply punishing all the parents who do the things right to address a few who are doing it wrong and, in theory, sure, but when you have some parents running the Dishwashing Institute at Home and others running Lil Nazis R Us it seems like maybe the Reigns have relaxed a bit and the lack of regulation here has serious consequences and not just with respect to the quality of education and fair warnings.

Here's where this story gets a little darker: more than two million children are being homeschooled. In the United States, many of them live in states that have little or no regulation, making it easy for abusive parents to hide behind the system. These are the faces of some of the homeschooled children who have died as a result of abuse and neglect. Susanna Grubs was homeschooled in Missouri, she tells us the discipline she still received was anything but gentle. I think in a lot of ways my siblings and I went completely unnoticed because I mean with my mother's disciplinary techniques and my mother's educational aspect, it's really terrible that it happened and is still happening and no one wants to stop it because parental rights are so paramount to exactly anything else in this country and that is tremendously dangerous because deregulating homeschooling not only eliminates safeguards against parents who are bad teachers, it also eliminates safeguards against parents who are bad people for everyone. time. hsld DA talks about parental rights, it's worth remembering that Elon Musk is a father OJ Simpson is a father Darth Vader is such a father, he made it part of his fancy name change, the point is that having a child doesn't make you inherently virtuous and one of the The key problem here is that child welfare laws were written before homeschooling was legal in all 50 states, so they rely heavily on the premise that a child will be in The teachers and administrators in our schools are mandated reporters, so you know if a child comes to school bruised or emaciated, that It is a very common way to report it correctly because the fact is that teachers fulfill multiple functions in the school, in addition to education, which they take care of. looking for signs of abuse, they are chaperones at school events and pretend not to know why Ellie doesn't sit next to Rachel Rachel doesn't sit next to Kelsey Kelsey doesn't talk to Ethan even though Ethan is having a birthday party. joint birthday with Kelsey's brother Bryce, who just happens to be Rachel's boyfriend from

last

period and they do all that while trying to teach long division.

Teachers are superheroes who should be making a million dollars a year, so you can probably see the fact that it is possible to take a child out of school. with no questions or follow-up allowed could be easily exploited by abusive parents, especially since most states don't even screen homeschooling parents for red flags. 48 states do not have a background check process for parents who choose to homeschool, in fact, even if you have a prior conviction for a crime against a child, you can homeschool them. A study conducted in Connecticut found that of the 380 students withdrawn in six districts for home schooling, 138 lived in families that were the subject of at least one prior report of suspected abuse or neglect and yet, despite this, At all times, the HSLDA has vigorously fought efforts to implement security barriers.

Here was its then president in 2015, who explained why they fight against all regulations, even those explicitly designed to prevent child abuse. Child abuse is a parenting problem, isn't it? any child, whether it's a non-homeschooled child or a parent, if they're a homeschooled parent, they can abuse their children, they have the potential to do so, so why should we invade all the others for just a few? innocent parents that's a prior restraint it's unconstitutional it's un-American there are some categories of homeschooling regulations that you would support that you don't consider an invasion or a takeover no, that's not right, it's bad enough that he's advocating a total there's a lack of regulation there, but the fact that he openly licks the corners of his mouth before doing so somehow makes it worse.

It looks like a cat went to a tsar machine and asked to be Andy Griffith. The hslda sees any carelessness as an attack. even offering members a 24-hour hotline in the event of a state visit. In fact, here's that woman's sister you saw earlier explaining how they would practice what to do if Child Protective Services showed up at her door, the parents would lock the door. front door would phone the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, hand the phone out the kitchen window and us kids were supposed to hide in the basement, we actually did drills about these things, Friends, we did drills in case anyone ever decided to check on our sacred well-being, that's dark, drills are meant to practice what to do to avoid getting hurt, not to avoid getting help, that's why fire alarms say pull here in case of emergency and not that snitches get points and the thing is that due to their committed membership, the hslda has the power to stop any type of oversight in its tracks.

The take ry law is named after an 8-year-old girl in West Virginia whose father pulled her out of school after he was reported abusing her and she died from neglect just

week

s later. Now lawmakers have finally proposed a law that would prevent parents from removing a child from school when there is a pending investigation of child abuse or neglect or when a parent has been convicted of domestic violence, child abuse or neglect, and it looks like that law would be easy to approve. it passed correctly, but the legislator who proposed it found out that not so much, there are groups I mean, like this homeschool defense fund group that spoke out against Ra's law, the hsda, that's all , and there were quotes about how horrible this bill was and it's an attack on homeschooling and you know they want to move the target, that's what you do in politics, but I always thought maybe protect children you wouldn't actually do it right and that seems pretty reasonable and if the hsld da think trying to protect children from being pulled out of school by people convicted of child abuse is an attack on homeschooling, they are saying quite a bit about what you think is homeschooling if Chile responded to a health inspector who accused his workers of urinating in the frying pan with this is an attack on everything Chile stands for, don't punish the majority of our staff for the minority that urinates and shits on our President Margaritas.

I would have some questions about what Chile thinks it represents and for the record that man's bill never passed and that story has been repeated in state after state after state, when a legislative aide who confronted HSLD's DA said: "I've never seen a more powerful and terrifying lobby" and a lawmaker in Arkansas who tangled with them says he was told To me, the only legislation they wanted was what Alaska had, which was nothing. At one point, I began to feel like the HSLD DA is basically the homeschool equivalent of the NRA, an extremely powerful organization that, while representing a large number of people, goes after a fringe fringe. version of your agenda, so where do we go from here?

Well, in a perfect world we would make sure that homeschooled children were safe and actually received a functional education and there are smaller organizations like this that push for those kinds of changes, but at the same time The bare minimum that we could demand in the 50 states to register a child as homeschooled, so that there is at least a record that it exists, of how low the bar is here at the core of the Earth, which I am sure, according to at least one book homeschool textbook, it's in there somewhere. between the ground and the fiery bowels of hell, but beyond that, we could pass some basic child safety protections to ensure that parents can't pull their children out of school to escape scrutiny for abuse.

A few years ago, Georgia passed a law requiring parents who remove their children from school without reason must submit documentation within 45 days that they are homeschooling their children or proof of attendance at another school, if They don't, they are subject to monitoring by the state and even this Republican representative from the state of Georgia recognizes that it was necessary if the people in your world who you believe are most protective of you are torturing or abusing you, who will take care of you. I mean, I don't know. I don't like government intervention and many things, but I don't know, the government is the only person I know that can intervene in these types of cases to save a child.

Yes, you are right, you are absolutely right and you agree. a staunch Republican state representative from Georgia was not something I had on my 2023 bingo card. By the way, I almost have a full bingo. I'm just waiting to know who, you know what, and to be clear, I share your ambivalence. about government intervention here, I understand that involving social services and the government in people's personal situations poses an R risk, especially for those who are not rich and who are not white, not that I like the idea of give him The State Room to snoop around. in people's lives or that I think our child protective services system is impeccable, without grades, we will almost certainly do a major story on CPS one day, but it seems like we give parents a way out free of all scrutiny , no questions asked, the card is simply This is not the answer because being a parent does not automatically make someone moral and being with a parent does not make a child safe and the truth is that some additional safety measures would not hurt the many parents who educate their children at home responsibly. but they definitely protect against those who use personal freedom as an excuse to neglect or harm their children.

The HLDA can say all it wants, that it doesn't support Nazis or child molesters, but the fact is that the policies it relentlessly pushes allow it. prosper and the basic reforms here simply should not be even remotely controversial because, after all, this is about child welfare, this is not rocket science, it is not even a homemade sheep's eye dissection, don't Google it, please true, I can't stress enough that all this is just basic common sense