Eye on CBS

Homeschooling: Eye on CBS

Thanks to CBS for the important idea of background checks on parents

The quality of the reporting on CBS’s recent reports, A Dark Side to Homeschooling and Home Schooling Nightmares, would generally produce a mouth-patting ho-hum but for the shocks of the stories that overwhelm all explanations. No one comes away unmoved. But the logic breaks down if one examines the stories because the relationship of events to Homeschooling is produced through innuendo, editing and what I'm assuming is a panoramic definition of what constitutes homeschooling: that of parents whose children attend a school at a church founded by the parents.

The events reported are disturbing and outside the boundaries of civilized behavior. Laws are in place to protect children from such horrors but laws affect only those willing to conform or those who are in the presence of someone who can stop a chain-of-events. By itself no law can stop a crime of derangement.

American parents who homeschool are not unmoved by these tragedies, but the events were such that no law could prevent the horrors, just as no laws prevent robbery, battery, rape or murder.

The only thing CBS uncovered is the Dark Side of Humanity, an old story. Siblicide is evident in the Biblical story of Cain and Abel as well as in the ancient Egyptian story of Osiris and Set. Filicide is not rare and is documented in literature. Hearing God tell you to kill your child is demonstrated by the story of Abraham and Isaac. So did CBS uncover a new threat to American children, homeschooling? No. CBS showed stories of mental illness, 'Biblical' child discipline gone awry and a murder-suicide the reasons for which are unknown.

Should we be stunned by 'homeschooling's' alleged dark side instead of by the tragedies of the loss of these children? If yes, why more so than with garden-variety violence? Consider how many murders of children or suicides by children have occurred nationwide. Suicide, according to a report from 1998, was the third leading cause of death for young people 15 - 24 years old and the sixth leading cause of death for children 5 - 14. A quick Internet search pulls up a pie chart showing that siblicide constituted 5 percent of family homicides in Australia between 1989 and 2002 and filicide accounted for 17 percent of homicides. In Virginia there were 427 homicide victims in 2001. Of these 4.2 percent were "other family" victims, that is, "all other homicide victims related by blood or marriage to the alleged offender (such as [step] siblings, [step] parents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents, grandchildren, in-laws and adult children)."

So why did CBS trot out tragic old news (2001) that happened during what public schoolers have as summer vacation? Is this a belated man-bites-dog story in which homeschooling parents destroy their children? Is the story part of the ratings game where tarnish on the reputation of homeschooling is acceptable collateral damage? Spare me the justification that it was said in the introduction that most homeschoolers have their children's best interests at heart.

Which part of the reports will leave the lasting impression:

a spoken caveat about 'most' people who homeschool
a film clip taken from a helicopter, death-scene photos of squalor, and interviews about suicide, murder and battery

Who stands to gain from the educational profiling of homeschooling by emphasizing, "parents don't have to tell anyone they're home schooling. Unlike teachers, in 38 states and the District of Columbia, parents need virtually no qualifications to home school. Not one state requires criminal background checks to see if parents have abuse convictions."

A similar story sequence could be the Dark Side of Transportation which would showcase family-car traffic accidents in which children died. The story could present the proposal that, because parents don't need a chauffeur's license to transport children and because no background checks are done for a history of traffic violations that all children should ride only in yellow government-operated buses. That’s where this ‘homeschooling should be closely regulated’ meme ends, with the government between parents and children.

Homeschoolers are not in a special category, they are only ordinary people who continue teaching their children as we all have from our children's births. If homeschooling parents are constrained, all parents are constrained. If background checks are instituted in order to teach one's own child in one's own home, how long before background checks are instituted for keeping the child? And what then? What is the follow-up? Taking the children away if your background doesn't meet public-service standards? And putting them where? Taken to the logical conclusion, this idea is nonsense.

Other problems with the CBS coverage are:

Bryan Edgar wasn't homeschooled. Why did CBS use him as an example? His parents founded God's Creation Outreach Ministry, a church that ran a k - 12 school according to a video clip, Police Investigate Boy’s Death aired by Kansas City’s Channel 9 news. Also, why did CBS suggest that homeschooling parents should have criminal background checks before being allowed to homeschool when that proposition is negated by the inclusion of this non-homeschool-related case? Bryan and his siblings were adopted by the Edgars so it must be assumed that the couple had good backgrounds to be investigated.
Andrea Yates was under a doctor's care and was homeschooling only one of her five children. When the murders occurred it was summer, a time when the one child would have been home. Mrs. Yates had a history of mental illness, has tried to kill herself and is again under a suicide watch.
The Warren children were known to authorities and to neighbors. Why did CBS focus on 'homeschooling' instead of on why Arizona authorities didn't keep the children because, according to an Arizona quotation in the CBS report, "The children are tortured physically and emotionally." If North Carolina social services workers were so concerned why didn't they obtain a warrant and, with the help of police, remove the children from their home?
The implication that public school children are safe because they're at regulated schools.

So what was the point? A guess would be to follow the money, or the power.

For homeschooling perspectives see:

North Carolinians for Home Education: Response to CBS (frames: click on story title in Hot News! on the right-hand navigation bar)
NHEN: Thoughts on Protecting Children in Homeschooling Families: The NHEN Response to Questions Posed by the North Carolina Task Force of Child Fatalities
LauraMaery Gold: Why It's Important to Document Abuses in Public Education

Follow-ups to CBS's reports

What Businessmen Should Learn from Homeschoolers: Lessons from the CBS 'News' Assault on the Mind, Capitalism Magazine, November 14, 2003

Who Homeschooled Dan Rather?

Cartoon about the CBS report

"Dark Side" parody

Home Education Magazine: CBS Smears Homeschooling

Taking CBS to School

Letter to CBS from members of the U.S. Congress

CATO Institute: CBS: Stumbling Through the Dark Side in Home-schooling Report

CBS Needs Education on Homeschooling, Say Advocates

CBS New is "Rather biased"

Claritin Pulls Ads from CBS nightly news

CBS News vs. home-schooling

Thanks to CBS for the important idea of background checks on parents

Because all parents have unsupervised custody of the nation's future citizens before those citizens are able to actively evaluate and affect their own circumstances, and because as yet there is no national standardized Plan of Societal Inculcation for our new citizens' critical early years, criminal background checks on all parents must be instituted so that only fit people will be raising the next generation. In this way all potential homeschoolers will be accounted for, and no special educational profiling of anyone will be necessary.

A bureaucracy should be established so that all pregnancy tests are barcoded (a scannable ID will be required for pregnancy test purchase), and all Pregnancy Test Disbursing Agents -- PTDAs (grocery stores, drug stores, convenience stores, online outlets and any other facilities that sell pregnancy tests), will be retrofitted to accept the ID scans. The PTDAs will either store the information securely until the it can be downloaded, or the PTDA will be networked into the National Database of Potential Parents -- NDPP. Investigating agents will contact doctors to confirm the results of all pregnancy tests, and get DNA samples to determine paternity (fathers checked as well as mothers). Next the agents will contact the preg-ee and her doctor to check on the pregnancy so as to know whether or not it comes to term; prenatal appointments will be entered into the database to track the pregnancy.

The Parental Suitability Confirmation Process must begin early, so that if the parents fail the background check, a space in the Care Network will be available for the child. A cadre of database administrators and case-workers to manage all the information will be established, as well as an infrastructure of trained Carers in Approved Care Facilities, who will raise the children of substandard parents. Notification to the NDPP of all pre-term pregnancy terminations is mandatory to preclude waste of resources. A fine of $1,000 or a jail term of two months will be levied for women failing to notify the authorities of pregnancy termination.

All preg-ees must have an amniocentesis to determine the fetus's sex because a name and an SSN must be assigned to the fetus six months into the pregnancy. Fingerprints checks of both parents will be needed, and checks will be run through the FBI and the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) for names and all aliases. Personnel staffing should be adequate to ensure that all checks on active criminals are facilitated, and those persons identified (probably more criminals will be caught through the increase in the number of citizens being checked, which will be nearly everyone).

As part of Homeland Defense the Conception Yield Agency (CYA) will be established to ensure that no citizen is left untracked.

[Attn: the above is dark humor and is not meant for serious consideration.
Also, this is not meant to make fun of the horror of children being hurt, frightened, bullied, injured or killed by anyone. It is the solution that is lampooned, not the plight of the children.
Background checks on parents aren't a cure. Bryan Edgar was adopted and I assume his parents' were investigated for parental suitability as part of the adoption process.
If you copy the lampoon copy this part, too.]

Continuing with the idea of background investigations on parents, this news release from a UK organization Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) shows that dossiers on all citizens are not a science fiction figment. "Electronic life records" must support not attack human rights

Classic from the late John Holt (1923 - 1985), The Constitutional Basis for Home Education

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