A Bad Time To Hate Homeschool

Kenneth Pike:

The pandemic that has halted entire industries and eliminated scores of jobs overnight has not taken education down with it. It has canceled in-person education—but educators of all kinds, and for all age groups, have shifted to remote learning. While this is not homeschooling, it is home schooling, and we are all home schoolers now.

This is the context in which a discussion of Harvard Professor Elizabeth Bartholet’s “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection,” in the May-June 2020 edition of Harvard Magazine, appears.

The piece is headed by an illustration of several children playing outside while one child, from behind the barred window of a house constructed of books, looks forlornly on. The inversion of reality (as public schools cut recess time to increase instruction hours) is stark, and the books are, without apparent irony, titled Reading, Writing, Arithmatic, and Bible. (The misspelling of “arithmetic” was later stealth edited, as Corey DeAngelis documents here. The version below, which is current, contains the correct spelling.)