Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet is calling for a presumptive national ban on homeschooling, calling for an end to parental “absolutism” over their children’s education in favor of children’s rights to protection and an adequate education – from the state.

The Ivy League scholar insists the rapidly growing homeschooling movement is a major “threat to children and society.”

Unwarranted attack

Even though research from education statistician Dr. Lawrence Rudner of the University of Maryland – cited by National Home Education Research Institute’s (NHERI) Dr. Brian Ray – shows that more than 20,000 homeschoolers from every state outperformed their public school counterparts in standardized testing by 30–37 percentile points across all subjects, Bartholet sees the alternative form of education used by 3–4 million students in America as subverting the state’s control over children.

“Homeschooling activists have in recent decades largely succeeded in their deregulation campaign – overwhelming legislators with aggressive advocacy,” the summary of Bartholet’s recent paper published in the Arizona Law Review reads. “As a result, parents can now keep their children at home in the name of homeschooling – free from any real scrutiny as to whether or how they are educating their children.”

Across every demographic, homeschoolers consistently outperform conventional schoolers.

“Homeschoolers are still achieving well beyond their public school counterparts – no matter what their family background, socioeconomic level or style of homeschooling,” Ray assessed from his 2009 study of 11,000 homeschoolers from every state over a 25-year period.

The survey was discounted by Bartholet as “advocacy dressed up by science” – without substantiating her claim.

She bashes home educators for not indoctrinating their children with the politically correct secular humanism that attacks biblical morality on a number of issues, including LGBTQ propaganda, abortion activism and Darwinian evolution – while accusing many of racism and sexism.

“Many homeschool because they want to isolate their children from ideas and values central to our democracy, determined to keep their children from exposure to views that might enable autonomous choice about their future lives,” the summary continues. “Many promote racial segregation and female subservience. Many question science.”

She ends by portraying homeschooling as being rife with child abuse and persuading readers to put an end to home education as we know it so that it is put under strict governmental control – if it continues to exist.

“Abusive parents can keep their children at home free from the risk that teachers will report them to child protection services, [and] some homeschool precisely for this reason,” the summary concludes. “This Article calls for a radical transformation in the homeschooling regime and a related rethinking of child rights. It recommends a presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool.”

The Harvard professor failed to mention the inherent danger a sizeable proportion of students are subjected to on a daily basis on public school campuses across America.

“Nowhere does Bartholet mention that according to the most widely-cited research, nearly 1 in 10 public school students in the U.S. will be subjected to sexual misconduct by school employees,” op-ed contributors John Stonestreet and G. Shane Morris pointed out in a column published by The Christian Post. “Of course, public schools are filled with many good and dedicated teachers and workers, but homeschool families are filled with good and dedicated parents.”

Bartholet promotes Germany’s handling of homeschooling – making it illegal – in order to snuff out “extreme religious ideologues.”

“I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority,” she argued in opposition to parents’ constitutional right to educate their own children.

In the face of Bartholet’s assessment, the United States Constitution never gives the government any authority over children’s education.

The op-ed writers went on to restat the ludicrous nature of her argument:

“So, giving the powerful government authority over the education of children will solve the problem of powerful parents having authority over children?” they mused.

Ramping up the attack on homeschooling

As recently reported by OneNewsNow, a Harvard University summit is slated for June that piggybacks on many of Bartholet’s arguments, with a focus on addressing the "problems, politics and prospects for reform" it sees in homeschooling.

College of William & Mary law professor James Dwyer – the organizer of the event – made some shocking claims about the government’s role in raising children vs. parents’.

"The state needs to be the ultimate guarantor of a child's well-being – there's just no alternative to that,” Dwyer stated. “The reason parent-child relationships exist is because the state confers legal parenthood on people through its paternity and maternity laws. It's the state that is empowering parents to do anything with children – to take them home, to have custody and to make any kind of decisions about that."

An excerpt from the summary of the summit’s goal goes even further.

"The focus will be on problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling – in a legal environment of minimal or no oversight,” the summit’s organizers announced. “Experts will lead conversations about the available empirical evidence, the current regulatory environment, proposals for legal reform and strategies for effecting such reform."