Dissecting Pro-Homeschooling Propaganda: “They Rage-Quit The School System–And They’re Not Going Back”
Today I came across another pro-homeschooling propaganda piece, and I am once again going to dissect it.
It was published on Wired and is titled “They Rage-Quit The School System–And They’re Not Going Back.”
The first half of the title raises a lot of questions. Who are “they”? Students, or parents? The first option doesn’t quite make sense: students can’t quit the school system, because they need their parents to withdraw them. But if “they” refers to parents, that doesn’t make any sense either. Parents can’t quit the school system, because they were never technically part of it in the first place.
I think what’s probably going on here is that “they” is intended to refer to both parents and students collectively. The author doesn’t seem able to differentiate between the feelings/actions of parents and the feelings/actions of children, so it’s already off to a bad start and we haven’t even gotten to the second half of the title.
The second half of the title, “And They’re Not Going Back,” is awfully presumptuous. Lots of parents try homeschooling for a short time, then quit when they realize it doesn’t solve any problems and creates a lot of new ones.
“The pandemic created a new, more diverse, more connected crop of homeschoolers.”
I find that hard to believe. I know a lot of parents, and none of them started homeschooling because of the pandemic. Their children just did distance learning through their traditional schools, which they are all going back to in-person in the fall. I also see no reason why the pandemic would have rendered homeschoolers either more diverse or more connected.
“They could help shape what learning looks like for everyone.”
Homeschooling parents have no influence outside the homeschooling commnunity.
Next, we have a stock image of a woman and her daughter sitting on their couch, looking at a tablet and a couple of notebooks. The caption reads “Some families were exhausted by the glitchy mayhem of remote learning. Others pulled their children from schools after they overheard how teachers spoke to students.”
I’m actually kind of impressed that the author realizes that remote learning isn’t the same thing as homeschooling (which is a lot more than I can say for most people in the media), but of course, what she’s not mentioning is that homeschooling does not solve either the problem of technological glitches or of verbally abusive teachers. Both of those things can and do exist for homeschooled students. (If your child is homeschooled, you’re the verbally abusive teacher.)
“It’s easy to homeschool in Texas. A cursory search leads to a step-by-step guide for withdrawing your kid from the school system. Plug a few bits of information into a templated letter, send to a district administrator, and voila! You’re running a school, and everything your kid learns is entirely up to you.”
I’m already well aware of how easy it is for parents to begin homeschooling, in Texas and elsewhere, and I am already well aware of how much power homeschooling gives parents over their children. I find both of these things horrifying, because homeschooling by nature attracts narcissistic parents, but I’m not sure yet whether the author of the article is talking about how easy it is to start homeschooling beacause she wants thoughtful readers to be appropriately horrified by the implications, or because she wants to provide encouragement to narcissistic parents. Given that the title of the article was very pro-homeschooling, I feel uneasy that her intention was probably the latter.
“‘It was so nerve-racking,’ says Sarahi Espitia, a mom of four in McKinney, Texas, a suburb north of Dallas. After a grueling spring of remote learning, Espitia began homeschooling her kids at the start of the 2020 school year. As a graduate of public schools, she felt like she had just plunged her family into the unknown. ‘We’re so used to going to school.’”
I am really glad this article is acknowledging that homeschooling isn’t all fun and games, but I also feel very alarmed by the way it focuses on how homeschooling is difficult for parents, without mention of how miserable it is for the students (who, unlike the parents, did not choose this for themselves and have no way to escape the situation).
I have a hard time understanding how anyone could perceive homeschooling as a solution to the problems with remote learning. In remote learning, your child only gets to communicate with teachers and classmates via Zoom. In homeschooling, they just don’t get to have teachers and classmates at all. In remote learning, kids have limited independence from their parents. In homeschooling, kids have no independence from their parents. Homeschooling takes all the problems you might associate with remote learning and dials them up to eleven.
“Except that the definition of ‘going to school’ had been radically upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. Campuses closed abruptly, while children and teachers struggled mightily with online learning. Espitia, who also helps run the family’s restaurant, was left to navigate confusing new platforms, screen-time fatigue, and endless technical malfunctions for four children. Her kids were 10, 8, 6, and 3; her youngest, a preschooler, didn’t even know how to use a mouse yet. By the end of the year, Espitia says, her ‘kids were crying.’ Wearied by online learning, yet wary of letting her children return to in-person learning, she turned to homeschooling—just for the year, just until things got back to normal.”
However miserable remote learning was for her kids, I have a hard time believing that homeschooling was any less miserable for them. And while homeschooling may have eliminated the constant technical malfunctions that come with trying to connect with the outside world via Zoom, it does so by denying children the opportunity to connect with the outside world at all. That may be convenient for you as a parent, but your child is the one paying the price for your convenience.
“The country appears to be on the verge of going back to normal—her district’s schools have been open for months—but Espitia’s kids won’t be going back to traditional school. Over the past year, she was able to shift her kids’ learning schedule outside of the weekday lockstep; because her husband works on weekends, she treats Mondays like a weekend, where kids have less ‘school’ and everyone can spend more time together as a family. She liked that she could teach her kids more Mexican history than they learned in schools. Last year, she joined a Latinos Homeschooling Facebook group, where families share resources such as Spanish children’s books and curriculum ideas. Next school year, she plans to keep teaching her kids herself.”
She could teach her kids Mexican history or get Spanish children’s books for them even if she wasn’t homeschooling. Also, please notice how this paragraph is all about what the mother likes about homeschooling. The children’s needs and wants are never mentioned. If the children have grown up in the United States, it’s possible they identify with U.S. culture more than with Mexican culture, and that they would actually prefer an Americanized education.
It’s also possible that they want all the same things their mother wants, but we can’t be sure, because the mother never even bothers to acknowledge the possibility that her children could have wants of their own.
“Espitia is a part of a wave of parents and caregivers who withdrew their children from US public schools and elected to homeschool because of the pandemic—and she’s part of a group that isn’t going back. The crisis gave rise to a diverse swath of families that are using tech to totally customize their kids’ learning…”
Homeschooling doesn’t necessarily involve using tech; the concept was invented before personal computers became common. Also, based on the beginning of this article, I was under the impression that the whole point of homeschooling for these parents was to avoid the technological glitches associated with remote learning.
Regarding the concept of customization, homeschooling advocates have been touting this as a benefit of homeschooling for decades, but I’ve never personally met any parents who actually pulled it off well. They all customized their children’s educations to meet their own needs and wants as parents, while disregarding the children’s needs and wants. They were usually Munchausen moms who claimed their average children had disabilities they did not have, or stage mom types who were convinced that their average children were somehow extremely gifted.
“While homeschooling is legal in all 50 states, it has never been considered the American norm.”
It still isn’t the American norm, thank God.
“In 2019, homeschooled students represented just 3.2 percent of US students in grades K through 12, or around 1.7 million students. By comparison, 90 percent of US students attend public school. But a March 2021 report from the US Census Bureau indicates an uptick in homeschooling during the pandemic: In spring 2020, 5.4 percent of surveyed households reported homeschooling their children (homeschooling being distinct from remote learning at home through a public or private school). By fall 2020, the figure had doubled to 11.1 percent.”
Again, I am really glad that the author of this article understands that remote learning is not the same thing as homeschooling, although I do wonder if everyone who took the survey understood this.
“The pandemic may also have given rise to a more diverse group of homeschoolers. In 2012, 84 percent of homeschool families were white. The US Census Bureau’s survey indicates that homeschooling rates increased across all ethnic groups in the past year, and the greatest shift was among Black families, who reported a 3.3 percent rate of homeschooling in spring 2020 and 16.1 percent later in the fall.
‘Covid-19 was the publicist for homeschooling,’ says Khadija Ali-Coleman, a longtime homeschooling parent and a researcher who studies African American homeschool students. In April 2020, Ali-Coleman and researcher Cheryl Fields-Smith cofounded the Black Family Homeschool Educators and Scholars network to connect researchers and the handful of Black homeschool families they had met through their research. But what began as a small Facebook group climbed to over 1,000 members, including many families new to homeschooling.”
Traditionally, only wealthy white parents were arrogant enough to believe they deserved totalitarian control over their children’s educations. I’m sorry to hear this societal cancer is metastasizing to other demographics.
“Families shared a number of forces that drove them away from public and private schools. Some were exhausted by the glitchy mayhem of remote learning. Other BFHES families pulled their children from schools after they overheard how teachers spoke to their children, admonishing students who didn’t maintain eye contact or keep cameras on.”
Is it really unreasonable to expect students in online classes to keep their cameras on? I guess the thing about always maintaining eye contact sounds pretty strict.
“For parents unhappy with Covid-era education…”
I haven’t even read the whole sentence, but the opening clause alone gives me pause, because it emphasizes the parents’ feelings, without bothering to mention or acknowledge the students’ feelings. The author of this article seems to regard children as little more than pieces of meat who exist to be acted upon by parents and teachers, with the parents always being right and the teachers always being wrong.
“…homeschooling could seem like a respite from struggling public and private schools and an opportunity to reclaim a part in their kids’ learning.”
Does it seem like a respite to the kids? Do the kids appreciate the parents’ intrusions on their lives outside the home?
Also, I think it would be more appropriate in this sentence to use the word “claim” rather than “reclaim,” because if you’re a parent, you never had a part in you children’s formal learning in the first place. The author’s use of the word “reclaim” implies that the public school system somehow took something from parents.
“Ali-Coleman points out that the pandemic was the catalyst that pushed parents to seriously consider what they really wanted their kids’ educations to look like, the roles they wanted to play as parents, and the options they had outside the default educational institutions.”
Again, notice the focus on parents’ desires, and the objectification of the children. What do the kids want their education to look like? How much involvement do the kids want their parents to have in their educations? No one in this article seems to be asking these questions.
“This is where online homeschool communities like BFHES come in: Virtual communities make alternative forms of schooling, like homeschooling and pandemic pods, more accessible for more parents looking outside the neighborhood school. If researching how to start a homeschool is as easy as a Google search, then finding a group of similar-minded families for support and advice is just a few more clicks.”
Homeschooling groups, both online and in-person, exist to support parents. They do nothing for children. (Or at least I know my mother was a member of a couple of different homeschooling groups when I was a kid, and I personally received no benefit from either one.) Homeschooled kids just don’t have access to help and resources outside the family.
“Online communities based on cultural and racial groups have been key to attracting and informing families who don’t fit the white, isolationist homeschooler stereotype.”
They may not be white, but they are isolationist. Homeschooling by its very nature tends to isolate people, and this is true regardless of your skin color. The author seems to believe that homeschooling parents who belong to racial minorities are somehow better at homeschooling than white homeschooling parents, and won’t isolate their kids the way white homeschooling parents have always done. I am skeptical, because I see no logical reason for this to be the case.
“BFHES hosts free virtual skill-share workshops on topics like homeschooling children with special needs or managing homeschooling while earning an income. The stories on the Facebook page turn the nebulousness of homeschooling into something more tangible. If this family that looks like me can make it work, why can’t I?”
This is sort of like looking at multi-level marketing promos and assuming that because it supposedly worked for someone else, that it will work for you. Like multi-level marketers, homeschooling parents are very image-conscious, and they usually cultivate an online image that makes them seem more successful at educating their kids than they actually are, and they always forget to mention that their kids hate being homeschooled. They also tend to give a lot of advice that sounds good in theory but doesn’t work in practice.
“If Covid-19 was the publicist for homeschooling, then the internet is the connecting force that binds longtime homeschoolers and the new crop of wired, inspired parents. And if the stereotype of homeschoolers is white, reclusive, and conservative-to-cultish, the online communities that grew over the course of the pandemic constitute a far more diverse, modern rebuttal.”
Again, they may not be white, but they probably are reclusive.
Homeschooling families have always varied in religious and political beliefs far more than the media thinks they have, so any “change” here is a perceived change rather than an actual change.
Saying new homeschoolers are in any way a rebuttal to old homeschoolers is like saying a met is a rebuttal to a cancerous tumor.
“Technology hasn’t just helped a more diverse set of parents start to homeschool—it has given parents a curricular blank canvas, free from the parameters of institutionalized education.”
Read: the parents face no accountability for teaching their kids anything specific, which means that the kids are at a high risk for not learning anything at all, or they may miss out on certain knowledge and skills that would be taken for granted by graduates of traditional schools.
“‘There is absolutely no one way that folks are homeschooling,’ Ali-Coleman says. ‘And what parents are finding is this level of flexibility that doesn’t exist within these traditional school settings.’”
There is a very good reason why this level of flexibility doesn’t exist in traditional school settings. I feel like she’s using the word “flexibility” as a euphemism for “lack of standards or aaccountability”.
Also, please note that while this “flexibility” grants tremendous control to parents, it leaves children entirely at their parents’ mercy.
Next, we have a paragraph that simply summarizes homeschooling regulations in a couple of different states, which I’m not going to reprint. All you need to know is that they’re all really lax and ineffective.
“But when it comes to actually deciding how to allot each hour in a child’s learning day, parents are pretty much given carte blanche.”
Please note the continued emphasis on parental choice and control, while children are yet again portrayed as passive objects who exist to be acted upon by adults, while having no feelings or decision-making capabilities of their own.
“This could be a barrier for parents considering homeschooling: Building a curriculum from scratch can be daunting, especially when you multiply the effort for each kid.”
Earlier, I was kind of impressed that the author of this article understood that homeschooling is a different type of education from remote learning through a traditional school, which means she knows more about homeschooling than most people in the media.
But here, she is revealing some ignorance. She doesn’t seem to know about umbrella schools or prepackaged curricula, which is a pretty significant knowledge gap to have if you think you know enough about homeschooling to be writing about the topic on the Internet. I feel slightly embarrassed for her.
“But especially in the extremely online Covid era, curriculum resources are as bottomless as the internet itself. Parents describe their homegrown curriculum design the way one might rattle off a cocktail recipe: practice worksheets from ABCMouse.com, videos from TED Talks for Kids, and a few minutes of the Happy Learning YouTube channel, for garnish.”
Can you imagine having an education that consists of nothing but a few online worksheets and watching YouTube videos every day?! And then I guess the kids wander around bored and lonely for the rest of the day when Mom runs out of ideas.
ABCMouse, TED Talks for Kids, and Happy Learning YouTube are meant to be supplements to kids’ education, not to actually be kids’ education. I think most kids would get both more enjoyment and more actual learning from attending a real school where they can have science labs and art projects and in-person class discussions. Those kinds of activities are much more engaging for kids than stuff on the Internet. Those kinds of activities provide kids with opportunities to actively do things, be creative, and voice their own thoughts, instead of just passively taking in someone else’s ideas becacuse they are passively following Mom’s orders.
I strongly oppose homeschooling under any circumstances, but if you must, at least enroll your kid in an umbrella school or buy a prepackaged curriculum instead of trying to make everything up as you go. Better yet, just admit that homeschooling was a bad idea and enroll your kids in a real school.
“The expansiveness of online resources, combined with offline, parent-led activities, lets parents more closely tailor their kids’ learning time to their own values.”
At this point, I probably no longer need to point out to you the emphasis on parental control, and the lack of regard for children’s independence. The author also hasn’t included any examples of homeschooled kids getting to do offline activities as part of their education, but I guess she wants us to forget that homeschooling mom who basically has her kids spend all their time on the Internet, and wants us to think homeschooled kids get to do all kinds of interesting things instead of just watching YouTube.
“Cheryl Vanderpool, a new homeschooling parent in the Atlanta area, is using OutSchool.com to help her sons learn Tagalog. Tagalog classes weren’t offered at the private school they attended before; now she can use tech and the flexibility of homeschooling to give her sons a stronger connection to their Filipino heritage. ‘I like the idea of presenting material to my kids that’s not necessarily the colonized experience,’ says Vanderpool.”
OutSchool.com is not a homeschooling program. Her sons could study Tagalog on OutSchool as an extracurricular while also attending a traditional school.
Their old private school probably offered some opportunities that aren’t available over the Internet (like opportunities to make friends in person, for example) but Vanderpool conveniently forgets to mention this, making it sound like the transition from private school to homeschooling has given her sons all gains and no losses.
And once again, we see the emphasis on what the parent wants for her children, with no mention of whether this is what the children want for themselves.
Next, there’s a fluff paragraph about the abundance of online resources for homeschoolers, which I’m not going to reprint or comment on.
“Others are striking out to build entire microschools of their own. The promise of a blank canvas appealed to Ivi Kolasi, a parent in Berkeley, California. She and her husband work in tech. Kolasi’s two older stepdaughters, in the sixth and 10th grades, were in public school, and she was already skeptical of traditional classroom learning. The pandemic hit just as her youngest daughter was entering preschool. Could the pandemic be Kolasi’s chance to set her on a different path?
Over the past year, she researched alternative schooling movements, the kinds with lofty names like Democratic schools and maker education. She teamed up with three other preschool families, hired a private teacher, and set up a microschool in her sun-filled attic. On any given school day, the children visit the Oakland Zoo, tend their hydroponic garden, or re-create Yayoi Kusuyama’s dot artwork with multicolored stickers on the wall of the ‘obliteration room.’ Kolasi hopes to expand in the coming years—to move the classroom out of her home, recruit more students, hire a Mandarin instructor, and give her child the years of expansive, creative educational experience that Kolasi has dreamed of.”
Basically, some lady who worked in tech decided she wanted to be a preschool director instead, so that’s what she did. Her preschool program actually sounds pretty good–certainly it would be better than being trapped in the house doing endless online worksheets and watching inane YouTube videos–but I’m not sure what it has to do with homeschooling.
The sentence “On any given school day, the children visit the Oakland Zoo, tend their hydroponic garden, or re-create Yayoi Kusuyama’s dot artwork with multicolored stickers on the wall of the ‘obliteration room'” was showcased between paragraphs earlier in the article, so perhaps the author is hoping skim-readers will see it there and think it’s a description of all the cool things homeschooled kids get to do, even though it’s not. Meanwhile, they’ll skip over the quote from the lady talking about all the Internet videos her kids watch, which wasn’t showcased.
“As more school-aged youth get vaccinated and the promise of normal life looms, it’s worth asking who is actually able to keep homeschooling. Are homeschools and microschools a viable option for middle- and lower-income families? And if privileged families withdraw from public schools, will low-income students (who also disproportionately tend to be students of color) be left in schools that become even more starved for funding than they already are?”
If low-income families quit homeschooling, it will probably be because they’ve realized homeschooling doesn’t work, not because of financial reasons.
Privileged families have had access to homeschooling for decades, but that fortunately hasn’t caused a mass exodus from the public school system, so I don’t think there’s any reason to believe this will happen now.
“Public school advocates are ‘absolutely’ worried about the possibility of enrollment drops, says Dan Domenech, the executive director of the American Association of Superintendents. Districts receive a certain amount of money per enrolled student: For instance, Berkeley Unified public schools, where Kolasi’s older daughters are enrolled, receive $19,471 per student. So precipitous drops in enrollment can have dire financial consequences for public school districts.
But besides trying to incentivize families to return to school with continued remote learning options, there isn’t much of a concerted effort for school districts to attract families who have left to homeschool or have sent their kids to private school. ‘Where there are parents who have the financial means, then that’s their choice,’ says Domenech. ‘But who goes to public schools? Predominantly the children who can’t afford private schools.’”
The author seems to think that if enrollment drops in public schools, the homeschooled kids will all get some wonderful education while being confined in the house watching YouTube videos, and the rest of the kids will be stuck in a poorly funded public school where they have to do such onerous things as see places outside their homes, talk to people outside their families, and function independently of their parents during the day.
If there ever is some mass exodus from the public schools in favor of homeschooling, we should be more concerned about the students who were removed than the students who were left behind, regardless of race or socioeconomic status. Homeschooled students rarely get a good education, either academically or otherwise, are often subject to neglect and abuse with no one to report it, and often grow up to have serious social and emotional problems. They are ill-prepared to go to college, get jobs, or live independently. Wealthy white parents who homeschool are sabotaging their children, not giving them further privileges.
Also, I’m disappointed to hear that some public schools are continuing remote learning options. Remote learning isn’t as bad as homeschooling because kids do at least get to communicate with classmates and professional teachers over the Internet, but still, there’s a lot you can’t do over the Internet. The goal of public schools should be to get as many kids as possible back in real classrooms, not simply enrolled in the public schools.
And also, I’d like to correct Domenech’s terminology in that last sentence. No children can afford private school, it’s the parents who do that (or not). The author of this article, and all the people she interviewed, have so much trouble understanding the concept that children are separate people from their parents, not merely extensions of their parents. For that reason alone, I would say this article panders very heavily to an audience of narcissistic parents, as does all homeschooling propaganda.
“But Ali-Coleman, of Black Family Homeschool Educators and Scholars, warns against over-emphasizing the limitations of low-income families. She says that not all homeschooling families are necessarily financially privileged, either, pointing to Fields-Smith’s research on single Black mothers who homeschool their kids in spite of low-income status.”
Yes, yes, all parents are capable of isolating their children in the house and providing them with a subpar education.
“Moreover, adequately funded public school systems can still harm children of color: More money won’t shield a child from unequal discipline, a biased curriculum, or a pervasive school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately pushes Black youth out of schools and into criminal justice systems.”
Sheltering children from the harsh realities of the real world seldom benefits them over the long term, and like so many things related to homeschooling, this is true regardless of your race or socioeconomic status.
Even if homeschooling protects black children from systemic racism, it also denies them opportunities to have positive ineractions with people of other races (and yes, those can happen in the public school system). It also denies them opportunities to learn subjects that parents of any race are seldom able to teach at home, such as higher-level math.
I don’t believe there’s any long-term research on how homeschooled black children fare as adults (and even if such research did exist, I wouldn’t trust it, because all homeschooling research is conducted by people who support homeschooling and cherry-pick their results to make homeschooling look good), but I’m not optimistic. I think homeschooled black children will likely just face different problems (and possibly worse problems), than those in the public school system.
For decades, some white parents have believed homeschooling to be the solution to all the problems with the public school system. They were wrong, and now their grown children are paying the price. If you’re black and you think homeschooling is the solution to all the problems with the public school system, you’re still wrong, and if you too insist on homeschooling, one day your grown children will also pay the price.
“The pandemic’s new crop of homeschoolers could also benefit public schools.”
Homeschoolers have never had any influence on or benefit to the public school system. I have no reason to believe they ever will.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has set up something of a wild, living experiment in education.”
Yeah, but not in homeschooling, since most kids did remote learning during the pandemic.
“Ashely Jochim, a senior researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, has been studying the pandemic-born phenomenon of learning pods, the clusters of families who partnered to share schooling responsibilities—a pandemic one-room schoolhouse. Right now, the Center on Reinventing Public Education is working with six school districts to experiment with ways that learning pods and homeschool co-ops could help schools, families, and community organizations collaborate, including ways that districts might help families combine homeschooling and classes from the district. Other districts might use flexible school funding models like Education Savings Accounts to provide more individualized support for low-income students. After Covid-19 closed Edgecombe County Public Schools in North Carolina, for example, the district set up small learning pods for students who lacked broadband access, a program that could outlast the pandemic.”
This whole paragraph started with the rather dubious claim that homeschoolers could somehow benefit public schools. It then goes on to provide a bunch of confusing, random “examples” that do nothing to support that claim.
Learning pods are a remote learning thing. They have nothing to do with homeschooling.
Homeschool co-ops do very little to help homeschooled children. I definitely don’t see how they could be of any use to public school students who already have access to professional instruction, extracurricular activities, and friends.
Regarding the idea of allowing families to combine homeschooling and classes from the district, that sounds like a way for public schools to benefit homeschooled students, not a way for homeschoolers to benefit public schools. Homeschooled students who used this arrangement would probably benefit even more if their parents just quit homeschooling them altogether and allowed them to attend public school full time.
As for the Education Savings Accounts and programs for public school students who lack broadband access, those things are nice, but again, they aren’t examples of homeschoolers benefitting public schools.
“‘The pandemic broke the rules on what school looks like: where learning occurs, when it occurs, who is performing the role as teacher or facilitator,’ says Jochim.”
Homeschooling parents have been breaking these rules for years, and doing their children more harm than good.
“Will families stick with their homeschooling setups? Hard to say. Many pandemic pods, Jochim says, were supplemental and still followed their public school’s curriculum; these pods are likely to return to school. Some parents of younger children are considering going back to public or private schools for high school, when the complexity of college prep starts to shape a child’s curriculum.”
I do agree with the author’s uncertainty that new homeschoolers will stick with this over the long term (although it directly contradicts the sentiment she expressed in the title).
The author acknowledged earlier in the article that remote learning is not the same thing as homeschooling. I’m not sure why she’s even bothering to bring up pandemic pods.
“Sarahi Espitia, the Texas parent, is excited to continue homeschooling next year. Her decision to homeschool gave a sense of freedom in a year when everything seemed out of control, when parents and caregivers felt pressured to somehow make ends meet and keep their kids safe while the world was falling apart around them. She’s glad that the pandemic presented her an opportunity that she might never have taken otherwise.”
Are her children excited to continue homeschooling next year? Did it give them a sense of freedom? She never even acknowledges that her children could have feelings or opinions about this.
“’It makes me feel proud of myself,’ she says. ‘It makes me feel like I did something right.’”
My personal experience with homeschooling mothers is that they are very narcissistic. They usually care very much about being good mothers, but they care for the wrong reasons. They want to be good mothers so that they can feel good about themselves, not so that their children can have the benefits of good parenting.
In this conclusion, Sarahi Espitia never mentions any discernible benefits that homeschooling has for her children. Her focus is entirely on herself. She likes homeschooling because it enables her to feel good about herself.
Earlier in the article, she did mention that her children cried while doing remote learning, and I guess they’re not crying while being homeschooled? But it seems like unless her children are actually crying, Espitia doesn’t notice their feelings.
The worst thing about this article is its persistent objectification and dehumanization of children, who are continuously portrayed as unfeeling objects to be acted upon by the adults in their lives, and who are never granted even a shred of autonomy.
It’s important to speak out against articles like this, because narcissistic homeschooling parents thrive off of having their egos stroked and their beliefs validated this way.
Originally published at http://adventureandintrospection.wordpress.com on June 8, 2021.
