Media tactics to combat homeschoolers

The education establishment is closely aligned with mainstream media, or so it appears to outside observers. Homeschooling is seen as a serious threat to the educrats and is weakening the monopoly on education in many States. Therefore, the education establishment (the educrats) and their allies have many tactics to fight against homeschooling in general and homeschoolers in particular. The mainstream media is a major ally of the establishment.

Particularly during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic panic, homeschooling participation has enormously increased. That was not just an upward tick: numbers continue to rise 4 years later. A combination of fear over the disease itself, coupled with the closure of in-person schooling, accelerated an existing trend. Unlike previous parental concerns over government-run, tax-funded schools, charter and private schools were also shuttered. At least for in-person, brick-and-mortar venues. (Online charter schools, like online options to assist homeschooling, enjoyed a major boost.) A constant drumbeat of news stories about predatory teachers, school shootings, transgender preferences, and assaults on personal freedoms (of speech, religion, and more) in schools just adds to the reasons for parents and families to opt out.

All of this is seen as a threat to the income and power of the government education system, from the federal Department of Education right down to the local school districts. Including the boards of education, administration (superintendents, principals, etc.), staff (including counselors and the myriad of “support” positions), and teachers (both in and outside of their unions). Remember, these groups – the people in them – are often massively influential members of local communities. And have a very vested monetary interest in the present system.

Of course, there always have been and still are teachers, staff, and even administrators and elected school board members who have resisted and pushed back against the system. These are often driven out, and their influence and views are mocked and brushed off. And they are consistently in the majority. In very large part because many (most?) of us have been brainwashed into believing in the value of public schools and the noble calling of being a teacher of youth.

(Including many teachers, who take strong personal offense to being lumped together with the perverts, powermongers, and greedy bureaucrats and companies.)

A few months back we had this MSN “news story” that painted homeschoolers as successful and dangerous insurgents against government and government-owned and -run educational establishments. This is indeed a common theme, pushed at all levels. This is not a one-time incident: this sort of propaganda is common and frequent.

And it blinds people to the reality that public schools are increasingly abused as a tool of tyranny and falsehood. Not because they have been corrupted into that, but because they were designed to do that. It has been courageous parents, students, and especially teachers and an assortment of politicians that made public, government-run taxpayer-funded schools tolerable for so many decades. Just as the heroism and sacrifice and morality of some good cops whitewashes the bad ones and the entire system in which they thrive.

(At the same time, we do have to recognize that home-schooling and other alternative forms of teaching our children and each other are significant threats to the near-monopoly of government in schooling, particularly PK-12. Their fear is based on reality: as home-schooling becomes more and more popular, their justification for ever-increasing taxes and levels of support is undermined.)

The media, dependent on advertising sales and sales of their products from pop-star music to cinema to toys, is part and parcel of this: they want poorly-educated and gullible people to be a majority. Because they buy things.

Are we?

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