Hatred, or more generously put, disdain for Christian homeschoolers rears its pernicious, snarky head every year in one way, or another.
The main combatants are from the Left. They fire vitriolic salvos over the walls of their sheltered cloisters of higher learning into an area of education they view to be harmful.
They view it as harmful because the general curriculum used by most Christian homeschoolers is classically based, which is, generally speaking, loathed by the Leftist hegemony.
The essential Christian Homeschooler’s curriculum would include a holistic embrace of subjects across a spectrum of genres that have built, informed, and sustained Western civilisation throughout the good and the bad.
If done right, Christian homeschooling gives students the best of Biblical Theology, antiquity, Shakespearean, Victorian, literary, and Philosophical classics, as well as age-appropriate exposure to multi-ethnic biography, art, community, logic, civics, General science, Math, grammar, English, language, and History.
Of course, not all Christian homeschoolers aim high. Neither do some schools.
This flaw doesn’t warrant vilification, such as Yale University Professor, Phillip Gorski’s claim on Twitter that “Christian homeschooling was -and is – often – if not always – a major vector of White Christian Nationalism.”
Gorski, according to a Campus Reform article, accused Christian homeschoolers of advocating a “fusion of Christianity with American civic life,” which he says, “carries assumptions about nativism, white supremacy, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and militarism.”
What Gorski means by “fusion” is the belief in American exceptionalism, or “manifest destiny.”
His concern is that homeschooled students are being taught that America is a Christian nation, founded by white Europeans, which for better and worse, is one of the greatest Constitutionally Democratic nations to ever have existed.
In other words, they’re being taught the truth, not a revised history ordained by the Critical Theorist Marxists of the New Left.
While Gorski’s concern about “manifest destiny” is to be recognised, it’s not evident that this, errant natural theology doctrine, is the be-all and end-all of the Christian home-schooling curriculum.
I’ve never seen it present in the American Curriculum our family uses and has used in 11 years of home-schooling.
To be fair, Gorski does admit that “not all Christians homeschool, and not all Christian homeschoolers learn Christian nationalism,” but it’s banal for Gorski to make claims insinuating that “manifest destiny” is the benchmark of Christian home education when his definition of Christian nationalism is skewed, to begin with.
As part of the Leftist academic apparatus, Gorski’s operating from his own assumptions, and learned bias.
To state it simply, for Leftists, Western Civilisation is white supremacism.
This is a fundamental belief among Leftists, evidenced by the irrational MAGA hat hatred in the United States, and here in Australia by loud, Leftist opposition to the Ramsey Centre For Western Civilisation.
Academics are protesting the presence of the Ramsey Centre on University campuses through agitprop op-eds, and a dedicated website, by which they accuse the philanthropic organisation of being narrow, Anglo-centric, Sinophobic, racist and patriarchal.
Never mind that their tenured positions of privilege only exist because of Western Civilisation grounded on Biblical Christian evangelical ethics, makes such positions and privilege achievable.
Simply teaching about Western Civilisation and its achievements is, to the majority on the Left, teaching racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, xenophobia, and the long list of thought cancelling nouns go on and on.
This includes the assumption that students not being taught from Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Black Lives Matter, or LGBT programs, within or over-against the ABCs, and 1,2,3, are being taught wrong.
By wrong: Children are being taught at home, not force-fed from the Unionised conveyor belts of the predominately Leftist education indoctrination complexes.
Though the Left does influence home education indirectly through the tragic history of the radical Left bludgeoning its way through the 20th Century, they have no control over what those children are taught, which translates into having no control over the adults those children become.
As is displayed by the way the Left farms racism and fear of catastrophic man-made climate change for political profit. Leftists, and some liberals, don’t want citizens, they want subjects.
I’m not advocating that “cancelling” CRT or QT, I’m saying – as I already do – like Islamism, Nazism, and Communism, teach about them, just don’t teach from them.
Teach from the Bible in one hand, the newspaper in the other (Karl Barth).
In the end, the contempt for Christian homeschoolers isn’t about people, it’s about politics, sex, and power.
The Left’s blind contempt for Western Civilisation merges with a learned prejudice against Christian homeschoolers.
The hate for Church and State informs the radical Left’s willingness to pervert, then vilify Christian home education on malicious grounds.
This fits in well with recent comments from Gene Veith, who wrote that “President” Joe Biden’s “American Families Plan,” was reminiscent of ‘Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which Government also breeds, reproduces (via in vitro hatcheries), and indoctrinates children in massive “nurseries.”
“State Conditioning Centres” took over the mum and dad role of raising children, and the curriculum, said Veith, taught woke “Elementary Class Consciousness.”
Brave New World analogies may seem overused, but we’d be fools to discount the loudness of its message here because, as Veith states, it “sounds disturbingly non-fictional.”
A.W. Tozer once said that “the complacency of Christians is the scandal of Christianity.”
If we allow the Leftist hegemony to dictate curriculum, on the sole basis of their own self-serving, misconstrued and false notions of Western Civilisation, we’re not just guilty of contributing to that scandal, (which in Biblical terms is scandalon; sin), we’re, as Tozer also said, “lacking in a moral wisdom that future historians will record as an Achilles heel because though we had the intelligence to create a great civilisation, we lacked the moral wisdom to preserve it.”
