(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Scientific American magazine urged the federal government to regulate homeschooling and suggested that parents of homeschooled children should “undergo a background check.”
The opinion was expressed in a June 17, 2024, newsletter, first citing the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) which shows that nearly three percent of American children — 1.5 million — were homeschooled in 2019, Breitbart News reported.
The leftists admitted in the newsletter that homeschooled children have excelled academically, using Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, who was homeschooled by his mother, as an example.
Nevertheless, they still think that homeschooling is bad for children.
“But most states don’t require the same assessment of homeschooled kids that are required for their public school peers. Parents are not required to have an education themselves to direct instruction,” the leftists said, adding that “in most states, no one checks to see that children are receiving an education at all” and that “in the worst cases, homeschooling can hide abuse.”
To solve the non-existent problem, the leftists who work at the magazine said that “homeschooling should be subject to some basic federal mandates” and that parents who homeschool their children “should be required to undergo a background check — the same as K-12 teachers.”
“Additionally, homeschool instructors could be required to submit documents every year to their local school district or to a state agency to show that their children are learning. Education is a basic right. We need to make sure kids have chances to investigate what makes them curious, study history and science and read,” the magazine’s editors stated.
However, data from NCES also showed that the reason why parents started to homeschool their children was because they wanted to combat toxic school environments and a lack of moral instruction.
It was reported that 80% of parents who homeschool their children said that they homeschool because they don’t want their children to be a part of a typical school environment, such as the lack of safety, drugs, negative peer pressure and other issues.
In addition to that, 75% of parents said they want to provide moral instruction to their kids. Another 75% said they want to emphasize family life together. Fifty-nine percent of parents said they want to provide religious instruction.
