New York Times Joins War on Homeschooling, Arguing The Government—Not Parents—Should Control What Children Learn

Allowing parents to educate their own children at home puts them at risk of all sorts of problems and abuses without massive state controls and “oversight,” declared an anti-homeschooling activist this week in the establishment mouthpiece of record. Home education is now firmly in the crosshairs of the educational totalitarians amid a push to create a police state.

The December 14 New York Times piece, headlined Home-Schooled Kids Are Not All Right, calls for massive new government controls over homeschool families. It comes just weeks after the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a shocking report demanding such regulation worldwide under the guise of “human rights.”

The Times opinion essay was written by Stefan Merrill Block, who was promoting his forthcoming memoir “Homeschooled.” It uses an emotionally charged memoir of an unconventional and harmful home-schooling experience — his mom was extremely weird — to argue for sweeping federal oversight of all home education, nationwide.

The author recasts parental discretion and even worldview formation as abusive. “The choice to isolate a child from peers and outsiders seems to me plainly abusive,” says Block. “I would also characterize as abuse a parent’s decision to… indoctrinate a child into one mind-set or ideology without the possibility of other perspectives.”

Home education, family autonomy, and parental rights, meanwhile, are portrayed as a dangerous failure of the state to oversee everything. “Our home-school had fallen into a newly legislated invisible space, where a child could easily vanish from public view,” continued Block. “The country has passively endorsed a nationwide system of blind spots.”

Block portrays the state as the ultimate authority, arguing that parents cannot be trusted with their children absent draconian government supervision. He calls for “an authority outside the home” to protect children from their parents. And he makes the case that all decent people would want benevolent bureaucrats checking in on families.

The call for unconstitutional national restrictions, meanwhile, is clear and unambiguous. “To truly protect home-schooled children, we must put in place common-sense laws nationwide,” Block argues. “A good starting point would be… requiring parents to register their home-schooled child with the state.”

To avoid sounding silly as millions of highly educated homeschooled graduates make their mark on the world, Block acknowledges “most home-schooling parents do not abuse or neglect their children.” Still, he repeatedly portrays parental authority itself — particularly when exercised outside state control — as inherently dangerous, abusive, and suspect.

Critics lambasted the piece and the arguments made in it. Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), is the top researcher and academic focused on home education in the world. After reading the Times opinion piece, he systematically dismantled the arguments in response to questions from The Newman Report.

“Stefan Merrill Block’s opinion is an anecdotal story meant to tug at emotional heart strings for philosophical and political purposes,” explained Dr. Ray, who has studied home education for decades. “He wants the government to control private homeschool education with hopes that it will indoctrinate students in his worldview and reduce harm by parents to zero.”

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