The Left/Right Alliance That Legalized Homeschooling

NPR’s Sanjena Sathian
looks back at the left/right coalition that brought
homeschooling out from under a legal cloud. The left wing of the
alliance featured fans of John Holt and
other radical critics of institutionalized education; the right
wing reflected Christian conservative concerns. Those worldviews
may have been far apart (though inevitably, people managed to

combine them), but the different groups managed to work
together:

Fast-forward to the 1980s, when
left met right. [Home School Legal Defense Association founder
Michael] Farris found himself defending a hodgepodge of
home-schoolers/unschoolers throughout the decade, mostly Christians
like him and his family, but also “black Jews, Muslims…even one
woman who told me her religious practices were a cross between Zen
Buddhism and the philosophy of Winnie the Pooh.”

States got creative, defending compulsory school attendance laws by
leveraging truancy and even child abuse charges against
home-schooling parents, and lawyers like Farris rose to the top of
a booming individual rights movement.

Farris and other lawyers fought to change the
definition of a private school to include home schooling; they
combated truancy charges aplenty and faced down the dictum that
students should only be taught by certified teachers. But mostly
they won the courts’ silence, as judges refused to rule on the
inherent value of home schooling and instead considered it from a
rights perspective. That, in itself, was victory.

Today, most of the nearly 2 million home-schooled kids are probably
still seen as
fringe—but the idea of criminalizing parents for teaching kids
at home? Equally fringe.

Sathian wraps up by contrasting those “1980s debates that could
unite two opposing value systems under the shared umbrella of a
libertarian ideal” with “today’s deeply personal and political
battles” over issues like Common Core. But I wouldn’t rush to
consign the left/right education alliance to the nostalgia pit just
yet. Both the Christian right and the John Holt left object
strongly to Common Core, and lately they’ve been joined by many

voices within the
teachers unions, which certainly wasn’t the case with the
homeschooling battles. Unity at last!

[Via Ralph
Nader.]