Harvard to Host Pro-Homeschoolers in Response to 'Disinformation Campaign Against Homeschooling'

Harvard stirred controversy earlier this month when they announced a June invitation-only summit to discuss increased regulations and a presumptive ban on homeschooling. The event, dubbed, "Homeschooling Summit: Problems, Politics, and Prospects for Reform," is set to feature a who's-who of academics, lawyers, and activists who have been outspoken in their belief that parents should not legally be allowed to educate their children at home.

One featured speaker of the anti-homeschooling summit, Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet, penned a lengthy article in the Arizona Law Review last year that concluded that homeschooling in the United States should be banned. Bartholet noted most specifically that children taught by their parents might not be exposed to the same social views as children in public schools. She contends that for this reason, homeschooled children are prevented from being "active, productive participants in the larger society."

Noting the lack of homeschool supporters slated to speak at the three day event in Cambridge, many called on Harvard and the event planners to extend invitations to some advocates for family choice in education. A suggestion to invite the Home Schooling Legal Defense Association, which has worked tirelessly for decades to defend the rights of homeschoolers, was flatly denied.

Founder of the HSLDA and homeschooling father of ten Michael Farris penned an Op-Ed for Townhall dismantling Bartholet's attack on home educators.

Amid outcry from homeschooling advocates and allies, Harvard announced on Friday that they would be hosting a virtual discussion that would effectively counter the suggestions being put forward by the original summit.

Titled, "The Disinormation Campaign Against Homeschooling," the May 1 event will precede the summit hosted by Harvard Law and being presented by the Kennedy School of Government. The event is also organized by the student-run group, Ideological Diversity.

Often, community colleges aren’t bad places. But, in part, that’s because they’ve often taken over the curricula that were once commonly taught in public high school. Because the public high schools are usually so criminally negligent in teaching basic knowledge, community colleges are often required to function as remedial high schools.

This is especially true of any field where there are objective standards of knowledge or performance.

But many homeschoolers finish their high school years already knowing much of this material. As well as many students from private high schools, and a few of the better public high schools.

My own sons attended Catholic high schools after about seven years of homeschooling (my older son started at the high school at the school’s invitation, during his final year of “primary” school, and my younger son just skipped a year altogether, ultimately graduating high school before his seventeenth birthday).

My older son finished with so many college credits, he’d have entered our state university as a second semester sophomore. Community college may not have been the most practical solution.

My younger son took an on-line course from MIT in some post-calculus topic his senior year of high school, so he’d have been tapped out course-wise at the community college.

Most of the academics Harvard are actually top-notch. My older son concentrated in Classics. He already was fluent in Latin, and pretty good in Greek, and at Harvard, was able to quickly move to graduate level courses. From an academic perspective, his professors were world-class, the very top in their fields. Most of them played at being marxists, except the Rhodesian feminist (not Zimbabwean, at her insistence). She was an odd bird. No one in the department cared about politics. They cared about their fields. My son’s favorite professors comprised an old German guy who had a new, younger wife every couple of years, a young Orthodox Jewish homosexual who was married to a palestinian moslem, and the previously-mentioned Rhodesian feminist, who was serving as chair of the department, and always looked out for my son. My son was an unapologetic politically-conservative, culturally-conservative devout Catholic, and in the Classics Department, no one cared. He fit in pretty well as one more oddball in a field of oddballs.

My other son concentrated in theoretical math, and had professors who were Nobel laureates, Fields Prize winners, etc.

But they each had a general studies requirement which required at least a few classes in heavily-politicized fields. And the social and student life of the undergraduate college are oppressively liberal, libertine, and politically correct. As well, the pressure that comes from selecting 2,000 top academic achievers from all over the world (40% are their high school valedictorians) creates a hyper-frenzied environment where everyone who is not already an Intel Science Prize winner, or the state poet laureate of their home state, or an internationally-renowned pianist feels like a failure, feelings that are routine drowned from 4 pm Friday to 11 pm Sunday by oceans of alcohol. This created a lot of pressure to conform to the world.

Ironically, for my older son, though it was psychologically-excruciating, and made his college life four years of Hell which have badly scarred his otherwise ebullient personality, it eventually made him stronger in many ways. Also, he had about the best dating life on campus, and several young ladies proposed marriage to him. This resulted from being almost the only guy on campus who didn’t want to “hook-up,” but just wanted to go out on old-fashioned dates with young ladies of high morals - you know - dinner at a nice restaurant, the movies, deep conversations, etc.

He’s recovered partly. He met, dated, and ultimately married another homeschooler (NOT from Harvard), and they will have (God willing) our first granddaughter in June.

But overall, the toll was too high. It took a year post-graduation to begin to decompress and recover some of his previously-happy self.

Because of the overall campus environment, and general studies courses, the younger guy got caught up in the whole politically-correct, far leftist, communo-fascist identity politics social justice warrior crowd, taking classes with one of Harvard’s resident demons, cornel west. He apostatized from his faith, and completely lost his moorings.

Now, he’s an anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, anti-government crypto-communist bitterly-disappointed Bernie Bro who works, ironically, for a defense contractor applying machine learning to software that operate drones that can autonomously kill people for the military. The irony is entirely lost on him.

So, if the academic experience of Harvard in REAL FIELDS (this rules out all “studies” fields) could be divorced from the rest of the Harvard experience, which is monotonously, banally, brutally demonic (Satan no longer needs to be very inventive at Harvard), it’d be a good school. But given that the field of wheat is always found with tares, this field is so choked with tares, it’d be better to nuke it.

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