The number of British children being educated at home has doubled in a mere six-year period, according to government data cited in U.K. media reports. The surge in homeschooling comes as government schools across the Western world become increasingly extreme in pushing anti-Christian, anti-liberty indoctrination.
Estimates based on admittedly incomplete local government data across the United Kingdom suggest that there were some 30,000 home-educated children in the 2016-2017 academic year. By contrast, in 2011, the estimates suggested there were some 15,000. In all, it was a 97 percent increase.
Among advocates of educational liberty and true choice, the news was greeted with celebration. After all, more homeschooling will lead to more intellectual diversity and huge savings to taxpayers. On top of that, existing data show clearly that home-educated children are far better educated on average than their government-schooled peers.
For totalitarians hoping to use the government education system to brainwash future generations, however, the news was a cause for dread. Indeed, according to news reports on the explosion in home education, “school leaders” and members of Parliament are pretending to be worried that “some may be receiving a substandard education.”
Ironically, virtually every child in a government school in Britain or the United States today is receiving a “substandard education,” and it is deliberate, as this writer and Dr. Sam Blumenfeld showed in Crimes of the Educators. Even referring to Western governments’ indoctrination and dumbing-down programs as “education,” substandard or otherwise, might be a stretch.
And so, now, tyrants masquerading as educators want to treat homeschool families like convicted sex offenders, registering and monitoring them all without so much as suspicion of wrongdoing. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, former Education Select Committee chair Neil Carmichael, for example, said he was “deeply concerned” by the massive growth in home education.
“We don’t know exactly how many any being home educated, the variance is in the region of 50,000,” he whined. “My concern with home education is that it’s fraught with difficulty. The problem is that it’s such an uncalibrated and unregulated area. The lack of regulation is one of my main concerns.”
To start with, Carmichael wants homeschool families registered. “I believe that every home educator should be registered,” he declared, dispensing with millennia-old Anglo-Saxon traditions of “innocent until proven guilty,” parental rights, and other basic liberties. “There’s currently no requirement for compulsory registration. It’s a huge loophole that needs to be tightened.”
And already, legislation to register and track homeschool families in the U.K. has been introduced in the House of Lords by Estelle Morris, a former Education Secretary. Under her radical plot, government would monitor “the educational, physical and emotional development” of all home-educated children.
In Scotland, meanwhile, legislation was passed mandating that a government bureaucrat oversee the development of every child — even those enrolled in government schools — throughout their first 18 years. According to the text of the legislation itself, the totalitarian measure was needed to comply with United Nations agreements.
The news is mixed. On the one hand, it is encouraging that parents are waking up and opting out of “the system.” On the other, though, it is concerning that a mere increase in the homeschool population has brought so many totalitarians out of the woodwork.
Americans must be prepared for a similar onslaught.
