Homeschooling has had a bad rap in the public eye for a long time, despite the fact that homeschooling parents come from an incredibly diverse number of backgrounds. There is a prevalent stereotype that all homeschooling parents are religious extremists or somewhere within that general concept scope, but this is simply untrue and has been for quite awhile. In fact, a large number of wealthy, left leaning parents "homeschool" their kids. You may not be able to imagine a dual income six figure earning parent sitting down with their kids at the dining room table to instruct them, but that's because the umbrella of homeschooling is much wider than that. Turns out any parent who hires a private tutor to instruct their child in their home is "homeschooling" them. Many states allow parents to group together with other parents and take turns "being the teacher" to instruct a larger group of children together. When you look past the stereotypical framing, homeschooling is incredibly popular and widespread among people from all walks of life.
Homeschooling is looked down upon by the mass of government school families due to a large number of both misunderstandings and misinformation. A well known situation happened a few months back where a Harvard paper released an article from an anti-homeschooling woman who claimed, with no evidence and in fact much evidence to the contrary, that homeschooling parents by and large used homeschooling as a way to mask the domestic abuse of their children. This claim was "justified" with nothing more than wild posturing, a mad idea within this woman's head that, clearly, no family would choose to homeschool their child unless they were hiding something. An unsubstantiated and dangerous claim with no merit peddled with no clear purpose other than a holier-than-thou academic attempting to pile more government meddling, regulations, and constraints onto parents who would choose to spend their own resources to educate their own children.
It was during the circulation of this mad woman's astonishing hubris that any one person could take a quick glance at any given comments section and find a wide variety of parents from all walks of life disgusted at the accusation that their decision to spend more time, more money, and more effort into the raising and nurturing of their children was somehow because of some insidious shadowy desire to abuse them. There were people who were homeschooled, proudly proclaiming the progressive nature of their parents' instruction, article after article about how liberal parents also homeschool, a perhaps surprising number of statistics showing much fewer than half of homeschooling homes include religious instruction - all in all a drastic number of left-leaning parents desperate to ensure that no one thought they were nasty "conservatives" because they homeschooled their children.
Anyone who would choose to actually look at the statistics would find that homeschooling children are well adjusted and more intelligent, let alone the fact that they have far more free time and creative license in their lives to grow more independently and confidently into adults. With the amount of bullying, social ostracization, fear mongering, abuse and just plain wasted time in public schools, the fact that anyone thinks homeschooling is somehow less nurturing is astonishing. You don't have to have active shooter drills in your homeschooling schedule, nor do you have any need to "fill the time" in a strictly scheduled 90 minute class period.
And yet, with the current coronavirus situation bubbling away, a number of people have taken the opportunity to declare homeschooling is racist. But where's the connection?
Many parents who view the coronavirus as truly dangerous are discussing now the changes they would have to make in their lives now to permanently homeschool their children, simply due to the danger they feel their children would be in to return to a crowded government school. They find no issue with government schooling itself, merely the viral contagion danger it poses. As quickly as the editorials and articles came out talking about homeschooling as a viable and perhaps necessary option for the education of our children in the "new normal", counter-articles came out declaring this move to be "from a place of privilege" and - you guessed it - white supremacy. Because, of course, only rich white people have the resources to homeschool their kids.
While concerned parents are simply trying to "do their part to stop the spread," as they've been beaten over the head with for the last four months, they are now what they've been delicately trying to avoid for much longer - racists. Absolutely depraved white supremacists directly responsible for slavery - by taking their kids out of public schools, they "help no one but themselves," leaving the poor kids (who are all minorities - their words, not mine) to suffer in public schools with less funding. I could not have come up with a more woke reason to take on the enormous responsibility of being directly responsible for your kids' education than militantly following the nonstop bullhorn of "stopping the spread", and yet as quickly as the demands to cancel government school forever started, it's suddenly nazi-level bad to actually do anything substantial toward that goal. The calls to keep schools closed for the next two years, met with nothing short of full support and decisive action, is suddenly white supremacy.
To ensure we are all on the same page, the reason homeschooling is now racist is because
1. having the resources to do so is white privilege
2. pulling your kids from school does absolutely nothing to help anyone except your own kids (this is of course directly contrary to the idea that we will "stop the spread" by quarantining and social distancing as long as possible)
3. white people pulling their kids from school is white flight (which is bad)
4. not needing government assistance to survive is also white privilege
Now, people who are "uneducated" and thus unfamiliar with the Critical Theory taught in college undoubtedly read this and think it is absolutely bonkers. That's because it is absolutely bonkers, but let me try to explain how this falls into Critical Theory concepts and how it therefore "makes sense" to the people who are saying it, and how homeschooling went from "a totally viable option that plenty of progressive and liberal parents choose" to "irredeemably racist".
To us regular folks this looks like nothing more than people seeing a phenomenon - mostly white moms trying to homeschool their kids due to the issues at hand - and deciding it must be racist because the moms are mostly white. That is, actually, what's happening, but the reason it's happening is due to Critical Theory (more specifically Critical Race Theory, which I will henceforth refer to as CRT). The very merit of it being mostly white moms spontaneously forming homeschooling pods for their kids due to the looming absence and perceived danger of government school DOES make this racist. Regardless of the fact that this is happening organically and entirely uninfluenced by racial factors, CRT posits that it is in fact racist for mostly white moms to form homeschooling pods amidst this virus crisis, because they are white.
Please note that even if there are some black moms involved, those black moms suffer from white association and should be choosing to abstain from attempting to homeschool their child without government assistance to avoid white supremacy compliance. This isn't some wild strawman I'm making or "quip" I'm attempting to make. Applying CRT to this phenomenon vilifies any black moms choosing to homeschool, whether they do so in companionship with the mostly white moms or not, as compliant in a "white supremacist movement". These finer points tend to be avoided since they are even less accepted than the first premise, but if you manage to talk a CRT-adherent into this corner, they will be forced to betray their CRT teachings or admit that the black moms are actually racist, too. This is because the very merit of the mostly white moms behind the movement actually make the entire movement racist, because it does, because that's what CRT is.
Let's back up. Critical Theory is a means of viewing the world through a lens of oppressors and the oppressed - thus, Critical Race Theory is a subset of this thought, viewing the world through a lens of the oppressors and the oppressed, and also what color they are. Despite the theory itself being obviously and self evidently a theory, one of many "thought experiments" on how the world works, it is widely embraced as the truth and subsequently taught to college students as if it were fact. While it is called CRT, it is not referred to by this name when taught - all instruction is simply taught with CRT as the backdrop, as if it were reality, without mentioning that it's actually a category of thought. It is simply taught without being named, so that it cannot be categorized and filed away as theory, but allows it to be embedded into everything else that is taught.
Many breakdowns of CRT fail to mention this part - it's presented as if students are exposed to it during a "CRT lesson" and then quizzed on it as its own subject within a curriculum. This is not the case - while CRT has a name and all of its concepts could be taught as an individual lesson plan, the reality is that this concept is simply peppered into everything else and left unnamed. To better comprehend this phenomenon, it is comparable to teaching things "through a Christian lens", the overarching backdrop of God as an everpresent reality in every aspect of every subject taught. CRT teaches everything with a backdrop of oppression, but unlike a Christian who may desire intentionally to learn through a Christian lens - and understands that there are "other lenses" and thus understands why there are differences in opinions on "reality", careful attention is paid to not actually clarify that CRT is the lens through which everything is being taught. Any alternative "lens" is written off as being simply false, rather than what it is, "through a different lens". The overarching backdrop of CRT woven into everything is not identified as CRT, but is left to be understood as simply being reality. Perhaps another way of comprehending this phenomenon is to call each concept a different color of "tinted glasses", just as we often refer to a rosy view of the past as "looking through rose colored glasses", viewing the entire world through a pair of "CRT tinted glasses" is forced upon students without consent or explanation.
My stress of the idea that CRT is left unnamed is very important - not naming it as it is allows it to exist as a more nebulous concept. When something is difficult to pinpoint as its own standalone concept, it's harder to question - it's harder to even think about whether or not it needs questioning. It becomes second nature, a simply "obvious" aspect of life, the same as any raised hand being a threat of physical harm to a dog that's been beaten its whole life. They cannot fathom seeing the world any differently from the way they've been indoctrinated to view it. This homeschooling problem illustrates that very clearly. As people who were not instructed via CRT-laced college education, we see this phenomenon for what it truly is - unwarranted willy-nilly accusations of white supremacy tacked onto something wholly unrelated to racial variables just because people involved are mostly white.
But for people whose 2-4+ year college instruction involved having CRT concepts constantly applied quietly to their every thought, the very fact that the involved people are white is what makes it racist, as they are taught explicitly to view the world through this lens of oppressors and oppressed. The fact alone that the moms are white is what drew them to this conclusion in the first place. Again, as this concept is insidiously woven into their every thought and concern, the conclusion that this is racist does not appear as the monotonous nonsense that it truly is. They were not taught "CRT is a way we can analyze and understand the world", they were taught "here is the world, and here is how the world is". Whites are the oppressors and everyone else is the oppressed. Anyone who aligns with the whites are race traitors and have taken the role of oppressors, which is why all black people with dissenting opinions are so easily and readily disregarded. It's about race, but it's also not - it's moreso about oppressors/oppressed, and race just happens to fall in line with it somewhat predictably. When race does not fall in line predictably, the failsafe of "oppressors/oppressed" is applied, thus classifying all dissenting blacks as "essentially white".
This is why homeschooling is racist. Because when white people do something, it is racist, because it just is (via CRT). This seems absurd (because it is), but when you understand CRT it makes it a little less agonizingly frustrating. Unbeknownst to the majority, they have been taught everything they know by religious zealots championing unquestioning loyalty to the concept that reality is shaped by the existence of oppressors and the oppressed. This is not the only way to view the world, but it's been taught that it is, which is why it's so culturally prevalent. Understanding this is a small step toward sanity for most of us lucky enough not to have suffered through it, and naming this beast is the first step toward ridding ourselves of it. Once it's been named, it can be confronted and questioned.
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