Homeschoolers for Trump (and why I'm not one of them).

Why we shouldn't be lured by far-right policies just because they sound good for homeschoolers.

Hello hello!

First off, I wanted to say THANK YOU for sticking around even while I deliver a lot less than I initally promised! I’ve made my peace with the fact I just can’t write as much as I did before.

And I also totally get if you signed up for one thing, and are now getting another, and have decided to stop your paid sub - TOTALLY understandable.

I hope you still stick around for the freebies :))

I do have a question for you all, though!

Okay, now to the post..

I’ve spent a few intense years in the online and offline homeschool community, and one of the most striking things about it is the way it feels intentionally depoliticized.

It’s almost like we are all trying to desperately cling to what unites us (home education) and actively ignore what doesn’t (sometimes literally everything else).

I have written a lot about the risks of depoliticizing things that are in fact, INTENSELY political. The risk of silence becoming complicity. The risk of assigning blame to individuals not systems. The risk of looking in the wrong places for change.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that we should not depoliticise homeschooling. This became particularly obvious to me the past year, when the parenting and homeschooling community has been forced to truly question its motives and beliefs while a genocide takes place.

This was also made very obvious by Trump’s direct message to homeschoolers, which I’m going to talk about here in detail, to spare you from having to watch or listen or even read it - that is, unless you want to, in which case knock yourself out (it’s actually very short!).

A few days ago, I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about why Trump does not represent all homeschoolers. I’m going to try and not repeat the same points, but to go into more detail in this post, so if you haven’t read the piece above it might make sense to take a quick look at it first.

Little disclaimer: I am writing as if Trump really means what he says, and may have the power to execute it if he becomes President. Of course, we know that Trump says many things, and then doesn’t necessarily do them - so, I’m bearing that in mind too. But regardless, these topics are in some ways bigger than Trump himself, because these ideas and policies are championed by a very vocal minority of homeschoolers that we should all be aware and extremely wary of - whether Trump is elected or not.

I do also want to point out that the Democrats, as far as I know, have no message for homeschoolers. So this is definitely not a post about how we should all be looking to the Dems for answers - the so-called left have historically been all in on public education reform, and not particularly open to considering why so many families and children are unhappy at school.

All of that said, let’s go..

The issue of parental rights

The rhetoric in homeschooling circles is consistently either full-on embracing, or low-key acknowledging the importance of parental rights.

But what do we really mean, by parental rights?

At first glance, this might just sound like rights for parents. What’s wrong with that? Surely parents have rights that are inherent to parenthood, such as parental leave or tax breaks. I would argue that something like parental or maternity leave is a human right, but here’s the thing: that’s not what parental rights are.

Parental rights are the rights of parents OVER their children. They are not human rights or even adjacent to that. Parental rights exist on the assumption that as someone who cares for a child, I have a specific set of rights to make decisions FOR that child that I believe are in their best interest; whether those decisions actually are in the child’s best interest, are almost irrelevant as long as they don’t break the law.

Parental rights matter to some people, because they protect a parent’s legal authority, as well as their freedom, to make decisions about how to raise their child, whether those decisions are regarding education, health, discipline, religious beliefs, inheritance, custody and so forth.

Parental rights make me very, very uncomfortable. I feel discomfort on a philosophical level, because we are using the language of rights to allow one set of people to have rights over another set of people. This feels very similar to ownership, and a lot less like actual human rights. Human rights, surely, are about what we deserve as humans, and not about how we get to control other humans, even if it’s in the guise of caring and protecting.

In the US, parental rights are proteced by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which has been upheld in various Supreme Court cases, and which, essentially, gives ownership rights to parents over their children. Parental rights are fundamentally property rights. And that should tell us all we need to know about how children are viewed in society.

Parental rights are often in conflict with both the rights of children, and a vision of children as our collective responsibility.

Let me deal with each one of those separately.

All children are our children

So often, we find ourselves looking to the parents when something “goes wrong” with a child.

I get that, I have done that too. But if we are to believe that we have a collective responsibility for our children, then that means we need to expand our ideas of what raising children requires.

In his book, Adam Benforado writes: “But with raising children cast as the prerogative of parents alone, our culture absolves everyone else from responsibility for their welfare.. That is not who we were made to be.”

Surely, this is what James Baldwin meant when he wrote, “The children are always ours, every single one of them.”

I can get behind feeling a collective responsibility for all children, but I feel conflicted about the collective responsibility coming from a faceless government: like, I don’t trust the government much, really. Not only that, but the idea that children BELONG to us all, is not what ‘all children are our children’ means to me.

There is a difference between a collective sense of caring for all children, and supporting a system that feels it has rights over our children. I still believe that in most cases, parents will do what is best for their child (more so than a random member of an institution might), and in some cases, parental rights will serve us to fight for the rights of our children. I’ve written more in detail about parental rights and the ways they can oppose or support the liberation of children.

And so, we come to a place where we need to acknowledge that putting the rights of children at the centre is the only way to counter the encroachment of parents, or governmental institutions, over the rights of the child.

Benforado also mentions that ensuring the wellbeing of children is in our collective interest: after all, they are the adults who will inhabit our society in the future. I don’t love seeing children as adults-in-the-making because I feel like we should be able to respect them as fully formed beings in the present, but I do see his point. We should all care about all children, because our future as a whole depends on them.

Benforado’s book rests on the assumptions that “the best way to address society’s major challenges is to put children first,” which is very different to using children as a vehicle to push adult agendas. Putting children first requires actually making decisions based on what is truly in their best interests, and getting to decide this requires us giving them full rights to participate in their lives.

In her book, It’s Not Fair, Eloise Rickman writes about the idea of “widening circles of care,” as something we can all do individually and in our communities. This feels like a way forward that both centres children, and assigns responsibility to us as parents, and to all adults, to care for children. Eloise writes, “I like the idea that there is no such thing as other people’s children; that we must recognise our duty of care towards children and that we should strive to be in solidarity and community with them.”

Children’s liberation should be the responsibility of all adults at all levels of society.

Children are people with human rights

A lot of why it’s tough to both protect, provide for, and respect children’s autonomy - is that children’s rights to be looked after might conflict with their rights to make decisions about their daily life. I might hypothetically believe that school is best for my child, but they might resist it and say they don’t want to go (or vice versa). Who gets to decide, in the end? Does my child’s right to be provided for and looked after, trump their right to participate in decision-making?

Clearly, I have tended more towards centering my child’s right to participation. Some might say that in fact, our reponsibility to protect and provide is just a means for adults to control children, and that participation rights should be at the forefront of the autonomy and liberation of children. In which case, we might claim that children’s rights are in direct conflict with parental rights (and parental responsiblities, at times!).

I don’t feel I can go that far. I don’t think there needs to necessarily be a “conflict of interest”, as Katherine Nicole O’Neal calls it, between parenting and child liberation, if parents are utilising their rights to protect the rights of their child: for example, my right to home educate my children is the reason I can remove them from a coercive system and protect their rights as people. Perhaps, parental rights can work hand in hand with the rights of children?

Perhaps, parents and children don’t need to be in opposition, perhaps we were never meant to be but we now exist in a system that literally thrives on binaries and promoting ideas of opposing or conflicting interests, that must be resolved by one set of people dominating another.

The issue is that parental rights can be used as a partnership tool, but also as a coercive tool. And how do we deal with backing a set of rights that could go either way, that rely on the good will of the rights-holder to make good decisions? I don’t have an answer to that, other than working to change people’s minds around the role of parent, caregivers and adults in children’s lives.

Ultimately, it is the parental rights movements, championed by conservative Christian groups as well as groups that protect homeschoolers, that has stopped the US from ratifying the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child. When we cite our rights as parents, it would do us good to remember who is backing us: conservatives and right-wingers that do not recognise children’s rights from exploitation and violence, and children’s rights to freedom, autonomy, and to make decisions about their lives. People who view children as property, not humans with their own rights. And those that worry adhering to the rights of children might mean confronting institutional abuses of power.

This is not to say that the UNCRC has fundamentally changed the lives of children. No children were consulted in its making, and many countries signed it but are not held accoutnable when they break their commitment. It is, effectively, unenforceable.

Which is why we need a broader framework of collective care and systemic change, that looks beyond individual rights.

The issue of “God-given rights” to be the “steward of our children’s education”

I don’t have a lot to say about this other than: it is extremely dangerous to bestow parents with godly powers of stewardship and decision-making. It is the stuff of authoritarianism, and sews the seeds for abuses of power at all levels of society.

When we hear this sort of rhetoric, even in a diluted form that perhaps doesn’t mention a godly power, we need to push back on it. We do not own our children. We should not be able to exercise exclusive power over them. And yes, we should not be able to have full stewardship of their education either - is it THEIR education, after all.

This dynamic of power over is dangerous and needs to be dismantled.

Similarly, the school system should not have the same power over a child’s education, either. It works both ways.

Full access to benefits

This is an interesting one. The Republican platform addressing homeschoolers, claims that homeschoolers will be given full access to the same benefit school children have.

I’m not really sure what this means, because it’s not specific at all. But I’m assuming it could mean access to extra-curriculars (which is already available in many states) and perhaps access to free meals, the library, or events at the public school.

This is interesting because at the very same time, Donald Trump is talking about dismantling the Department of Education and handing all education and school decisions back to individual states. This could potentially mean that free lunches no longer happen, or that school funding is cut so that any benefit your homeschooled child might derive no longer exists. I have no idea what it could actually mean, in practice, but it seems extremely contradictory.

And as we have seen in the past few years (for example by 14 states turning down funding for free meals over the summer), states don’t necessarily make educational or child welfare decisions that are actually good for children, that could be considered “benefits” (even though these “benefits” are actually just basic human rights).

The problem with “educational choice” or “school choice”

These words get thrown around a lot in homeschool circles.

I get it. It sounds wonderful, in principle. Imagine if there were no single system of education, but a myriad of different schooling and community options for our children.

Each family could decide where to send their child - the self-directed community nearby, or the mainstream school, or the forest school, a homeschool co-op or the Christian school. Or homeschooling or unschooling, of course. It would be like a buffet - we would each be handed some funding (although it’s hard to know where the money would come from), and we could each pick what worked best for our child.

This system would sort of kill two birds with one stone: dismantle one single schooling system, and support all manner of schooling options that are currently not seen as legitimate and not given financial support.

In principle, it seems like a good idea. But I think the worry here is that the quality of education would end up varying massively based on the resources of the local population, and that we would see even more disparity than we already have in the school system. And, that the more liberatory forms of education would be excluded because they aren’t considered “schooling,” thereby erasing any actual benefit to children.

Some states already utilise a voucher system. Maine is one of them, in fact. Because many Maine towns do not have a public school, the town allocates funding to each child to attend the school of their choice outside of the town they live in - whether that school is public or private. I can’t comment on every single state or country’s voucher system because it would require a lot of research and expertise that I haven’t done/don’t have, but some downsides of a voucher system are pretty obvious ones:

It might make disparities worse

Families who can afford to move to areas where school choice is an option, might choose to do that - this might drive house prices up in that area, and down in areas where children are required to attend the local public school. It might also take funding and resources away from public schools in some areas as a result, and begin a cycle of concentrating wealth and resources in some areas and depriving others of both. This piece is an interesting look at the role of segretation and race in the school choice movement.

Religious schools qualify

School choice means people might choose to send their child to religious schools, effectively providing government funding for religious education. Private schools have a lot less oversight and requirements, and this could be an issue. (Side note: in Maine all schools need to be accoutable to the Maine Human Rights Act, which safeguards the rights of groups that might face discrimination within a system of school choice. I don’t think this is the case for all states.)

Too much power in private hands

Private schools do not necessarily have to admit all students. They essentially can make up their own rules, within certain parameters, and this might mean that students with disabilities or learning differences might not be able to access the support they need.

So while school choice sounds fab in principle, it might simply mean that already marginalised children end up suffering even more in multiple ways. The only reason I think vouchers would work is that they are a way to dismantle an oppressive system, and there is the potential for more rights-respecting settings to thrive. But in the end - the downsides seem really stark. And the whole concept feels really libertarian and free market-ish that I just can’t get behind it.

It makes me think much harder about the sort of vibes I give off when I talk about dismantling the schooling system - like, then what? Are we going to trust that the results of this dismantling are collaborative, respectful to children, and rooted in collective freedom? Because all I can think of is that it would simply create a vacuum for private interests to seize power and run with.

School choice isn’t actually about noncoercion

I think the thing that makes me be very suspicious here is that even with a school voucher system, a lot of alternative centres need to quality as a school to be able to accept vouchers. So for example, my children’s Self Directed Education community in Maine, cannot get state funding because they don’t tick the “school” boxes. So when I imagine that school choice might mean a range of options - actually, it might just mean a range of pretty similar schools. It might not be the silver bullet for us self-directed people.

Until the concept of school is either expanded, or there is space carved out for settings that do not look like school, then school choice, especially in areas with many available public schools, doesn’t actually do what we think it might do.

$10,000 for every homeschooled child - wouldn’t that be amazing?

This is probably the promise I’m taking with the hugest grain of salt. And to distance this entire conversation from Trump, let’s imagine that all home educating families get $10,000 per homeschooled child, just as a matter of routine.

On the one hand - YES. This is the closest homeschool parents will ever get to feeling seen and valued by society at large. It could literally save the lives of children who struggle in school. It could provide resources for parents who have to home educate and as such have had to sacrifice a lot. It could hand funding back to groups of parents to set up co-ops, communities, self-directed learning spaces, and so on.

It could do so much good. And equally, it could also have a lot of the same effects that the voucher system above might have: funnelling resources away from schools, concentrating them in the hands of those who already have the capacity and ability to homeschool, providing state money with a lack of oversight.

Speaking of oversight, that might also be an issue: would there be requirements to access the funding, and what would those look like? Would you need to prove you are following state curricula, or that your child was “at grade level”?

As someone who believes in trusting children, in trusting parents and people in general, I want to believe that giving families resources will mean they feel more supported and able to live better lives. At the same time, it’s so much more complex than that. And we don’t live in an ideal society.

And because this kind of policy is being championed by the far-right, I know that the end game here is not what is best for families and children, but what is best for capitalism and specific interest groups (such as religious extremists).

Trump is the “champion” of nobody who cares for children’s autonomy and liberation.

At the same time, Harris is also not necessarily concerned with the rights of children when it comes to educational policies.

Nobody is really willing to look at the coercive nature of schooling and the abuses of power inherent within a hierarchical system. As people who care about children’s status in society - all children, not just our own - we don’t really have suitable representation.

And this takes me back to: how do we organise in our communities so that children can be seen and heard? How do we do this with not a whole lot of resources, and little to no actual funding?

I don’t have a whole lot of answers, frankly, other than to continue to build and connect and organise with the resources we do have. And to support those who are aligned with us, and distance ourselves from those who are not.

Thank you for reading! And for being here and supporting my work.

I appreciate you all!

Fran x