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.