Harvard Magazine gets attention for an article about the "risks of home schooling."

Harvard Magazine has a cover story on the dangers of home schooling and suggest a presumptive ban. In the cover image they misspelt arithmetic. https://t.co/GjTzL64hEQ

— Shruti Rajagopalan (@srajagopalan) April 19, 2020

I first saw that at Instapundit, where Glenn has written a funny-mean headline: "ELIZABETH BARTHOLET, THE 'KAREN WANTS TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER' PROFESSOR OF LAW AT HARVARD, DOESN’T LIKE HOMESCHOOLING."

Let's look at the article. First, "arithmetic" is spelled correctly (so the illustration was either edited by Harvard Magazine or by somebody who wanted to make it look stupid):

The article is written by Erin O'Donnell, based on interviewing Elizabeth Bartholet, who is the Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program. Bartholet "recommends a presumptive ban" on homeschooling.

“We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling,” Bartholet asserts. All 50 states have laws that make education compulsory, and state constitutions ensure a right to education, “but if you look at the legal regime governing homeschooling, there are very few requirements that parents do anything.” Even apparent requirements such as submitting curricula, or providing evidence that teaching and learning are taking place, she says, aren’t necessarily enforced. Only about a dozen states have rules about the level of education needed by parents who homeschool, she adds. “That means, effectively, that people can homeschool who’ve never gone to school themselves, who don’t read or write themselves.” In another handful of states, parents are not required to register their children as homeschooled; they can simply keep their kids at home.

This practice, Bartholet says, can isolate children. She argues that one benefit of sending children to school at age four or five is that teachers are “mandated reporters,” required to alert authorities to evidence of child abuse or neglect. “Teachers and other school personnel constitute the largest percentage of people who report to Child Protective Services,” she explains, whereas not one of the 50 states requires that homeschooling parents be checked for prior reports of child abuse. Even those convicted of child abuse, she adds, could “still just decide, ‘I’m going to take my kids out of school and keep them at home.’”

Reading those paragraphs,  I thought of the great memoir Educated, by Tara Westover, and then I saw that the next paragraph has Bartholet citing Westover as an example of a child who is kept out of school, left uneducated and subjected to physical abused throughout childhood.

[S]urveys of homeschoolers show that a majority of such families (by some estimates, up to 90 percent) are driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture. Bartholet notes that some of these parents are “extreme religious ideologues” who question science and promote female subservience and white supremacy.

Children should “grow up exposed to...democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people's viewpoints.”...

Bartholet's idea of a "presumptive ban" would put the burden on the parents to meet some sort of standard that would be set by legislation. Do those who are insulting Bartholet support letting parents keep their children out of school on a mere claim that they are educating their children at home?

At the Orange-and-Blue Café...

... you can talk all night.

And do think of using the Althouse Portal to Amazon. One thing I bought recently is "Educated: A Memoir" by Tara Westover. I recommend it. Here's an excerpt, something that I was listening to as I walked on Willy Street today:

I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected. I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.

There’s a story my father used to tell about the peak.... From a distance, you could see the impression of a woman’s body on the mountain face: her legs formed of huge ravines, her hair a spray of pines fanning over the northern ridge. Her stance was commanding, one leg thrust forward in a powerful movement, more stride than step. My father called her the Indian Princess. She emerged each year when the snows began to melt, facing south, watching the buffalo return to the valley....