I am so sick and tired of seeing the crass way in which the New York Times equats "homeschooling" with radical right, christian fundamentalist loonies. Huckabee Draws Support of Home-School Families [1] is a slap on the face of the millions of parents in this country who believe that independent, child-led, out-of-school, unschooled, parent-directed education is better and far superior than the crap that passes these days as "progressive" school-confined education --regardless of religion

Yet the only people who are to blame are the leaders of the secular homeschooling movement. They have failed to raise money and to raise awareness among the progressive movement about their true politics.

First, their libertarianism has hampered the growth of the independent and even "open source" learning movement in this country because they've stuck their heads in the sand on about what they've needed to do to attack the politics and PR game of extremists like Michael Farris and his radical Home School Legal Defense Association. This guy is one of the signers of "A manifesto for a Christian America" [1], just FYI.

Second, their natural disgust of Democrats has unfortunately marginalize them within the progressive community, even though most homeschoolers are more than liberal but progressive in their education and political thoughts and would most likely align themselves to the Democrats. But because Democrats treat them like three-eyed bible totting hill billies, they'd rather stick with the tried and true millions of the schooling industry and teacher's union than "explore" a constituency that appears anyway to be hostile to them.

It is frustrating. It is inexcusable that groups like American Homeschool Association or even here in New York, the New York City Home Educators Alliance are still thinking that polite emails and phone calls are a viable solution to the HSLDA problem, especially when you have quotes like this one :

“Mike is the kind of candidate we have hoped for,” said Michael Farris, an evangelical Christian and chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, a group that defends parents’ rights to educate their children at home. “He’s a man who shares a world view with evangelical Christians.”

Conservative Christians are said to represent the vast majority of the parents of the 1.1 million children estimated by the federal Department of Education in 2003 as home-schooled in the United States.

Earth to Paul Vitello [2] : 1.1 MILLION IS THE TOTAL OF ALL HOMESCHOOLERS IN THIS COUNTRY!

In this era of technological advances and global networking, in an era when MIT has open-sourced their whole curricula and where alternatives to hard-bound schooling are being thrown out the window in "the third world", spending billions into warehousing children daily in a government sponsored building would seem anachronistic.

I am not saying that schools are not needed. I am saying though that the system of warehousing children in a school and imposing "mandatory attendance" minimums along with trying to pull out of the air "benchmarks of learning aptitude" is just utterly ridiculous.

All progressives should be for getting kids out of systems that fail them and putting the money back into not just the communities --through independent learning centers and better libraries-- but back into the hands of families with part-time attendance school years, flex-time work hours and universal health care.

But no.

The fundies have actually succeeded at hijacking what would be a winner for the "open source" spirit of the web 2.0.

Isn't that f*&%^ed?

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