Washington Post’s attacks on homeschooling won’t stop the decline of public schools.
Washington Post Smears Homeschooling Families
Record-breaking numbers of families continue to abandon public schools after lockdowns exposed their mass abuse of children, and The Washington Post is willing to descend into tabloid smear mode to try to stop them.
Last week it profiled a couple who were homeschooled and have put their own children into public school. The article takes the couple’s side against their own parents, airing wild allegations of systemic child abuse against all homeschoolers based on the testimony of these two disgruntled graduates.
The Revolt of the Christian Homeschoolers
It’s a very tiny revolt, apparently. The Post almost exclusively uses these two homeschool graduates to project onto every homeschooling family frightening images of “Handmaid’s Tale”-esque authorities keeping children in line with smacks from tree branches and hoses.
The article is titled “The revolt of the Christian homeschoolers.” It’s a very tiny revolt, apparently. The Post almost exclusively uses these two homeschool graduates to project onto every homeschooling family frightening images of “Handmaid’s Tale”-esque authorities keeping children in line with smacks from tree branches and hoses.
That’s not an exaggeration. Aaron and Christina Beall “had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government ‘indoctrination camps’ devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families,” the 5,000-word article says near the top. The “modern homeschooling movement,” it says,
…led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life — a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.
Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them.
Get that? Rejecting “contemporary ideas about … gender equality” is linked to and reinforced by “corporal punishment” the article later describes as repeated beatings with a broom handle. The article also makes sure to mention the Duggars — who have zero relation to or interaction with the Bealls, except that both homeschool — and all the other homeschooling boogeymen it can find. It’s a ridiculous effort, albeit quite polished, and it’s not going to work the way the Post intends.
Thanks to lockdowns, people are aware that simply reading your kids books or doing a math workbook at home isn’t a risk factor for child abuse. Yet in this article, The Washington Post spends 5,000 words and two years of reporting to smear something it demanded every parent do just three years ago.
Not just homeschooling, but also the Bible comes in for an — inaccurate — link to child abuse: “Sometimes [Aaron and Christina] still flinched when they remembered their parents’ literal adherence to the words of the Old Testament: ‘Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.’”
“Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view,” the article says.
What an open-minded, fair, and accurate description of conservative Christian beliefs! Gee, I can’t figure out why Aaron and Christina’s parents, plus all of their siblings, “did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the discipline they used with their children” with a reporter from The Washington Post.
It’s almost the classic example of a loaded question: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Somehow, The Washington Post feels entitled to ask it of private citizens based entirely on their anti-PC religious and parenting decisions, and then shame them to the world regardless of how they reply.
Imagine The Washington Post ever publishing a profile suggesting all black parents deserve suspicion and extra government oversight because spanking is well-accepted among their peer group. Why aren’t there any Washington Post profiles of black adults who still wake up in terror of the belt coming off its hook by the fridge, with the implication that the parents in that group need more check-ups from government agents?
The most likely answer is that this story is not at all about a concern for actual child abuse, which is not higher among homeschooling families. (If The Washington Post genuinely cared about child abuse, it would do big exposes of polyamory, the U.S. border crisis, and public schools.) The Washington Post is simply using this couple’s story to smear the millions of parents losing their trust in public schools as they impose gender insanity on children after imposing lockdown insanity on everyone. It’s a political hack job.
This story took two years to report, and it reads well. But that just means The Washington Post is good at decorating the bullsh-t it throws at people who don’t do what they want.
What they want is for people to put their kids in government schools. As this article shows, they’re willing
- Use of h2 and h3 tags to create a clear hierarchy of headings
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Why The Washington Post is Attacking Homeschooling
To invest major business resources in smearing anybody who doesn’t obey. Since we’ve established it’s not because The Washington Post cares about child abuse — because if it did, it would go to war against dismembered marriages, the No. 1 risk factor for child abuse — we have to ask the real reason it is using such sharp rhetorical swords to herd people into this one childraising direction.
The Washington Post seems to be using its major media power to attack homeschooling families. But why? It’s pretty obvious: homeschooling families are more mentally independent than those who dutifully attend their government-assigned ZIP-code school. Their numbers have tripled since The Washington Post and its buddies rammed the nation with their lockdown train. Post-lockdown, those numbers aren’t going back down.
The Threat to Public Schools
This public school exodus isn’t limited to homeschooling, either. Christian school enrollment is up 35 percent since 2019. States are rapidly expanding school choice to allow more parents homeschooling-like education flexibility, with parents increasingly given direct power over their children’s state education funding and allowed to use it for not just school tuition but also tutoring, music lessons, special education therapies, and books.
Parents have overwhelmingly favorable views of homeschooling. Education savings accounts are overwhelmingly popular with voters, especially black and Hispanic voters. They have been for years.
This is a huge threat to public schools. That’s a problem because kids learn about important stuff in public schools, the Post says — like the Gender Unicorn and other sexy fun those fundamentalist Christians ban their elementary schoolers from seeing! It seems The Washington Post’s reporter and editors agree with the criticism they put into their enemies’ mouths: that public schools are, at this point in American history, “devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families.”
The Attack on Christian Families
Of course, they would probably say it’s good, necessary, and justified to subvert Christian families. That’s the point of their whole article weaponizing their major media power for an attack on two specific Christian families — and millions of others that, to the Post, look just like them — thanks to the inside assistance of some of their members.
The Post article celebrates, sympathizes with, and defends Aaron’s departure from Christianity. It attacks Christians because they oppose the competing religion of cultural Marxism, which involves child mutilation. The Post admits this religion is preached in public schools. So The Washington Post celebrates actual child abuse, right out in the open, while also adopting a horrified pose over some Christians somewhere allegedly spanking their kids.
Now, even if we stipulate that his parents went too far (all we have are the aggrieved party’s allegations), Aaron’s allegedly spanked rear end still functions perfectly well to this day — if it didn’t, you can be sure that would have been in the article. That’s more than many public school graduates can say today after their counselors helped them amputate their genitals with Medicaid. But Aaron’s parents are the bad guys who need to answer to The Washington Post’s demonic sense of justice.
To the Post, helping subvert a Christian family is all in a day’s work. And herding Christian kids into public schools is a major part of that self-righteous effort. But it’s not going to work, because far too many parents view The Washington Post’s bankrupt moral outrage against their choices as a badge of honor.
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