Tragic Irony
By Jackie Orsi,
California Homeschool Network

A San Jose Mercury article quoted a homeschooling mom rhapsodizing over the new charter school program in Fremont CA. “It’s not a teacher-parent relationship you have anywhere else,” said parent B.C. “It’s like having another member of the family.” This statement chills me to my core.

It does not surprise me that homeschooling families routinely report that their resource teacher is “nice” and “helpful;” her employment rests in great measure upon being nice and helpful. It is essential that she ingratiate herself, establish a place in your family, and entrench herself there.

I know a thing or two about homeschooling. I’ve enjoyed it for the last nine years with my own children, and learned from all the countless families I’ve come to know. I know that in a homeschooling family, interactions and relationship are immediate, intense, and genuine. Never static nor prescribed, they are ever-changing and developing. Homeschooling is a deeply personal family experience that calls upon our full reserves of patience, commitment, vision, and love.

When the state becomes a partner in your homeschool, you bring the state into your family. An agent of the state is assigned to your family. She has a benign title, like “resource teacher.” Your resource teacher holds her job because the state deems that she is superior to you in knowledge and understanding, therefore she is fit to supervise you.

She is a stranger to you, in fact that will not essentially change no matter how many hours you and your children appear before her, or how many hours she spends in your home. She does not love you and your children, beyond a certain thin “love for humanity” veneer that all human service professionals are expected to cloak themselves in. She must retain her professional detachment, but that is not hard for her to do because she is trained to think compartmentally about people. She understands that you are her inferior, not worthy of love among equals.

Your resource teacher keeps detailed narrative records about your children, your family, your meetings together, your home. Her reports are permanent records belonging to her employer, the state. They are read by utter strangers, higher agents of the state, who do not love you, do not even know you, but insist that you need the services of their program. All the agents of the state are convinced of the worth and necessity of what they do for you, and they’ll testify to that, if need arise.

At some point in the machinery of the state, your family will cease to exist except as a series of ciphers, financial and otherwise, to keep an army of state auditors employed.

But don’t concern yourself about the auditors. Think again about your nice resource teacher. She and other public school program personnel are legally mandated to tell about you to other highly powerful agents of the state.  These ultra agents are authorized to take your children away from you without notice and keep them from you for a long, long time. They are not bound by constitutional rules of due process. To them, you are guilty before proven innocent.

And there must be findings, always findings. Without a steady production of findings, the resource teachers, the auditors, and the ultra agents cannot justify their paychecks.

The first wave of modern day homeschoolers, the pioneers of the 70s and 80s, answered to no one but themselves. They were a refreshing new arrival in society: parents who could and would raise their children without reliance upon the state. They were a turnaround movement, a new consciousness, and a complete challenge to the status quo. The education establishment was momentarily flabbergasted, then fought back viciously in the courts and legislatures for many years-until now, when it discovered that you can catch those pesky flies with a  little bit of honey.

I find it a tragic irony that a movement that started out so intent for freedom is becoming the state’s most willing thoroughfare into the intimate lives of families.

If you think that welcoming the state into your most personal life is a thing to be celebrated, or even tolerated, then you go to the head of the class: you’ve finally earned straight A’s in the hidden curriculum of the public schools that produced you.