If you've followed the mainstream news in the last week, you'll be familiar with a case that has been all over the headlines involving charges of child torture at the hands of a California couple, with 12 of the couple's 13 children found starved and some shackled to furniture.
The details of the case should be disturbing to anyone and perhaps it makes perfect sense that headlines concerning the abuse have dominated news feeds this last week, but we still want to examine what the motives might be for the media to keep shocking us with more lurid details every day.
That's a headline from Reuters from an article detailing the push by a California state lawmaker and various homeschooling advocacy groups for more government "oversight" of homeschools in the wake of the allegations in this case. California Assemblyman Jose Medina says, "I am extremely concerned about the lack of oversight the state of California currently has in monitoring private and home schools." Medina is still in the early stages of his plan, but he suggests part of it would be requiring an annual walk-through of home and private schools "to ascertain the safety and well-being of the students."
California already has some of the more stringent homeschooling laws in the nation, requiring parents to register their home as a private school and to register their children as students, but there is no requirement for the state or local municipalities to conduct inspections or oversight of the roughly 3,000 private schools registered in California.
That's something Massachusetts-based Coalition for Responsible Home Education would like to see changed. That organization has called for requiring annual contacts by outside officials and background checks for parents who run home schools. An op-ed from the editorial staff of The San Diego Union-Tribune makes the case this way:
That children could fall through a crack in society is unacceptable. The New York Times reported there are more than 3,000 private schools registered with the California Department of Education. Many of them operate out of people’s homes for just a few children. No doubt, many parents are great teachers. And no doubt, stories remotely like the Turpins’ are rare. But the state has a responsibility to protect its most vulnerable population.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the amount of children being homeschooled has doubled since 1999 and we are by now aware of the threat posed by homeschooling to the established order of systemic brainwashing by our current "educational" system. We are also aware of the things that can happen to you when government agents come into your house to check on how you're raising your children.
Is this tragedy being used as a reason to push a more nefarious agenda?
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