Harvard Law Professor Calls for Ban on Homeschooling While Everyone is Forced to do it

Elizabeth Bartholet. Image from YouTube.

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

Harvard Family Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet is at it again.

At a time when schools all across the nation are closed, with many parents of school-aged children also out of work and families confined to their homes during a nation-wide lock down that is undoubtedly causing much stress, and forcing families to home-school even if they have never done it before, Elizabeth Bartholet has come out publicly and called for a ban on homeschooling, stating:

The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18? I think that’s dangerous. I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority. (Source.)

Her comments were published in the Arizona Law Review.

Bartholet believes children are best educated in schools, where teachers are “mandated reporters” can report suspected child abuse to local Child Protective Services (CPS).

Every state has legislation imposing affirmative duties to protect children against parental maltreatment and a related child protection system. This system includes child protective services (“CPS”), agencies charged with enforcing the laws that protect children, and mandatory reporting requirements making teachers and other school personnel responsible for reporting suspected child maltreatment to CPS.

Every state requires parents to comply with compulsory education requirements either by covering “educational neglect” in child protection laws, or by truancy laws penalizing parents for not sending their children to school.

What Bartholet fails to mention, however, is that States may be losing revenue during the lock downs, due to the fact that a certain quota of children need to be put into the Foster Care system to collect federal funding, and teachers at schools are one of the main ways children are seized by CPS and put into the Foster Care system.

That funnel of children entering into the system has been cut off for now.

We have covered the extremist views of Professor Bartholet previously here at Health Impact News on our MedicalKidnap.com website.

Bartholet believes the State should approve ALL parents before they are allowed to parent their own children, and is in favor of in-home visits to approve parenting, not just their ability to home-school.

Richard Wexler, Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, wrote:

Bartholet’s ideas are so extreme that they include requiring every family with a young child to open itself to mandatory government surveillance. (That’s not an exaggeration. There’s a summary of her views in the section of this post to the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog called “Harvard’s resident extremist”  and the details are in her own book, Nobody’s Children, pp. 170, 171).

See:

Will Everyone in the U.S. Soon Need Government Approval to be Parents and Keep Their Children?

Bartholet’s disdain for religious teaching, especially conservative Christian teaching, is very obvious.

The other was a conservative Christian movement, which rejected many of the views and values reflected in public education and the larger society as inconsistent with religious beliefs. As time went on, the conservative Christian wing became the clear majority of all homeschoolers. Estimates of the number of homeschoolers who are religious, or for whom religion is a primary reason for homeschooling, range from over half to 90%.

Some homeschooling parents are extreme religious ideologues who live in near-total isolation and hold views in serious conflict with those generally deemed central in our society.

Ironically, these same “conservative Christian” groups that she attacks have actually invited her to some of their conferences in the past.

She was one of the main speakers at the 2014 Together for Adoption Conference in Greenville, South Carolina, for example.

The theme of the 2014 conference was “Urgency & Complexity: Biblical & Ethical Approaches to the Orphan Crisis,” and it was sponsored by such well-known groups as Focus on the Family and Lifeline Children’s Services.

This highlights a problem that I believe I have been the only one to address so far: the double standard Christian churches and organizations have when they object to someone like Bartholet’s views on homeschooling and her dim views of conservative Christians, but her views are fair game if it involves Christians taking other people’s children through adoption or foster care, all in the name of “Orphan Care,” where they conveniently redefine the meaning of “orphan” to justify their own child trafficking.

See:

Christian Churches Redefine the Meaning of “Orphan” to Justify Participating in Child Trafficking

State-funded Foster Care and The Church: Part of the Problem, NOT Part of the Solution

I get scathing responses from Christians every time I bring up this topic, but the fact remains that while teachers in public schools are one of the primary means of removing children from their parents into the custody of the State through CPS and then put into foster care, foster care could not survive today without the Christian Churches and organizations that make up the bulk of the agencies overseeing foster care.

I addressed this issue when broadcasting the Medical Kidnap Show on radio station KFNX in Phoenix last fall, and you can listen to it here:

It is not surprising that Bartholet’s views on banning homeschooling were published in the Arizona Law Review, as Arizona has one of the worst records of medical kidnapping and abusing parental rights of any other state in the U.S., and they have been caught licensing pedophiles as foster parents as part of the nation-wide epidemic of child sex trafficking.

Arizona Medical Kidnapping Articles