Hot potato issue of the day, Homeschooling.

If Alaska parents want to home-school their child, no paperwork needs to be filed, no phone call made. No one need be told.

As for the student, no specific subjects need to be studied, no number of hours need be logged behind a desk, no tests taken.

Alaska has the most lax home-schooling law in the country.

No one even knows how many Alaska children stay home instead of attending a public or private school -- they aren't tracked or monitored.

As many of you know I did work for the Alaska School District until just recently and I can attest that it is one of the best education systems in the country. Wonderful teachers, a varied curriculum, and countless opportunities are available for children with special needs or who are academically gifted. I would not claim that every single child that enters Alaska schools gets exactly what they need, but I can say that the effort is definitely made and the resources are almost always readily available.

There are special ed teachers, counselors, school psychologists, school nurses, physical education teachers, etc., who receive the specialized training in their field of expertise to provide the services they were hired to provide. What parent has all of those resources close at hand in the home when their child needs them?

And there is a very important the social component to attending school. Part of our education system is learning how to successfully interact with other people. And that is made much harder when the child is almost exclusively surrounded by family members.

I used to teach gymnastics and I would often get home schooled students looking for a PE credit to meet their educational requirement. For the most part the kids were quite intelligent, but they had limited social skills. One boy in particular did not know how to express to me that he was not feeling well and ended up vomiting in the middle of the trampoline. He was so overcome with shame that he locked himself in the bathroom until his Mom came to get him. And this kid was fifteen years old!

Home-school advocates say the lack of reporting and regulation is the way it should be because it leaves parents free to make choices for the child. But others say it leaves an uncounted number of children at the mercy of parents who don't have what it takes to give kids what they need to avoid being left behind in life.

I consider myself to be pretty intelligent, on paper I appear even smarter, but I am all too aware of my limitations. I could confidently manage to assist my children in learning to read, discovering science, and studying history, but when it came to math I might as well be a tree stump for all of the help I would be able to provide. Math skills simply elude me.

I could probably teach from a manual provided by homeschool publishing companies, but I would not be able to expand on the information provided. I could not flesh it out, or come at it from a different direction if my child proved to be as dense as I am on the subject. I simply do not have the tools. But a high school math teacher undoubtedly would.

Across the country, the popularity of home-schooling is growing. The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that from 1999 to 2003, the number of home-schooled children increased from about 850,000 to roughly 1.1 million, a 29 percent jump. National home-schooling proponents suggest even higher estimates today of around 2 to 2.5 million children. But again, no one knows for sure.

2.5 million homeschooled children? That is a whole hell of a lot of kids! These are future adults who may not accept the same scientific facts as their peers. Who may not have learned to take turns like their peers. Who may not have been exposed to as many people of a different ethnicity, or even gender as their peers. And yet we expect them to interact as effectively with each other as their peers?

I have to say that kind of concerns me.

In school we learn to accept that there are people who do not believe like we do.

In school we learn that the rules of society are to be obeyed.

In school we learn that often things are not simply black and white, but rather varying shades of gray.

In school we learn that as great as mom and dad are, they are not always right.

Where else will those lessons be taught if we do not attend school?

So exactly why do parents choose to homeschool their children?

Some parents home-school for religious reasons. Some because their child has learning disabilities and needs special one-on-one attention that schools don't offer. Some because they don't like the public school social environments where their kids are bullied. And others because they think their kid will get more out of individualized instruction.

I know that there are parents who choose to homeschool their children because they really do believe they can provide the best education for their little one. And for a handful that is probably true.

But a lot of parents seem to be choosing to keep their kids home NOT because they can give their children the best education possible, but because they want to control what their child learns. Perhaps they do not feel comfortable exposing their child to other ethnicity's, or liberal points of view, or, and this is most often the case, secularism.

They do not want their little snowflake to realize that people of a different faith are not monsters, or that evolution is not a sign of the Apocalypse, or that the earth is not the center of the universe. They want to shape the mind of their child to think EXACTLY LIKE THEY DO.

They want to create, in effect, a clone who accepts their own stilted view of the world.

Now let me add this disclaimer. There are indeed a number of legitimate reasons to homeschool your children. But I stand by my assertion that those are the exception to the usual reason that parents choose to do so. For the majority of the parents making the homeschool choice it is less about education, and more about control.

And this is especially true concerning fundamentalist Christian parents who are terrified that somebody may teach their child information not sanctioned by their church. So to keep the minds of little Jimmy and Sally pristine and uncluttered with "facts" they simply remove them from the source of that kind of information, the public school.

By this method an army is created of people who have never learned to utilize "critical thinking", who readily accept as "fact" whatever their parents, ministers, or elected officials tell them, and who are easily directed to do whatever their masters tell them to do.

We have seen them for ourselves. They are the thousands of people attending 9-12 protests, they are the screamers at the health care town halls, they are the supposed millions of people who watch FOX News like it is the gospel. This what the Republicans have been trying to accomplish for decades by vilifying public schools and pushing for private (read "religious" schools) and homeschools.

This is THEIR demographic. Those that are instructed to"believe" instead of using that amazing intellect of theirs to "think"(Why would a GOD give you such a magnificent organ if he did not want you to use it?). That is the monster that the conservative Republicans are attempting to create. A simple minded mob that responds to their Pavlovian catch phrases.

Abortion! "Save the babies!"

Communism! "Save our democracy!"

Atheism! "Save our religion!"

Socialism! "Stop this President!"

I am afraid my friends that Frankenstein has successfully brought his creature to life, and it will take far more then simple pitchforks and torches to drive it away.