Are we putting religious tolerance above the rights of America's children?

Courtesy of Alternet:  

The appropriate balance between freedom and harm can be hard to strike, particularly when it comes to religious freedom. In an attempt to find this balance, religious conservatives have been granted exemptions from a wide range of civil rights laws and social obligations. In the last two decades, one of the exemptions they have secured in many states is the right to opt out of school attendance for their children. 

Led by a group called Home School Legal Defense Association, a network of institutions and activists have sprung up to advocate the rights of parents to educate their children—or not—as they please. Now the largest generation of home-schooled children are coming of age, and some are telling horror stories that suggest parent privilege may have gone too far. 

A recent testimonial posted at Homeschoolers Anonymous opens like this: 

"It was not so much homeschooling that traumatized me as much as my mother’s mental illness. This was hidden by homeschooling, and the pain that damaged me came from the constant exposure to her psychiatric illness. I feel like someone roasted me over a fire, leaving me with burns to rest the remainder of my life, and I didn’t even know at the time what fire was. "

As with nutritional or sanitary neglect, lack of education can create lifelong hardships for those it affects. Ask any adult who has taken a college course while working full-time. Then imagine tackling years of remedial elementary, middle and high school courses while supporting yourself—and possibly a family—with a job so menial it doesn’t require a high school education. This outcome may not be the homeschool norm, but on websites like Homeschoolers Anonymous, homeschool alumni are reporting experiences of educational neglect in alarming numbers. 

Homeschooling families often portray themselves as a persecuted minority, but compared to homeschooled victims of neglect and abuse, responsible homeschooling parents are a formidable army. Represented by groups like the HSLDA, which has lawyers, publicists and media personalities at its command, these groups can easily paper the walls of a legislator’s office with letters listing their demands. But for young children who are having their futures stolen, these groups offer no solutions. 

Boiled down, most arguments for unregulated homeschooling amount to the same thing: “We must ignore the problems of abused homeschooled children to maintain the sovereignty of parents.” 

At the heart of this claim is religious homeschoolers’ insistence that God has elevated parents above any earthly authority. This is an attempt to resurrect an Old Testament-era legal theory, which afforded children no more right to life, liberty and self-direction than a sheep or a goat. It’s true thatbiblical fathers could do anything—including selling off their sons and daughters—but outside of homeschooling circles, few Americans would argue for a return to that kind of absolute parental license. 

In America, children are not possessions for parents to use or destroy. Rather, children are recognized as dependent beings whose bodies and futures are held in trust by their parents. Educational neglect is an abdication of a parent’s legal obligation of good stewardship. By failing to educate, parents potentially squander a child’s entire lifetime of future earnings and achievements. It’s difficult to imagine a more brazen theft. 

Having been burned by this debate before, I think it is important right off the back to differentiate between those who homeschool due to poor schools in their districts, or children with specialized needs, and those who homeschool for purely religious reasons, or as a method of controlling the lives of their children.

I have to say that as a person working in the mental health community, that there are many children with special needs who do not receive a diagnosis until they reach school age, and are evaluated by educational experts.

Therefore a child with learning disabilities may not receive that very important early intervention, and be left to sensibilities of a parent, with no background in education, who may see their child's lack of progress as a behavioral problem which needs to be addressed through punitive measures rather than educational strategies.

And that does not even consider the number of abusive, or mentally ill, parents who keep their children out of the public school system in order to protect themselves from prosecution or the risk of having their victims removed from their homes. 

I believe that I have already once shared the story of the little girls who lived behind me when I was a pre-teen, and who were kept home from school and raped repeatedly by their father, a deacon at a local church. When they made the mistake of confessing that to me that one day while out playing the family packed up and moved away the very next day.

I never saw or heard from them again.

As a professional I have seen numerous cases of abuse in the homes of religious homeschoolers that went unreported until somebody called the state and the children were removed from the home. Once the children were convinced they were safe the stories they would tell have left scars on my heart that will never fade.

Once again this is not ALL homeschooling families, nor is it ALL religious homeschooling families. Not by a long shot.

But it DOES happen, and all that it would take to minimize how often is to make sure that the homeschooling environment was regulated, and that the children are taken for regular doctor visits and possibly screenings for any potential learning difficulty or psychological concerns.

That may seem intrusive to some parents, but the fact is that often parents are NOT able to identify what is best for their children due to their own prejudices or the fact that they are too close to the problem.

To be blunt it is most often in the child's best interests for the role of parent and teacher to remain separate, and for the parent to remain involved, but not in charge, of a child's education.

And in my opinion, there is NEVER a time that religion should be considered before the best interests of the child. NEVER.