MSNBC column on ‘insidious’ homeschooling reads like a conspiracy theory

An associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania for the Department of Religious Studies took a break from her broader attacks against evangelicals as racists to deliver a screed on their “extreme beliefs” and claimed the push for homeschool education is a covert attempt at segregation and, ultimately, aimed at “dismantling the public education system.”

Dr. Anthea Butler, author of “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America,” recently wrote an op-ed for MSNBC titled “How the conservative Christian right is hijacking homeschooling” in which she took particular aim at actor Kirk Cameron. In her piece, she references his upcoming documentary “The Homeschool Awakening” and called it “another salvo in the ongoing evangelical war against public schools.”

Butler writes, “‘Public education has become public enemy No. 1,’ the actor Kirk Cameron opines in a promotion for ‘The Homeschool Awakening,’ his documentary scheduled to hit theaters in June,” before noting his expressed views that the pandemic offered a unique lens for parents into the curriculum of government-run schools that further justifies homeschooling.

“However, as Cameron’s quote indicates, this latest project of conservative evangelical education is another salvo in the ongoing evangelical war against public schools,” Butler claimed. “It should come as no surprise that evangelicals, fundamentalists and other religious conservatives have fought against public education since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.”

“The prospect of integrated schools led to the creation of many ‘segregation academies,’ private schools designed to keep African American children and undesirable immigrant groups away from white children,” she went on. “But there was another, more insidious way to circumvent integration: homeschooling.”

Butler ignores Cameron’s position that “we’ve been made grossly aware of the inaccurate and the immoral things that the public school system has been teaching our children and our grandchildren” and his acknowledgment that, “Whoever’s shaping the hearts and minds and souls of our children will determine whether or not we live in a free country,” to pounce on a Critical Race Theory inspired supposition of inherent racism.

With the banner on her website promoting the secular ideology that “People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves,” from activist Ella Baker, Butler goes on to draft a revisionist history of the education system dismissing any form of tutelage that took place prior to the 1960s.

“One of the main purveyors of homeschooling was a fundamentalist, Rousas Rushdoony, whose work beginning in the 1960s in establishing Christian day schools grew into the homeschooling movement…to prepare them to take their place in a theocratic government,” she argued before claiming, “Cameron’s documentary promoting homeschooling is not an aberration; it is part of a larger project about dismantling the public education system in the United States.”

Butler later presented her support of CRT and her opposition to anything that would hinder the U.S. Department of Education as she railed against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, referring to it with the leftist moniker of “Don’t Say Gay.” Her opposition to homeschooling and insistence that government education promotes her ideologies reveal her to be the only fundamentalist here as Cameron and supporters of homeschooling do not actively seek means to promote their beliefs on others as Butler aims to do.

She concludes that the actor, “says that people choosing homeschooling are having an awakening, but the public needs to awaken to the reality that public schools may disappear if people with his extreme beliefs have their way.”

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7 thoughts on “MSNBC column on ‘insidious’ homeschooling reads like a conspiracy theory

  1. I make more then $12,000 a month online. It’s enough to comfortably replace my old jobs income, especially considering I only work about 11 to 12 hours a week from home. I was amazed how easy it was after I tried it…
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  2. I’m a retired public school educator with over 40 decades in the profession. The public schools of today bear no resemblance to those of decades ago that put American students atop everyone else worldwide in achievement. I’ve come to believe that public schools as they exist today should indeed disappear.

    What Butler doesn’t seem to know is that minority parents have long sought to place their children in private or charter schools because the public schools in their communities are failing them – or downright dangerous. In NYC, there’s a 50,000 student waiting list for charter schools. In 2021, 30% of students in Catholic schools were minority. Minority parents are among those who voice their concerns at contentious board meetings.

    Maybe Butler is worried that homeschooled children will learn to do things like learn to read original sources, think for themselves and understand how much of what she says is hogwash.

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  3. What is funny to me about this radical perspective is that I homeschooled my children – way back in 2012 before I ever knew how terrible public school really was – and I had no agenda with regard to destroying public education.

    That’s what they don’t understand on the Left. There is no great agenda. The only agenda I ever had about it was doing what was best for my children at the time. In fact, I was a public school teacher before I started homeschool. I was very pro-public education.

    My initial decision was to quit my job and homeschool my oldest child. She was finishing up 8th grade when my husband and I decided. We left our other two children in public school and only brought the oldest home because she was acting out and behaving inappropriately – all the time. We felt a drastic change was needed.

    But after only one year, my other two children begged me to homeschool them. They hated the renewed focus in school on standardized testing. Too many benchmarks was killing their joy of learning. Now, my children are older.

    My youngest is about to graduate from homeschool high school. She has been accepted to a top ten engineering school for this fall, and we are very proud of what our girls accomplished. Choosing homeschool, which for us led to a private, university model classical academy, was the single best choice we ever made for our children.

    Parents are not using their own children as pawns in some great societal scheme. Only teachers of the radical progressive Left use children like that. And if they are so sure of the agenda of the religious who homeschool, what do they think is the agenda of Progressive Leftists and liberals, who most send their children to exclusive private schools?

  4. We can only hope the public education system disappears. Public education has become a cesspool of immorality filled with insane teachers who are indoctrinating instead of educating. I removed my child from the public education system when they began to push the Covid lies, there have been plenty of other reasons though. Sending your child to public schools is terrible for them and for the future of our country. Some people feel they have no other choice, we felt that way for a long time, sometimes you have to make sacrifices for they good of your children.

  5. Butler, like so many on the left has forgotten her history. It was the DEMOCRATS who fought against integration. Her whole argument is a false flag narrative. Home schooling has been popular in all Christian faiths and no faith at all. It is becoming more popular than ever thanks to the filth and lack of actual academics proven during the pandemic.

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