“Homeschool or Die” Wait! Isn’t This Extreme? Keep Reading…

Every time a tragic shooting happens, it takes about five minutes for renewed cries of “Gun control!” to come echoing down the line. The loudest cries come when the softest targets are hit – most poignantly schools, which are notoriously gun-free zones and therefore attractive to nutcase criminals.

After the horrific school massacre in Parkland, Florida last February, a reader sent me a link to an essay entitled “What did we think was going to happen?”

The author of this piece (who calls himself “El Borak”) essentially argues school shootings will never end. Not because guns are too available; not because teachers aren’t armed; not because Trump is in office. No, shootings will continue because there’s nothing to stop them. There are no longer any social barriers to control behavior.

“We purposely tore down every protective social wall that humanity spent the previous five millennia constructing,” notes El Borak. “No one ever thought to ask why they were constructed in the first place. Because no one ever thought.”

Point by point, this writer highlights the old-fashioned fuddy-duddy ideals leftists so eagerly dismantled – and what happens as a result:

We built a culture that promotes confusion. We tore down all barriers related to morality, especially sexual morality. We started with serial monogamy and hookup culture and moved right into married gays and bent genders. Now after 12 years of sex education our kids don’t even know what sex they are. We purposely tore down every protective social wall that humanity spent the previous five millennia constructing. No one ever thought to ask why they were constructed in the first place.

Because no one ever thought. We built a culture that promotes unresolvable interpersonal conflict. No more are we one nation under God; we are not under God at all, nor are we a nation. We are but intersectionalities of aggrieved classes, competing for the most oppression points by demonizing our fellow citizens for the original sin of being born white or male or straight or with two legs. We have set an entire generation against itself with manufactured claims of oppression. Did we truly not think that some of them would take up arms against the others or that a few would seek to destroy the many? We did not think at all.

El Borak points out the generation of “angry, bitter, drug-addled, under-developed aspiring rappers who don’t know who they are and never learned how to deal with life’s most common setbacks” that resulted from the progressive desire to eradicate those old-fashioned fuddy-duddy morals that once underpinned our nation.

Yes, the whole column is well-written, and I urge you to read it in its entirety; but one thing in particular caught my eye. In offering personal (as opposed to societal) solutions to raising kids who aren’t “angry, bitter, drug-addled, under-developed aspiring rappers,” he states: “Homeschool or die.”

The inflexibility of this startled me. Homeschool or die? I mean, you’ll never find a bigger supporter of homeschooling than yours truly – but “homeschool or die”? That seems a bit extreme.

But El Borak doesn’t see it that way. “Homeschool or die,” he states. “I don’t want to hear why you can’t do it. In three decades as a homeschooling parent, I’ve heard your excuse. Either it’s important enough to you that you work through your roadblocks, or it’s not. Your choice.”

There are many people who lament the homeschooling trend, arguing we can better fix schools by getting involved rather than withdrawing. To this I counter: Twelve years (the years your kids are in school) will pass in a flash. You can spend those 12 years battering your head against the brick wall, futilely arguing for change. Or, you can simply keep your kids home and educate them yourself – not just with the academics they need, but with the moral compass that is necessary for adults to function in society. Let’s face it, most homeschooled kids do not turn out as “angry, bitter, drug-addled, under-developed aspiring rappers.” They become leaders.

Parents who are committed enough to homeschool usually emphasize personal responsibility and accountability – and this is the lack which is turning society on its head. Most people put the dearth of accountability firmly in the camp of liberals.

“The final failure of accountability for the left is a failure of moral organization, while for the right it is a failure of personal character,” notes Daniel Greenfield in an essay called “Gun Control, Thought Control, and People Control.” He continues, “The right asks, ‘Why did you kill?’ The left asks, ‘Who let him have a gun?’, ‘Who didn’t provide him with a job’ and ‘Who neglected his self-esteem?’ … The only possible answer to reactive behavior is to find the thing being reacted to and condemn it.” (Emphasis added).

Greenfield continues: “This is the society that the left is creating, a place filled with as many social problems as there are people, where everyone is a lab monkey except the experts running the experiments, and where no one has any rights because freedom is the enemy of a system whose moral code derives from creating a perfect society by replacing the individual with the mass. It is a society where there is no accountability, only constant compulsion. It is a society where you are a social problem and there are highly paid experts working day and night to figure out how to solve you.”

Now we learn that Common Core, forcibly implemented nine years ago in public schools with promises to improve student achievement, has proven to be a wildly expensive scam and a failure. Or wait, maybe it wasn’t a failure after all. If the goal was to produce stupid, brainwashed students who would unthinkingly vote the straight socialist ticket, then it’s been a brilliant success.

And progressive lawmakers still try to paint homeschoolers as child abusers since, of course, parents must only be interested in hiding the bruises, right? Predictably, California is taking the lead in this attitude, with attempted legislation that would require home visits, interviews and other government oversight.

No one will ever admit the obvious: Homeschooling parents are raising children who will lead our nation, not destroy it. Why is this obvious? Because while everyone else’s kids are wandering around aimlessly, lost and confused, homeshooled kids were taught using a map and a compass.

Homeschool or die? Maybe this guy is onto something.