A Stitch in Haste

Cato@Liberty on homeschooling:

A home schooler, 13-year-old Evan O'Dorney, is once again the winner of the Scripps National ... Spelling Bee. In fact, home schoolers took fully one third of the top 15 spots in the Bee, utterly out of proportion with their share (about 1/40th) of the U.S. student population.
...
Imagine what heights America could achieve if every family had the freedom to choose from among homeschooling, public schooling, independent schooling, or some combination of the three[.]

Yes, certainly, but let's not ignore the other major reason that parents choose to homeschool:

According to the US government's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 72 per cent of home-schooling parents interviewed said that they were motivated by the desire to provide religious and moral instruction.

Translation: Radical Evangelical parents less interested in providing "better" education for their children and more interested in providing "pure" education -- complete with creationism, the War of Northern Aggression, "condoms don't work" and "homosexuality can be cured." Anyone think these kids can spell a multisyllabic word more complicated than "Leviticus"?

Keep the "joy of homeschooling" in mind when you see reports like this:

"Poll after poll shows that approximately one out of two people in America reject evolution. They think the scientists, teachers and textbooks are wrong," [an education professor] says. An even higher proportion of home-schooling parents may reject evolution, [he] thinks. "And they're going to be teaching science?"

Radical Evangelicals have now created ("creationisted"?) an entire generation of homeschooled Christian ignoramuses. Which probably explains the rise of substandard radical Evangelical institutions such as Patrick Henry College and Liberty University, which are charged not with educating but with reinforcing dogma (which is increasingly homeschooled dogma).

Libertarians, who are absolutely correct to praise legitimate homeschooling, should not ignore the problematic underbelly of the movement. There is bitter to go with the sweet.

Even in a libertarian paradise, there would be no right to neglect your children. Under what circumstances religious homeschooling constitutes child neglect is an open question.