Homeschooling in the News

There have been three articles in the past couple of days. There's a piece in the NY Times about possible closure of NYSED's Office of Non-Public Schools, which has run interference between homechoolers and overreaching or ignorant school district personnel, who either misinterpret the state homeschooling regulations, or think they are free to invent their own special, additional requirements, just because. You can read it here. CNN has a video and a companion article which recognize the growth of secular homeschooling! Wow, progress! It is actually positive! And the Wall Street Journal has an article about "school refusal", in which psychologists caution against "well meaning parents" homeschooling in order to help kids with anxiety disorders. While the well meaning psychologists dismiss homeschooling, the comments are surprisingly favorable. As a person with an anxiety disorder, I can tell you that forced exposure to triggers never helped me any, and I doubt it helps kids with school anxiety. Being so overwhelmed and stressed can't possibly be good for children (or adults, thankyouverymuch.) It saddens me that the psychologists interviewed apparently can't think outside the box enough to see the benefits of homeschooling. Oh, wait-- they don't teach thinking outside the box in schools anymore, do they? Or perhaps they lack the compassion to realize that sacrificing someone's mental health in the name of making the "normal", societally approved, choice is folly. Or maybe they are just too knee jerk accepting of the socially maladapted homeschooler myth to be able to see the tremendous advantage that homeschooling can give an anxious child, allowing him/her to able to learn without the unnecessary distraction of sheer terror, or the "solution" of being drugged into compliance. Grrr.