In Defense of Homeschooling

Dear Harvard University and Harvard Magazine,

Contrary to your woeful stereotyping of homeschoolers in the biased, speculative and wholly unsubstantiated portrait painted in Harvard Magazine currently, here is photographic proof that my homeschooled 10th grader is not chained to the kitchen table by horrible authoritarian parents who isolate and indocrinate him. 

There he is at the *Harvard Museum of Natural History* taking in the *gasp* evolution and zoology exhibits.  He wants to be an evolutionary biologist and a paleontologist.

Here he is at Columbia and Yale and MIT participating in enrichment programs for high school students, rather than languishing in a bookish prison as your article depicted. 

He has recently walked the Freedom Trail in Boston and visited Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Art, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Historical Society, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University, Yale Art Gallery, and too many others to list here.

I will stack his DIY interest tailored education against any public school in the nation and feel confident it is at least equivalent, if not far superior. 

In some of the photos, he has on a ballcap that reads "Assume nothing." I would like to suggest that you adopt that as your mantra in attempting to understand the diverse and wonderful practice of homeschooling.  If Veritas is your motto, you need to seriously reexamine what you have published and your call for a presumptive ban on an educational modality that is effective, creative, and stimulates a lifelong love of learning.

Sincerely, an Ivy League educated libertarian retired lawyer who finds your latest foray into journalism laughable.