Government registries are never a good idea. And government dictating education policy hasn't worked out for anyone either.
Combining the two will most likely result in a real nightmare. UK homeschoolers, might want to ask some questions, as they hear the latest news about government plans to track them, merely for trying to teach their own kids.
The BBC reports that “concerned” Members of Parliament (MPs) want to place homeschool families on a government list, and of course, they commissioned a committee “report” to act as cover and propaganda for their “concern.”
The Commons Education Committee says it is important to "get a grip" on the number in home education.
It says more data must be collected to ensure all children out of school get a suitable education.
Suitable to whom?
The “report” was given the Orwellian title “Strengthening Home Education,” and runs the classic political pattern of claiming a “crisis,” offering blanket promises of government “help,” and hiding the commensurate government invasions of privacy, the mandates, and threats of punishment should “assisted” targets not comply.
Most of all, the report implies what generations of politicians have directly claimed or implied: that the government has control over people’s kids.
Committee chair, Conservative MP Robert Halfon, said it was ‘frankly astonishing’ that the government was only able to make a ‘best guess’ over the standard of education children schooled at home were receiving.
Considering the fact that learning is individualistic, any large-scale, aggregate “measure” of “the standard” of education “performance” must, by its nature, not concentrate on each individual child. However, even if one operates under the “public”, or “government,” standard of focusing on mass metrics, homeschoolers repeatedly show higher performance levels than children milling through the grinder of government schools. From the US, to Canada, to the UK, homeschool students outperform their government-indoctrinated peers. A study in Wales found that, not only do homeschoolers outperform students in government schools, but that government schools simply don’t improve, regardless of how much tax cash is thrown at them.
Related: Watch: Mom Debates Harvard Prof That Wants To Ban Homeschooling
So, how, exactly, is the injection of more government going to “help” homeschoolers?
It won’t.
It will lasso parents and kids through the enticement of government subsidies and the attached government regulations that go with them, which means the “home” school will become an extension of the government school.
Which is precisely what many politicians must want. As we have seen in the US, the BBC notes that, since politically-mandated COVID-19 lockdowns began last year in the UK, the popularity of homeschooling has skyrocketed.
According to research by the BBC, published earlier this month, the number of children registering for home education in the UK rose by 75% in the first eight months of the current school year.
It found more than 40,000 pupils were formally taken out of school in the UK between September 2020 and April 2021, compared with an average of 23,000 over the previous two years.
The figures are based on Freedom of Information responses from 153 of the 205 county councils and unitary authorities in Great Britain, and all of Northern Ireland.
Curiously, the BBC was able to obtain those aggregate stats that the politicians and their “committee” found so elusive. One of the key “rationales” the politicians coughed-up to back their call for officially placing parents on a government “registry” was that the government couldn’t get any real figures of how many were homeschooling.
Why not ask their tax-subsidized broadcasting corporation?
Homeschool parents are right to be wary of government proposals to “help” them. Such parents already have helped their kids escape the indoctrination centers that have failed generations.
Why should they trust the same bureaucracy, the political machine that has failed over and over, to help them?
The historical record shows it only will harm and attempt to control them.