Harvard Law School Planning Conference to Smear and Silence Homeschoolers
Richard Moorhead
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Harvard Law School is planning a conference on the topic of homeschooling, with speakers and content of the tenative June summit suggesting the event will be very negative towards the practice.
The Homeschooling Summit: Problems, Politics, and Prospects for Reform is planned for June 18-19th. The conference listing states that a focus of the conference will be to “discuss child rights in connection with homeschooling in the United States.”
Further investigation of the conference’s premise suggests it’s outright hostile to the notion of homeschooling entirely. One event scheduled for the second day of the conference is entitled “Concerns with Homeschooling.”
The Home School Legal Defense Association questioned what seemed to be the outright hostility to homeschooling that will be part of the event, pointing out the concerning public statements of some of the educators participating in the summit.
The pro-homeschooling rights group highlighted the anti-homeschooling track records of the event’s speakers.
Some, such as College of William and Mary law professor James Dwyer, have fundamentally questioned the rights of parents to homeschool their children. Dwyer has argued in law review article that “the claim that parents should have child-rearing rights—rather than simply being permitted to perform parental duties and to make certain decisions on a child’s behalf in accordance with the child’s rights—is inconsistent with principles deeply embedded in our law and morality.”
It almost seems anachronistic that the fixings of elite cultural liberalism are maintaining themselves in the midst of the national Chinese coronavirus epidemic, an event that has actually forced the American public and policy makers to focus on things that matter. This anti-homeschooling summit might end up being cancelled because of the coronavirus epidemic. But it any case, Harvard Law’s academic elites seem intent to question the rights of homeschoolers either way.
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