Mt. Sophia Ideas

While drinking my morning tea on April Fools’ Day, I stumbled across an article entitled, “Increasing Number of Parents Opting to Have Their Children School-Homed.”

It’s from The Onion, a fake newspaper/news site, full of satire and spoofs of current culture.  And while I can’t recommend the site in general (it ranges from the completely innocuous to the  completely offensive), this article was too good to pass up.

So, please accept my apologies for bringing The Onion into our little discussion about homeschooling, but I hope that once you reach the end of this post, you’ll have decided it was worth it.

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The article opens with the following:

According to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education, an increasing number of American parents are choosing to have their children raised at school rather than at home.

There was, of course, no such report by the DoE, since this is The Onion — where everything is made up.  But the article proceeds to detail “school-homing” parents’ concerns with the quality of their children’s home environments and guardians.

School-homing parents, the article says, worry about the ability of their children’s parents to provide proper care, education, and values to their children.  It’s best just to let the experts at school take care of raising the children, the school-homing parents say, rather than relying on their children’s incompetent parents raise them.

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In the end, the article takes all the usual arguments for removing children from schools in order to homeschool them, and reframes those arguments as arguments for removing children from their homes in order to have the schools raise them.

The result, I think, is hilarious.   But all joking aside, what does the article actually tell us?

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First, the article presents the act of turning your child’s education and formation over to a school as being an admission of your own incompetence, selfishness, and laziness.

We’ve come a long way since the days when it was the homeschoolers who were the one’s being made fun of!

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Second, it shows us that homeschoolers are having an impact.  The article wouldn’t be funny unless people were familiar enough with homeschoolers to know why homeschoolers choose to homeschool their children.

After all, all the reasons the “school-homing” parents give are exactly the reasons that homeschooling parents give, just with the words “school” and “home” (or “school teacher” and “parent”) reversed.

Unless people could recognize these arguments as, “typical arguments for homeschooling, just turned around backwards,” no one would find the article funny.

The fact that The Onion expects people to find the article funny means that The Onion expects people to be familiar with homeschooling and homeschoolers.

We’re no longer some bizarre fringe group.  We’re now an acknowledged part of the culture, with which people are expected to be familiar.

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Third, it means that people are expected to agree with us.  The article wouldn’t be funny unless the arguments made by the “school-homing” parents didn’t seem ludicrous to people.

But the arguments made by the “school-homing” parents are exactly the opposite of the arguments made by homeschooling parents.

So, if The Onion expects people to find the “school-homing” parents’ arguments ludicrously hilarious, that can only mean that The Onion expects people to find the arguments of homeschooling parents to be sane and sensible.

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Even though this is just a satire/spoof article on a fake news site, in other words, I think it shows us that we homeschoolers are better positioned than ever to be culture changers!

-Micah Tillman

^{[Micah is a Mt. Sophia graduate who is working on his doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. He also gets to teach philosophy (as a "graduate fellow"), which he loves.]}

Related posts:

• What Good Is College (or High School, or ANY School)?
• Six Good Reasons to Consider Trade School by Angela O’Shaughnessy
• 3 Tips for a Successful Homeschool High School Year