Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

Mike Smith:
Last fall, CBS Evening News ran two stories entitled "A Dark Side to Home Schooling" and "Home Schooling Nightmares." In the reports, CBS covered five tragic situations where child abuse had been discovered and proceeded to blame homeschooling as contributing to the abuse.

In my 20 years of working on behalf of homeschoolers, I have never seen such a blatantly one-sided report. Homeschoolers were rightly outraged by the charges and responded via email, letter, and phone by the thousands to CBS and its parent company Viacom.

The CBS reports have been followed by a hostile editorial in the New York Times where a link between homeschooling and child abuse was alluded to.

The main fact missing from these media reports was that social services was aware of the problems in these families.

The New York Times, in its editorial, referred to a case in New Jersey where the parents were charged with starving their children. It failed to mention that social services had visited the family an astounding 38 times.

Claiming to be homeschoolers did not enable the families to evade government scrutiny. The government was already aware of the problems in the families.

Homeschooling should not be blamed for these cases of child abuse. As we shall see later in the week, being educated in the home is the safest environment for children.

And until next time, I'm Mike Smith.