There’s a battle going on right now in our neighboring state of Illinois concerning the Illinois Homeschool Act. This Act takes the current minimal oversight of homeschoolers in Illinois and places families at risk of violation by state appointed truant officers right in their homes. The bill would require parents to file a homeschool declaration form as well as an education portfolio to their local school district effectively putting their children under the jurisdiction of the very system from which many of these parents are trying to get away. The form discloses personal information of the child and opens each family to the mercy of a truancy officer who might show up at the child’s home to demand evidence of the child’s education.

The American education system is a disaster on its way to self-destruction. It was always going to fail, but so committed are some Americans to the unrealistic ideal that education can be carried out by a centralized state, they cannot see its failure even when the quality of education has been in consistent decline for decades. This decline is evidenced by the ever-decreasing test performances, lowered quality of education, and the increasingly violent atmosphere of the schools. Homeschooling parents saw the red flags and slowly began to secede from the public schools back in the 1970’s. Since then, homeschooling has experienced a gradual increase, until the pandemic, when the number of homeschooling families doubled.

And something else happened during the pandemic. Parents began to realize with horror that their children couldn’t read, despite being reassured by various “assessments” given by the government schools that their children were on the appropriate level. The fraudulent teaching practices involved in the reading scandal currently rocking the education community were covered extensively by education reporter Emily Hanford in her docu-series Sold A Story. Those running the education system failed American children at a most basic skill: reading. Yet somehow, these same administrators believe they are qualified to offer proper evaluation of children who are being homeschooled.

A system is what it does, and what the education system does is seek to separate children from their parents in order to install a set of beliefs that reinforces support for itself. The state is a jealous god, and it will take over any area of influence that competes with it, including the roles of the parents. Parents are not supposed to be liberated from their duties to their children. This Illinois Homeschool Act is just another attempt by the state to transfer the healthy interdependency evident in thriving homeschool families and communities onto itself.

Homeschooling is a family pursuit and it is a limitation. In order to homeschool both parents must be committed to it. Families must belong to an interconnected community with shared beliefs and work ethic. This connectedness reinforces the commitment and the family bond. If homeschooling falls prey to any state oversight, it will lose what has given it life and success in the first place.