There's a podcast host named Jennifer Welch who has spent the last week telling American homeschool moms what she thinks of them.
It started when she and her co-host called homeschooling "trickle-down stupidity." A "crazy Christian problem." MAGA on steroids. Her co-host went so far as to call it child abuse.
The language was rough enough that I'm not going to reprint most of it in a family newsletter.
She did get some pushback—from Ron DeSantis, from the Department of Education, from a whole lot of ordinary parents—but that only made her double down.
Now she says that, "Homeschooling is inherently patriarchal, and it is a huge push of the fascist project because it keeps women at home."
(You know she’s right because she said “fascist.” Eyeroll.)
Let’s think about this.
Homeschooling is a movement built, led, and absolutely dominated by mothers. Moms write the curricula. Moms run the co-ops. Moms organize the conventions, the field trips, the park days, the science fairs, the entire infrastructure of most of it.
That already sounds like a pretty terrible patriarchy.
For Welch to call it patriarchal, she has to believe that millions of women are too foolish to understand what they freely chose. That they were tricked. That they need someone with a podcast to explain their own lives back to them.
Which is a funny position for somebody claiming to defend women.
“Believe all women,” unless they choose something outside of what you think all women should choose. Then call them stupid.
(Am I doing feminism right?)
Welch is worried that a homeschooling mother might end up dependent on her husband.
Strangely, she is not remotely worried that every family in America might end up dependent on the state.
Apparently dependency only counts as oppression when it's voluntary.
Think about what's actually being argued here. That a woman's real value is as a wage earner in somebody else's company, and that her children are better raised by strangers on a state payroll. That the natural, healthy, non-fascist arrangement is one where the government has your kids for 13,000 hours and you get them tired at 4pm with just enough time to feed them dinner and force them to do their homework.
If you opt out of that—if you decide you'd rather be the one who teaches your own child to read—you're the authoritarian.
Yes, of course it’s nonsense. But it’s shocking how many people actually do believe that children are the property of the collective, and that parents who refuse to offer their offspring up to the state are withholding what rightfully belongs to the village.
Mothers who choose alternatives in education are not victims of anything. They made hard, expensive, exhausting choices on purpose. They often give up income to do it. They sacrifice quiet mornings, and “freedom” to rearrange their entire lives around the conviction that a child's education is too important to hand to somebody who doesn’t know them.
That is not oppression! It is wild, free, radical individualism. It’s the least outsourced, most deliberate thing a person can do with their life.
And the reason it makes people like Welch so agitated isn't the curriculum, or the socialization, or the “patriarchy” or any of the rest of it.
It's that people who looked at the system everyone is supposed to accept without thinking, and said “no thanks” are major disruptors to the status quo.
That kind of refusal is contagious. It should be. Freedom has always been catching.
And people like Jennifer are deadly afraid of women who are truly free.
Right now, millions of families are starting to think about what this next year is going to look like. Some of them are wondering if they really have it in them to send their kids back to school at all.
Homeschooling is a decision that has to be made by each family individually. For some families, it simply isn’t in the cards. But the homeschool spirit isn’t confined to whether or not you fully educate your kids at home, or whether you send them someplace else to be taught and just supplement their education in the time you have with them.
Any amount of supplemental, parent-led teaching goes far in forming a free child.
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If you’ve decided that you are going to be the one to oversee the education of your children—to impart to them their values, and their understanding of the world—then these are the best tools to help you along.
And if you’re a homeschool mom, way to go! Be confident that what you’re doing is enraging all the right people. The wailing and gnashing will continue, but you don’t have to care.
Millions of women know exactly what they chose, and they're doing the same thing right alongside you.
You’re literally changing the world.
— Connor
