I found the full CBS…

I found the full CBS News story done by correspondent Vince Gonzales on the web. Entitled “A Dark Side to Home Schooling”, it covers a handful of extreme examples of criminal behavior that occurred in homeschool families, although it’s quite a leap of logic to suggest that homeschooling itself was the cause or even a factor in them.

Just for perspective, here’s a page from a study done by the National Center for Education Statistics that shows that during the 1998-1999 school year there were 40 “school-associated violent deaths in the United States” of school-aged children. Of course, defenders of public schools would point out how small a percentage of the population that is, as would CBS News, and rightly so. It’s not really a major, national news story. But then, CBS made a national news story out of a similar small percentage of homeschoolers.

The problem here is classic “guilt by association”. Andrea Yates homeschooled, and, as CBS dutifully reports, killed all 5 of her children. No mention is made by CBS in this story, however, of her issues with postpartum depression. One might imagine Mrs. Yates might have done the same thing after her children came home from public school, but would CBS then have somehow associated public schools with those deaths in the same manner they have done with homeschooling? The answer is obviously “No”, because domestic violence happens every day in this country in public-school-educated families, and no mainstream news organization is blaming public schools for it.

But here’s how CBS words it, letting you make the link:

Andrea Yates gained national attention when she drowned her five children in a bathtub. Deanna Laney, told investigators she beat her three sons with rocks, killing two of them. Both mothers taught their children at home.

They might as well have added, “They also had brown hair, and had their car’s oil changed within the last month”, for all that last observation is worth.

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