John Oliver Grudgingly Accepts Homeschooling
The tut-tutting class has retreated from pushing for a ban on DIY education to fretting over regulation.
J.D. TUCCILLE
10.11.2023
TV host John Oliver is essentially a court jester for people who consider themselves political and cultural elites; the topics he addresses reflect their concerns. So when he does an extended take on homeschooling, you can assume that, after years of innovation and growth, DIY education is on the radar of the tut-tutting class. And when he accepts homeschooling as a potentially beneficial practice, but one that needs more oversight from the right people, you know anti-homeschoolers are in retreat, fighting a rearguard action to maintain a degree of control because it's too late to abolish a practice they dislike.
"By one estimate, there are now around 2 million children being homeschooled in this country, and parents can choose that for all sorts of reasons," the host allowed on the October 8 episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. "Maybe their kids have social or health problems, or disabilities that aren't being accommodated. Maybe they're families with legitimate fears about school safety, or who are in the military and move around a lot. And there's also a growing number of black parents opting to homeschool due to whitewashed curriculums and zero-tolerance policies in schools that disproportionately criminalize their kids at an early age. So, there are a lot of reasons to do it. And the fact is, for some kids, getting to be homeschooled can be transformative."
That's quite a shift from a few years ago when Harvard Law School's Elizabeth Bartholet penned a sniffy Arizona Law Review piece favoring a "presumptive ban" on homeschooling.
Oliver showed a brief clip of Victoria, a Detroit girl who described switching to homeschooling as "just like a kind of like a sunshine, like the clouds opening a little bit."
But then we get the cautionary note.
...
