We’re Here, We’re Queer (and patriarchy had nothing to do with it)

I’m not sure if two examples counts as a trend, but over the last few weeks both HSLDA founder and Patrick Henry College chancellor Michael Farris and well-known homeschool mommy blogger Karen “that mom” Campbell have both suggested that the blame, as it were, for LGBT homeschoolers lies at the feet of patriarchy. Under this […]

Preview of Coming Attractions

So, I distracted myself from studying for my final to make this post. I’ve been saying for a while that somebody needs to do a greatest hits of current events and history for the former homeschoolers whose parents censored the newspaper/didn’t own a TV/learned all their history from Bob Jones or Abeka and are trying […]

13 Again

I feel like I just found a time machine and was transported two decades back in time. You may have seen that American Prospect came out with an article, “The Homeschool Apostates,” that chronicles some of the people who were hurt by the fundamentalist homeschooling world, and how homeschool graduates are pushing back. It’s a […]

Ding dong, Vision Forum Ministries is dead (But Vision Forum, Inc. is still raking in the cash)

Vision Forum Ministries announced today that they are closing up shop entirely. Whatever Doug Phillips did, it had to have been something so bad that the board decided the best course was to shut down the whole thing, turn off the lights and go home. Closing a ministry entirely when it’s not named after the […]

Kevin Swanson and the “Homeschool Apostates”

Guys, guys, my favorite wingnut is talking about Homeschoolers Anonymous! He doesn’t mention HA by name, because heaven forbid someone go to the website and see what it’s about, but apparently wanting to reform abuses in homeschooling makes us all apostates. Also, somehow doing debate plays into it, though I’m not entirely sure how debate could have […]

The Curious Case of the Spell Family, or, The Entirely Invented (Non)Threat to Homeschooling in Florida

Proving again that one should be careful to make promises one cannot keep, I feel that I must break my promise to myself that I would stop writing about homeschooling for a while. In the last few days a story has been making the rounds about a supposed threat to homeschooling in Florida. The potential […]

Since when did being a homeschooling and parental rights advocate mean being an anti-gay activist? When it’s Michael Farris, of course!

Well, I guess it was too much to hope for that Farris et al. would speak out against the egregious threat to the rights of gay parents in Russia. When a concerned former homeschooler asked him about it on his Facebook page, he pretty much blew her off by saying that because it wasn’t a […]

Nerdy Homeschooler

Note: I wrote the following for Homeschooling Positives Week on Homeschooler’s Anonymous. *** I’m a nerd, a geek, though I suppose not enough of one to get caught up in the arguments over which of those terms is positive and which one is the insult. I was a female computer geek back before there were enough of us […]

HSLDA, the Parental Rights Amendment, and Enabling Child Abusers

I’m sick, I’m really sick. When I wrote back in May about what I suspected was a legal strategy by HSLDA to make homeschooling a fundamental right, I said that I hoped I was wrong. I hoped that HSLDA’s end game wasn’t giving parents the right to do almost anything to their children short of […]

How bad homeschool research and statistics hurt homeschoolers

When I was in college, I was one of the participants who answered the NHERI/HSLDA/Brian Ray survey of homeschooling graduates. I don’t remember how I got the survey, probably via email forward from my mom, but what I do remember is sending an email to my family after taking it in which I said something […]