Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Aug. 28 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh takes the side of the right-wing Alliance Defense Fund -- indeed, Unruh's article is in large part a rewrite of an ADF press release -- in telling the story of an ADF client, a homeschooled 11-year-old child who has been ordered to attend public school as part of a family court case involving her divorced parents.
The girl's mother homeschools the child, and the father believes that homeschooling "prevented adequate socialization for [the child] with other children of her age." But what the ADF and Unruh -- who, as we've noted, homeschools his children and has demonstrated such pro-homeschool, anti-public education bias that he portrays any critic of homeschooling as Nazis -- are really interested in is the father's belief that "exposure to other points ot view will decrease [the child's] rigid adherence to her mother's religious beliefs, and increase her ability to get along with others and to function in a world which requires some element of independent thinking and tolerance for different points of view."
ALso of interest to Unruh and the ADF is the finding of the child's guardian ad litem that the child "appeared to reflect her mother's rigidity on questions of faith" and that the child "would be best served by exposure to different points of view at a time in her lift when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior and cooperation in order to select, as a young adult, which of those systems will best suit her own needs."
What's so objectionable to exposing children to different points of view? As Unruh quotes the ADF as saying, "It is a parent's constitutionally protected right to train up their children in the religious beliefs that they hold. It is not up to the court to suggest that a 10-year-old should be 'exposed' to other religious views contrary to the faith traditions of her parents."
But there's another issue here. WND has long railed against what it calls "indoctrination" in public schools -- for instance, in a 2006 article, WND described as "sexual indoctrination" a plan in California that would prevented any school teaching materials or activities from "reflecting adversely" upon homosexuals, bisexuals or transgenders.
And what is a child who rigidly adheres to a parent's religious beliefs but an indoctrinated child? Isn't all indoctrination bad, wherever it happens?
As this case illustrates, indoctrination goes on all the time in homeschooling -- but WND will never call it that, because its employees would have to admit that this what they are doing to their own children.
For WND, apparently, identifying "indoctrination" depends on who's doing the indoctrinating.
