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Monday, July 08, 2024

Traumatic Homeschooling: How Evangelicals Use Education to Totalize by R. L. Stollar May 7, 2022

Friends,

Wow! This was an eye-opener. I am reading this in the context of my earlier post today on "unschooling." There is much to know about these suspect movements. I would never want to say that all homeschooling or unschooling is bad, but rather that the growing evidence and first-person accounts like this one by R. L. Stollar, are deeply concerning. 

Based on these burgeoning stories and evidence, particularly of horrific stories of child abuse that range from actual harm to children in an unregulated system of education to the "totalism," or indoctrination that is killing children's wills, is resulting in a growing choir of individuals calling for legal and policy reforms to protect children.  Stollar's entire paragraphs on "totalism" is worth reading:

"Totalism is a concept first developed by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Totalism is related to totalitarianism, and signifies a psychological form of totalitarianism — the totalitarian monitoring and control of another individual’s behaviors and thoughts. Lifton uses the term to describe the attributes of ideological movements and organizations that aim for total control over people’s behaviors and thoughts. While these movements and organizations may vary in design and goals, they follow common patterns and cause predicable types of psychological damage to those within them."

The evidence gets even more grim as one learns of the cases of child torture where according to a study by pediatrician Barbara Knox (2014) finds that 

“47% [of the tortured children] who had been enrolled in school were removed under the auspice of ‘homeschooling.’” “Homeschooling,” Knox observed, “appears to have been designed to further isolate the child.”

This is terrifying. I am glad that more people are speaking out. 

-Angela Valenzuela


Traumatic Homeschooling: How Evangelicals Use Education to Totalize

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