Yes. Black parents should home school. Homeschooling is a long-overdue act of self-reliance that Black parents did not know they could do until the COVID-19 pandemic forced children to stay home. Rather than wait on school systems to get up to speed with online learning, parents should home school. By seizing control over their children’s education, parents liberate their children from the daily aggression and manipulation of systemic racism. Black homeschooling is an act of racial protectionism.
By 2014, there were about 2.2 million K-2 home school children in the United States. Black students made up 8%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Black parents have options. There are more resources now on curriculum’s, support groups, and information on how to pull a child out of public school legally.
Parents must teach their children even when schools are not ready. They have a duty to educate and guide their children. Black parents have the chance to expose their children to Black history. The School system won’t do it. They can correct some of the damage done by the Western indoctrination system highlighted by Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-education of the Negro.
“If you can control a man’s thinking, you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think, you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”
― Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro
Schools systemically undermine family bonds. Parents who home school can better guide and direct their children and keep their moral and ethical values intact. If parents home school during the pandemic, they have a better chance of improving their child’s literacy and math skills. Homeschooling gives parents a unique opportunity to socialize and educate their children to be competitive, build an economic foundation in the Black community, and have a mindset to change the Black condition with constructive solutions.
Too many school systems are already failing Black children. One study done in 2015 in the Journal of School Choice on Black home school students showed that Black home school students performed academically above the national average in general and well above Black public school students in particular. Parents who can’t take the leap to pull their children out of public school should supplement their children’s education with resources.
- National Black Home Educators
- Is home school legal in your state?
- Black Home school support & resources.
Black parents have always taken some action and agency over their children’s education. It’s is nothing new. When Mississippi public schools did not comply with Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate public schools “with all deliberate speed,” Robert Mosses, and other members of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), set up 41 community-based Freedom Schools to teach Black students about their history. Freedom Schools taught middle and high school students about voting, and political activism. Eleven years before Brown, Thurgood Marshall represented parents in Hillburn, New York, who set up a Freedom School in 1943 at Brook Chapel in protest of the town’s segregated and subhuman standards at Brook School. The Brook School was a school for colored children. It was a four-room ramshackle with no heat or running water. Hillburn had two schools, one Black and one white.
Indeed, in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education gave Black families access to equal education. It intended to tear down segregation and allow Black children to get a fair shot at learning at schools with better resources. Some say Black home school parents are abandoning Brown’s civil rights gains and are selfish for bailing on the Brown decision that opened up access. Sixty years after Brown, disparities still exist, institutional racism plagues schools. Brown gave Black families access options. Back children should not have to stay in destructive learning environments. Home school is self-reliance rather than waiting for the system to change.
Get your free e-book The Mis-education of the Negro, Carter G. Woodson
Alice T. Crowe- Opinion columnist
My passion is correcting the missing pages in our history books. Secrets of the Hollow is my latest film series. The first segment, Last Disintegrated School, the untold story of Thurgood Marshall’s fight to desegregate the Brook School in Hillburn, NY, in 1943. This untold story happened eleven years before Brown v. Board of Education. Infobase distributes Last Disintegrated School. Visit my website for information at www.acroweflyz.com. I am currently editing the revised edition of my book, How to Get Black on Track. Follow me on Twitter.
