Equality, Part I (of 3)

Okay. I’m homeschooled (for a few more months, anyway). Thus, the following will be biased toward homeschoolers/homeschooling.

We talk about equality, right? Everybody wants equality, or so they say. More often than not, the equality people talk about is forced equality (i.e., socialism, forced busing, etc.), which is really not equality at all. Real equality gives equal opportunities to everyone… even the “alternative” people.

For the past hundred-odd years, homeschoolers have been looked upon as different. Admittedly, we are. We prefer not to be fed government propaganda by the public school system. We like to have the freedom to learn what we want to learn, not what some self-styled expert tells us we should. That’s not to say that we don’t do math and English and all that business. We do, usually. And we generally score higher on standardized tests, to boot.

So why are we largely looked upon as some blight? Why do the people in government ban us from certain scholarships and other opportunities? Are we not equal to publicly educated students? Are we somehow inferior? Less human? Less cultured? Less… what? What is the matter with us?

Perhaps the problem is that we are just a little too American. We are an independent breed, we homeschoolers, which was lately an American ideal. Somehow, between the New Deal and Change We Can Believe In, we lost sight of the reason America exists. While I have established that I don’t think the Revolutionary War was “morally right,” this doesn’t negate the fact that America was founded on a desire for freedom. Not conformity. Not bureaucracy. Not socialism. Freedom.