When my daughter was in school in the late 90s, I was active in the PTO. I ran the book fair, wrote and distributed notes to go home with students, folded plastic bags for fundraising, collected boxtops for education, and even shopped with a Target card to donate to the school. I had attitude about the School Improvement team, but I eventually joined them as well, even putting in a weekend to help define the mission and find a new name for the school.

During that weekend meeting, we looked for ways to market the school. Homeschooling came up. We sneered and thought how superior we and our school were to those delusional people who thought they could do a better job at home.

By the next year, (the beginning of the new millennium), I had decided to join the homeschooling ranks. I was in shock about the whole thing, but convicted that this was the way I should go. I was haunted by Proverbs 22:6: ‘train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.’

Another scripture that convicted me to homeschool was from Deuteronomy 11: 18 Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 19 Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. I knew I couldn’t do that part time. I had to commit to full-time homeschooling my children.

Fast forward to 2004. On September 20, the Department of Homeland Security sponsored a mock assault on a school bus. The fictitious terrorists who supposedly planted a bomb on a school bus were portrayed as a group of homeschooling radicals labeled “Wackos Against Schools and Education.”

The goal of the ‘Wackos Against Schools and Education’ was to force everybody to homeschool. Organizers were concerned that the scenario look realistic. Maybe they should have pretended to combat real terrorists rather than whip everybody up into a frenzy in their war on homeschoolers.

It’s politically incorrect to link fictional terrorists to Muslim radicals, but homschoolers are an acceptable target for all kinds of hostile media assaults. Why this national assault on this individual family decision? Why did the Department of Homeland Security single out homeschoolers as a terrorist threat? The full answer is not obvious.

Several factors come into play. Conservative Christianity is one. Christians who believe and teach the Bible are considered dangerous to the educational system. Remember, the purpose of education is to ‘challenge fixed beliefs.’ Conservative Christians stand firm against such an assault on their belief system. They understand that the school system is trying to replace Christianity with its own religion. And in order to do that, the system must first strip the student of his own beliefs and values. Christian homeschoolers separate themselves from the educational system, and thereby avoid becoming indoctrinated in the educational religion.

This separation is a second factor in the case for making homeschoolers terrorists.

I’ll discuss separation next time.