Courtesy of the Daily Beast:
In 2006 the evangelical magazine World featured 15-year-old Kierstyn King—then Kierstyn Paulino—in a piece about homeschooled kids who blog “to rebel against rebellion.” She was quoted describing her heroes: “‘First, Christ. After that: soldiers, my parents, and Ronald Reagan.’” On her blog, she wrote posts with titles like “The Case for Christians in Government,” arguing, “Our founding fathers built this land on Judeo-Christianity, and we have strayed too far from Christ.”
These days King, 22, has a hard time stepping into a church without having a panic attack. She escaped—her word—from her family in Georgia on her 18th birthday and lives in Maine with her husband, also a former homeschooler. Very little is left of the ideology her parents worked so furiously to instill in her. She’s ashamed of the work she did as a leader in various homeschooling youth organizations, which, she writes, “contributed to the amount of hurt I and many others who grew up in this radical/evangelical/conservative/christian subculture endured and continue to endure.”
She is, however, still blogging, both on her own and as part of Homeschoolers Anonymous, a new site that publishes children of Christian homeschooling families speaking out about upbringings that, they say, have left them traumatized and unprepared for adult life. “Our primary concern is for people to be exposed to our experiences growing up in the conservative Christian homeschooling world and to see how those ideologies can create abusive situations,” says Ryan Lee Stollar, one of the site’s founders.
I personally think that this huge push for homeschooling is essentially driven by religious fundamentalists who are terrified that society will teach their children that their belief system is antiquated and no longer relevant in these changing times.
And before you jump all over me, yes I realize that not ALL parents who home school do so because of a desire to control their children or keep them separated from others who might point out facts that debunk their parent's values or faith. However you also must realize that YOU are not part of the Evangelical push to avoid public school in favor of religious based homeschooling.
I am thrilled to see that sometimes even early indoctrination is not enough to keep out young people from learning the truth. It give me hope for our future.