With schools across the country shut down, millions of parents have discovered the considerable joys and challenges of homeschooling. This has made our betters in media and academia extremely nervous. What if a sizable portion of these parents decide that they quite prefer teaching their own kids? What if they never send their offspring back into the government’s education factories? They — our betters, I mean — may lose their hold on an entire generation of children. And that would be a great tragedy. For them, anyway. 

A recent article in the Washington Post was forthright about these fears. “Homeschooling during the coronavirus will set back a generation of children,” the editorial claimed. Harvard Law School is holding a “summit” to discuss this problem. The summit, led by “experts,” will focus especially on “educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling, in a legal environment of minimal or no oversight.” Naturally, the summit experts have suggestions on “legal reforms” to help remedy this problem.