A Dark Side To Home Schooling?
Dateline: 10/13/03
By Ann Zeise
CBS Evening News dredged up an old murder suicide story in
order to once again sell fear disguised as a news story tonight.
A
Dark Side to Homeschooling was aired tonight, October 13,
2003, apparently for the sole purpose to serve some political
agenda to try to require social worker visits to homeschooling
families. A
second part aired on the 6 o'clock CBS evening news on Tuesday
night.
Talk
about the CBS homeschool stories.
This is much more of a case of social workers NOT doing their
jobs! This family was well known to both Arizona and North Carolina
social workers! These people were already being investigated
for child abuse... a SECOND time, after already having been convicted
in Arizona.
This was NOT a family hidden from the normal safeguards we
have in society! This is a case of the safeguards failing them.
The story said something about only 3 investigative social workers
in the state!
I was doing a little research on the net today. Seems like
the odds are very good when a child is murdered that a parent,
close relative or acqaintance will have done it. Stranger murders
are really very rare in general, and rarer still for child murders.
Here are some alarming
statistics about children being murdered in this country.
35%
of murdered children are killed by their parents or other family
member.
A reporter could take ANY segment of the population and draw
a conclusion that families are very dangerous to your life! Something
like 10% of all child murders are done by a parent and 25% by
other family members.
No matter WHAT anyone does, it seems, nothing changes this
horrible statistic. Fear sells. And this show is all about fear
mongering. Anyone else see Bowling
for Columbine? The conclusion of this documentary
was that the only thing that could be the cause of the high murder
rate in the USA was that our news shows promote fear. [Teachers
Guide] Canadians have a lot of firearms, same movies, teens
play same video games, yet they have issue-oriented news shows.
Perhaps it is time to tell the news producers that we've had
enough of all this faked fear mongering!
The amazing thing is that not more homeschool families murder
their families! When they do, it is so unusual that it makes
the evening news, even tonight, 2 years again after the fact.
Oh, and now it turns out that the family was not properly signed
up for homeschooling. They were disobeying all sorts of laws!
There were 517 murders in North Carolina in 2001, says a report
of the North Carolina Department of Justice. This is actually
good news, as there has been a steady decrease in murders in
this state in the last decade. Of these, 252 of these victims
knew their killer. 76 of them were murdered by a close relative,
down from 88 the past year. One can only conclude that the state
of North Carolina probably already has some pretty good safeguards
in place. Only 32% killed by close relatives? That's better than
the national average! Two of the 517 were homeschooled kids (well,
not legal homeschoolers!)... 0.3%. Homeschoolers tend to be 1.7%
of school-aged population. The rate of murders in homeschool
families is therefore much lower than might be statistically
expected!
I'm not going to excuse what happen in this family, or in
any family where there is such terrible abuse. No family can
forsee when what seems to be just "trouble" might erupt
into murder and suicide. Hindsight is 100%. Others, neighbors
church members, all saw this family on a regular basis, but did
nothing because they probably saw no need. This seems to be rather
a pattern in all such stories I read in the paper.
Any reporter will tell you that it isn't news when a dog bites
a man. It is a story is when a man bites a dog! Only the unusual
makes the news. It is so odd for killing to happen in
a homeschool family that it is headline news when it does. Remember
a few months ago when a church member opened fire in a church?
Doesn't usually happen, right? Yet no one is investigating churches
for how they treat their members based on an isolated incident.
If this
page is accurate, it is very interesting!
Number of kids murdered at or around school in the last three
years: 47.
Number of kids murdered at home: 3,000.
Odds that a school-aged youth will be murdered by parents
at home versus being murdered by a peer at school: 15 to 1.
Odds that a parent will murder their teenage child vs the
other way around: 6 to 1.
Number of youths murdered in school shootings since May 1,
1999: 7.
Number of kids killed in mass shootings by middle-aged adults:
at least 22.
Number of students murdered at school in the last three years
in the "school shootings" featured in headlines and
repeated news stories and cited by President Clinton: 25.
Number who were white: 23.
Number of students murdered at school in the same period who
received virtually no media or political attention: 32.
Number who were not white: 29.
Mathematical odds that this could be a coincidence: less than
1 in 100,000.
Cold, dry statistics. Still an awful lot of dead kids!
Hard Facts
Bureau
of Justice Statistics Homicide trends in the U.S.
This site contains a series of charts that describe homicide
patterns and trends in the United States since 1976.
Light Side of the Dark Side
Homeschool
Spin: A Look at the Dark Side
These children are being forced to read and learn. Their home
is cluttered with books and so-called educational objects. Okay,
that's fine, but where are the video games that children need
to develop good fine motor and social skills? The images here
will scare you.
Other Reactions to The CBS Show
HEM
News & Commentary
Ann Fisher: By now you've had a chance to read or view CBS's
shameful tactic of exploiting a few horrific tragedies in order
to smear homeschooling as a hotbed of child abuse. I won't dignify
the CBS report by including quotations here, but I would share
my thoughts about ways homeschoolers might defend against this
attack.
Follow Up Contacts
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Viewer comment lines: (212) 975-3247 or (212) 975-4321
"Eye On America" Story Date: October 13, 2003
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Barbara Pierce, producer bp1@cbsnews.com
Their office phone in LA: (323) 575-2202
ADDRESS:
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CBS' Comment Line is (212) 975-3247
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