Homeschooling s Liberalism By David Mills - 1190 Words

Have you ever done something so controversial that it brought extreme criticism to you? This is what happened to David Mills. In â€Å"Homeschooling’s Liberalism† by David Mills, we read a story about Mills personal experience when he tells people his children are homeschooled. The story he tells us is more about their reactions and why he feels justified in homeschooling his children, rather than how Mills homeschools his own children. Mills stands by his decision to homeschool his children for several reasons, among them; his belief that the school system isn’t doing the best they can in terms of education. This story is actually eye opening and doesn’t make the idea of homeschooling as crazy as I used to think it was. I have spent a†¦show more content†¦Mills states, â€Å"Thomas Jefferson, by consensus I think our favorite founding father, would have approved.† Mills believes that taking charge of education for one’s own child is a liberty that is one of the few things that America fought for and continues to fight for the suppression of oppression of any kind, Educating your own children is an act of the kind of freedom I was taught our country provided, a freedom of self-determination thatis one of its great glories. (Mills 344) Mills divulges that when he was going to school, one of his teachers taught him about Herbert Marcuse and Marcuse’s idea of â€Å"repressive tolerance† and that â€Å"we are not free even though we seemed to be, and in fact that the system itself controlled us through what we thought were free choices.† (Mills 342) At whatever age Mills heard this quote, we know it must have stuck with him since he has kept that idea in his head. Mills recalls Edmund Burke’s theory of â€Å"little platoons† for ideas thought to be from anarchy. Mills and other people like him had different ideas of how to go about life, he tells us: â€Å"We had a vision of soci al difference and diversity, which we were taught was threatened by the homogenizing effects of late industrial capitalism, symbolized even then by white bread and processed cheese.† So Mills knew he was in unpopular opinion that tended to upset the balance of what others