UN Targets Homeschooling
Under the guise of “human rights,” the U.N.’s controversial “education” bureaucracy is officially demanding that all governments regulate and control home education—if they allow it at all.
The U.N.’s demands include “education standards” for homeschooling, as well as “accountability” to government.
The outfit is also demanding mandatory registration, forced “evaluations” of homeschoolers by authorities, compulsory “home visits,” and much more.
In fact, the agency is even calling for U.N.-approved values and attitudes to be imposed on children across a wide array of issues, with U.N. control of “education content.”
The new U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report on home education, titled “Homeschooling through a human rights lens,” lays out the most draconian global assault on home education in history.
The powerful global agency, long dominated by card-carrying communists, claims governments must bring homeschooling under their thumb—for the benefit of the children, of course.
Unsurprisingly, the top U.N. official involved in the push comes from the “Democratic People’s Republic” of Korea (DPRK), better known as North Korea.
According to the report’s acknowledgements, it was prepared under the “supervision” of Gwang-Chol Chang, chief of the UNESCO Section of Education Policy.
Before joining the U.N. to help transform education globally, Chang worked for the mass-murdering North Korean Communist regime’s “Education Ministry.” The agency operates among the most comprehensive communist brainwashing systems in human history.
And yet, with no sense of the irony, the government controls being demanded by Chang and his minions are said to be necessary to uphold what the global body describes as “international human rights.” Yes, seriously.
If the U.N. agenda is not stopped, parents and even private schools that refuse to comply with the U.N.’s outrageous demands will be accused of violating the “human rights” of children.
The calls for total control are clear—and portrayed as mandatory. “Governments must implement oversight mechanisms such as registration and evaluations,” the report declares (emphasis added), demanding more “regulatory capacity.”
“As homeschooling continues to evolve, adopting a rights-based approach becomes crucial,” the report continues, touting the “need for quality education” as defined by the U.N. through “established minimum education standards and accountability.”
Controlling What Is Taught
Even the content of homeschooling materials must be in line with the U.N., the report makes clear.
“The educational content provided through homeschooling must be aligned with the aims of education set out by the Convention on the Rights of the Child,” explains the report, despite acknowledging that the U.S. government is not a party to that U.N. agreement.
Among the “key considerations” cited by the U.N. to ensure that homeschooling fosters “child well-being” is mandated “exposure to cultural diversity.”
The global education agency also claims there are “concerns” that “persist” about the supposed “lack of exposure to diverse perspectives and potential effects on social cohesion.”
In other words, if your children do not receive enough LGBT instruction or Critical Race Theory propaganda, their supposed “human right” to “socialization” and “quality education” is being violated.
This understanding is not speculation. U.N. “Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education” Farida Shaheed recently slammed states such as Florida and Texas for seeking to protect children from exactly that sort of perverse indoctrination.
“Censorship laws restricting classroom discussions on race, gender identity and other ‘divisive concepts’ limit students’ access to critical knowledge,” she claimed.
The new U.N. report goes on to claim that children must be taught certain UN-approved values such as “global citizenship” and “respect for diversity,” a term often used by the U.N. to promote gender confusion and “progressive” ideologies.
The report even cites a U.N. agreement purporting to require that governments promote the “development of respect” for the U.N. charter. This highly controversial document was shaped, in large part, by Soviet mass murderer Joseph Stalin and his American agents such as Alger Hiss.
Comprehensive sexuality “education” that shapes children’s “attitudes and values” in line with those pushed by the U.N. is also important, the report claims.
The report argues that governments have an obligation to ensure “quality education” in the home, as defined by the U.N. and governments.
To brush aside decades of research and studies showing that homeschoolers generally do far better academically and socially than those in government schools, the U.N. report simply claims there were supposedly “methodological flaws.”
Parental Rights and Family
Echoing principles and values promoted by tyrants from Stalin and Mao to Hitler and North Korea’s Kim dynasty, the report claims governments are “the primary duty-bearers” when it comes to the education of children.
To the extent that parents are permitted by government to educate their own children, governments must still “ensure” that parents do so in line with the UN’s demands.
To enforce compliance, the document promotes “mandatory training” from government for parents who wish to homeschool.
The report also complains that education should render “advantages of one’s family background irrelevant to one’s prospects.”
But homeschooling, it says, may “fail to address” this, as if neutralizing parental and family efforts to help children succeed were a legitimate government objective.
Even the fact that mothers tend to be the primary teachers in home education is attacked by the U.N. for perpetuating allegedly harmful “gender roles.”
Fathers and husbands serving as breadwinners is condemned, too. That is because this supposedly leads to wives and mothers handling more than what the U.N. considers to be a fair share of “unpaid care work”—tasks once known to virtually all people as motherhood and parenting. Oh, the horror!
“Homeschooling must uphold gender equality by avoiding the reinforcement of traditional roles, promoting shared responsibilities, and ensuring that curricula challenge stereotypes,” the report concludes.
American homeschool families are key targets, as the report makes clear.
Pointing to American states with less regulation, the U.N. claims “concerns have been raised” that “States” (governments) may not be taking adequate measures to protect children from their parents.
As part of that, the U.N. demands that governments provide “parental support”—essentially a euphemism for government oversight and control.
“In countries where homeschooling is permitted, such supportive measures could include: training programmes [sic]; access to educational resources; guidelines; periodic home visits; or forums for peer-to-peer exchanges that enable parents to ensure both the child’s right to quality education and compliance with State-defined minimum education standards,” argues UNESCO.
Citing U.N. committees and documents, the report even calls on governments to criminalize corporal punishment, including spanking.
“States therefore must prohibit corporal punishment in all settings, including the home,” the report declares, acknowledging that more than 130 governments have so far failed to comply.
Christians and Religious Instruction in the Crosshairs
Religious homeschoolers are especially singled out, with the U.N. claiming that “dogmatic approaches may stir up intolerance.”
The report cites a 2018 study defining this as approaches that “seek not just a single course on religion, but instead desire to have all disciplines taught through the eyes of their particular faith.”
In other words, parents who are serious about teaching their faith to their children must be prevented from doing so.
Countless Christian homeschooling families and even Christian schools seeking to instill a biblical worldview would meet that criteria.
Even private actors such as digital education companies used by homeschoolers must be regulated to comply, the report claims.
“[W]ithout regulation, online educational content could promote the problematic agendas of groups with vested interests,” it argues, as if politicians and dictators doing the regulating never have problematic agendas or vested interests.
Basis in ‘International Law’
The UNESCO report bases its arguments on a wide range of U.N. agreements, declarations, and conventions that it claims impose obligations on national governments.
Some of those listed, such as the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (U.N. CRC), have not been ratified by the U.S. government.
There is a good reason why. The CRC, as just one example, purports to require that all decisions be made in the “best interests” of the child.
But there is a major catch: “best interests” are defined by government and the U.N., rather than parents.
When the scheme was implemented in Scotland, lawmakers assigned a “named person,” working for the government, to oversee the upbringing of every child from birth to adulthood.
Other agreements cited by the U.N. are problematic for different reasons.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the foundational U.N. “human rights” instrument, was heavily influenced by the mass-murdering regime ruling the Soviet Union.
As such, it contains outrageous provisions incompatible with liberty. Consider Article 29, which enshrines the notion that “rights and freedoms may in no case be used contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”
No wonder the Chinese Communist Party and other tyrants worldwide can claim to support U.N. “human rights” even as they terrorize and even murder so many victims.
Of course, the American concept of rights is radically different. The biblical ideal and “self-evident truth” cited by America’s Founding Fathers holds that God, not government, endowed each human being with “certain unalienable rights.” These include life, liberty, and property. And because these rights were not given by government, they cannot be legitimately infringed upon by government either.
This understanding of rights is entirely incompatible with the U.N. and the CCP view on “human rights.” In fact, the two visions are essentially opposites.
Regarding education, the U.N. UDHR is extremely concerning as well. Consider that Article 26 purports to make “compulsory” so-called “education” a “human right.”
Obviously, something compulsory cannot be a right, Soviet and CCP efforts to redefine the term notwithstanding.
Even more troubling, perhaps, is another provision of Article 26 claiming that compulsory education “shall further the activities of the United Nations.”
Read plainly, this means any homeschool parent or private school that refuses to promote the U.N. and its agenda is infringing on children’s supposed “human rights.”
UN Versus US Constitution
The U.N. claims these restrictions on homeschooling are obligatory under “international human rights law.”
But at least with respect to the United States, that is based on a deeply flawed understanding of American constitutional law.
The U.S. Constitution does indeed make properly ratified treaties part of the “supreme law of the land.”
However, there is an important caveat: Like federal statutes under the Constitution, those treaties must be made “in pursuance thereof.”
In short, that means statutes and treaties must be in accordance with the Constitution that created the federal government—not in violation of the Constitution.
If a statute or treaty is not constitutional, then, as the Constitution’s Framers explained repeatedly, it is null and void on its face.
Obviously, nothing in the U.S. Constitution grants the federal government the power to enforce pro-U.N. indoctrination—or any sort of “education” at all—on children.
In fact, the Tenth Amendment specifically reserves any and all power not delegated to D.C. for the states or the people.
Therefore, without a properly ratified constitutional amendment, U.N. agreements conflicting with the Constitution must be regarded as meaningless, whether they were signed and ratified or not.
Then-President Thomas Jefferson explained this in a Sept. 7, 1803, letter to U.S. Sen. Wilson Cary Nicholas.
“I say the same as to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless,” Jefferson wrote. “If it is, then we have no Constitution.”
The U.S. Supreme Court reiterated the obvious fact that the U.S. Constitution supersedes treaties in its landmark 1957 Reid v. Covert ruling.
And of course, even if the federal government had the constitutional authority to approve such agreements, it lacks the constitutional power to force state and local governments to comply.
In its historic 1997 Printz v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government may not “commandeer” state or local government. That precedent remains in place.
Critics Speak Out
Former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas, now a vocal critic of public education and particularly the U.N. influence within it, slammed the global education agency for seeking to “take over” homeschooling.
Blasting UNESCO’s calls for regulation, Douglas told The Epoch Times that parents were wisely choosing homeschooling to protect children from the very extremism and indoctrination the U.N. is seeking to advance.
“Our rights to raise and educate our children come from God; not from UNESCO or any other government seeking to intrude upon our ability to do so,” she said.
Lauren Gideon, director of government relations for the Education Independence Initiative working to restore family responsibility over education, also blasted UNESCO’s push.
“The homeschooling concept is predicated on two interlocking, equally robust cornerstones: the God-given, natural right of parents to own and direct the education of their children, and the right of self-funded educators to govern their educational private property without the interests of the state trespassing upon their family’s private domain,” she told The Epoch Times.
“Liberty itself is predicated on this public-private distinction,” Gideon continued.
“On this basis, parental liberty stands secured within the American tradition that guarantees innocence until proven guilty through due process of law,” she added. “Any breach of these boundaries, though present in some states, is explicitly anti-American.”
UNESCO’s calls for registration, oversight, and evaluation of homeschooling families “represent precisely such a breach,” continued Gideon, who works on public policy for homeschool giant Classical Conversations.
“These measures presume parental guilt before innocence, undermining the due process that anchors American liberty,” she concluded, adding that UNESCO’s proposals would undermine “the very framework of American liberty itself.”
Ultimately, UNESCO is seeking “total control over education, including all forms of private education,” explained Tiffany Boyd with Free Your Children.
Speaking to The Epoch Times, Boyd warned that the U.N. agency’s longtime push for government funding and control of all education was a key part of its effort to bring in a “one-world curriculum.”
“UNESCO has made it clear they will persist until they have total control over private education,” she concluded. “We must stop them in their tracks.”
Americans Must Resist
Notably missing from the list of those consulted for the report was the Home School Legal Defense Association, the largest and most powerful home education organization in the world.
Also conspicuously missing was the world’s largest repository of research and studies on homeschooling, the National Home Education Research Institute.
Thankfully for homeschoolers and real education, the Trump administration has already announced that the U.S. government is again cutting ties with UNESCO.
Citing extremism and hostility to U.S. values, among other concerns, the U.S. government is in the process of exiting the agency for the third time.
But the threat remains and will persist. President Joe Biden simply re-engaged with UNESCO after taking the reins of power. The next president could do that, too.
Even after the Trump administration’s withdrawal announcement, the defiant director-general of UNESCO, a longtime socialist, boasted that the organization would continue working with its American “partners” anyway.
Meanwhile, none of the key “international law” arguments made in the new report are contingent on U.S. membership in UNESCO.
The U.N.’s dangerous power grab on homeschooling and on education more broadly must be forcefully resisted and rejected.
Read the rest of this article at The EPOCH Times.
Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, and consultant who co-wrote the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.” He writes for diverse publications in the United States and abroad. Previously published at Liberty Sentinel.
