Members of the Tennessee Home Education Association have scheduled their yearly Home School Rally Day March 19 at the state House of Representatives Chambers on the second floor of the Tennessee capitol.
THEA President Claiborne Thornton told The Tennessee Star Monday this is an annual event members of the group have held since 1985.
“We found it impractical to invite all the legislators into our homes, so we thought we should go to their home,” Thornton said.
“We go there and ask home schoolers to come from across the state and to get appointments with legislators and have a meeting with them. We have a program to encourage folks to be there and have displays in the halls and want to make it possible for people to see what is going on with homeschooling right there in their own offices.”
One scheduled event is a Davy Crockett Statesman’s Student Congress Debate Tournament.
Thornton said he did not know how many homeschoolers will show at the capitol later this month. This is especially because, as far as he knows, there are no bills in this year’s legislative session that affect them.
“The first lesson that most children learn is how to speak their mother tongue. That is certainly the most difficult lesson to learn, to go from being completely non-verbal to being verbal and parents regularly teach that to their children,” Thornton said.
“The idea of homeschooling says they will want to stop and teach them how to talk. How far do I want to go with teaching my children? For many people, they are most delighted to turn that over to someone else, people who specialize in that and are trained in that. People who homeschool decide that they would like to do that themselves.”
Typically, Thornton went on to say, that means they line up working in cooperation with other people for subjects that are more complex, including math or science.
“As far as that basic concept, in contrast, Hitler said it best. He said ‘You have your children one day a week, on Sunday, and I have them five days a week all day.’ He said we are changing kids the way we want them to be,” Thornton said.
“There have been elements like that in society that are committed to establishing a political philosophy of what I call a worldview into the culture based on what is popular at the time, and many homeschoolers would take exception to that. They feel like that is something more of an obligation of the parent.”
Thornton said, by his reckoning, there are probably more than 100,000 homeschooled kids in Tennessee, and that number is increasing.
For more information visit the THEA’s website.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
