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One of the great conservative successes of the modern era has been allowing parents to direct their children’s education through school choice initiatives.
According to EdChoice, “There are 74 educational choice programs on the books in 33 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.”
But the Left—which includes Kamala Harris—hates school choice because every time a parent chooses to send their children to a non-public school, they lose the ability to indoctrinate that child forever. They can no longer secretly trans those kids or induct them into the sexual revolution at the tender age of six. They also can’t teach them that 2+2=5.
The Left’s primary weapons in the war against school choice and homeschooling (it’s the same war) are lies and dissembling.
Twenty years ago, the Akron Beacon Journal published a disgraceful series “exposing” the dangers of homeschooling by trying to falsely tie every high-profile case of child murder, kidnapping, or abuse to the educational choices of the parents, never mentioning how dangerous public schools are.
A website called the Fallacy Detective did a brilliant takedown of the series, highlighting the very obvious logical fallacies contained within:
Fallacy 3: Proof by Lack of Evidence
. . . [T]he nation [collects] an unprecedented volume of statistics on public school students. . . . [But] it . . . knows almost nothing about children who are educated at home. (Nov. 15)
Lack of evidence is only evidence that there is a lack of evidence. There is no evidence of widespread cannibalism among Akron, Ohio residents; should the government fund a massive study to learn why there is no evidence? No, the government should channel its money to study problems for which we have evidence.
This line of reasoning tempts us to lose perspective. We imagine all the horrible possibilities of what homeschoolers could be doing behind closed doors, but we forget that we have absolutely no evidence for this – we only have a lack of evidence. Paranoia is an irrational fear of the unknown.
A reporter commits the fallacy of proof by lack of evidence when he suggests that something is true simply because there was no evidence to the contrary. A lack of evidence cannot be used to support or refute anything. The reporter has the burden of proof to supply positive evidence to support his claim.
School superintendents and other child professionals say an unknown number of children receive an inadequate education at home. . . . (Nov. 15)
An unknown number may be a million or zero. We don’t know. We could say an unknown number of newspaper reporters were smoking an unknown substance when they wrote this article.
It’s gaslighting, pure and simple, and reporters do it—and get away with it—all the time when they discuss school choice. Here’s a more recent example, courtesy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which is upset because “Ohio has expanded school vouchers to cover nearly every student in the state with at least a partial scholarship, state spending on private school scholarships has ballooned to nearly $1 billion a year.
