I've spent some time thinking about homeschooling due to the threads and responses to @C_Stroop over the past day or so. I'd like to share some observations from my childhood and from my current experience homeschooling a neurodiverse kiddo.

My mother decided to pull me from public school in 4th grade because the teachers and school system were filled with "godless liberals." Curricula covering math and language were OK to her, but civics, history, and science drew her ire.

Examples of godlessness included: a reading assignment about showing compassion to an injured sled dog, anything science related due to the theory of evolution and carbon dating, and most of the humanities, which were not describing Christianity properly, in her mind.

The switchover from public school content to homeschooling curricula was drastic and rocky. My mother scrabbled to locate "suitable" resources, eventually landing on the Southwest Louisiana Christian Home Educators Association.

That local Christian group mailed newsletters every two weeks on average that included recommend Christian curricula and other resources, including the Home School Legal Defense Association. HSLDA is a box of Christian shenanigans that I'll unpack in a moment.

The newsletter provided consistent connection, but the real networking occurred at the book sales organized by the local group. There were at least two every summer, one for new books and one for used. Bob Jones and Pensacola Christian College sent reps every year.

PCC's sponsored the Abeka brand of K-12 curriculum, covering all subjects. The Abeka history books whitewashed every era and culture, but some of the worst content hit with American history. Manifest destiny, states rights, and Christian supremacy were jammed packed into it.

Abeka grammar books used Christian centric words and themes in everything, including sentence diagramming. Abeka math avoided any mathematical theories that might be used to disprove the existence of god. Science, oh darkness, that was gutted to remove many facts and theories.

The Abeka science taught creationism alongside evolution, as if it were a competing theory. It questioned carbon dating and discussed how Noah's Ark totes happened. Dinosaurs were mostly made up or existed alongside Adam and Methuselah.

The Evangelical Christian understanding of the Bible infused every Abeka subject in every way they could manage. I only used Bob Jones content on occasion, but they were just as awful.

Science, for me, was further undercut by switching from Abeka to Berean Builders in my high school years: https://bereanbuilders.com/ecomm/product/exploring-creation-with-physics-set/. The author, Jay Wile, went full on with the Christian brainwashing, constantly attempting to refute to the secular, liberal agenda.

Switching over to the used book fairs, even more of the exotic flavors of Evangelical Christians came out of the woodwork for those. Theological combat was put on hold to haggle over used Abeka and other books, functioning like hand me downs. The fair always opened with prayer.

Quiverfulls used some of their brood to staff their table(s); United Pentacostals clucked at our "liberal" dress code. Assemblies of God and other more mainstream Evangelical denominations took time to swap ideas and conspiracies. They even latched onto the idea of a co-op.

The co-op was a collection of parents that decided to teach a few random subjects and to oversee physical education once a week. The primary goal was to combat assertions from educators that we weren't receiving enough socialization. The educational value was non-existent.

HSLDA: What a hot mess. This is one of many ways Christians lobbied and sued to weaken oversight over homeschooling. HSLDA also sent a regular newsletter with stories of social services terrorizing good Christian families for "educating in a Christ centered fashion." Hogwash.

Our family joined HSLDA with the promise of legal support should those pesky gov officials show up to tear our family apart. They also included guidance on how to register as a school with the relevant US state.

Practically, my day-to-day was 2 hours of forced viewing of televangelists on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, reading the Bible, and chores. I had to sneak to my room to work on the real subjects, as corrupted as they were. My parents were absolutely not capable of teaching.

Any help I received was from numbers in the back of the textbooks or the local librarians. All of my successes were from muddling through self-taught and scrabbling for better sources of information (again, library ftw).

Christian homeschooling was pure, unadulterated brainwashing into Christian supremacy.

Nowadays, I'm homeschooling my kiddo due to the pandemic. Remote learning through the public schools was not working for many reasons, but partly due to removal of any assistance for neurodiverse students. I never, ever wanted to homeschool my kiddo due to my experiences.

I have good, solid reasons to homeschool in the short term, but, darkness take me, I'm still so nervous about failing my kid. I'm only doing so because our school system was absolutely failing my kid due to years of assault by Christian orgs.

I've managed to put together a solid curriculum covering all the relevant subjects, but it is a struggle. I searched all over to find a world history book for kids that de-centered white folks and Christians. I've found paid worksheets without religious iconography.

I use Khan Academy as a good supplement. I teach math from books I found on Amazon (yes, common core). Science is supplemented with library books and thrift store finds - there are non-Christian books out there!

Bringing this to a close, I'm saying that Christians actively work to weaken oversight and to remove access to non-Christian sources of information. Support your local libraries and support stronger rules to govern homeschooling - kids are being radicalized at home!