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It is my dime-store opinion that homeschooling is little more than legalized child abuse. Physical abuse and brainwashing are simply opposite sides of the same coin. I'm pretty confident that no one who thinks it is appropriate to control every piece of information that reaches their child should have children in the first place. Your anecdotal story about how you were homeschooled and loved it does not interest me. Good for you. For every one of you there are a dozen socially retarded zombies wandering the Earth with wholly fictional versions of reality in their heads – courtesy of their tinfoil-hatted mom and her Teach the Controversy textbooks.

This video has been making the rounds, taken from an ABC special about a group of homeschooled fundies (homeschooler logic: if we put all of the asocial kids in a room with one another once a month, it counts as social interaction – no different than school, really!) being taken on a tour of a natural history museum. Rather than try to describe it, just watch as much as you can before you vomit.

Let us ignore all of the obvious points of criticism for the moment. If you have ever taught a class in your life – from preschool to med school – the pedagogy on display here has to horrify you. It certainly made me want to projectile vomit. These people seem to have taken the Learning = Rote Memorization formula to an extreme that would shame the worst public grammar school teacher. The concept of "teaching" on display here consists of the guide speaking and then stopping for the children to fill in the missing word. In unison, mind you.

Here we see the three pillars of religious fundamentalism: all-encompassing ignorance, fear, and unquestioning obedience. Nothing says "fundie" quite like a pasty, empty-eyed gaggle of Children of the Corn extras listlessly reciting dogma memorized out of fear of punishment. It's hard to do anything except feel bad for them and baselessly hope that one or two of them will find a way to think for him- or herself. It's a longshot.

On one hand, it's tempting to say Who Cares to the homeschooling issue. After all, homeschooled kids are exceptionally unlikely to bother you or I. The few that enter the economy at any level above Sandwich Artist or Wal-Mart night manager will get degrees at Regent or Patrick Henry before returning to Lizard Lick, NC to embark on a long career of shitting out kids. But the kids didn't volunteer for this treatment. Public and private schools may do a pretty outstanding job of messing up kids, but at least one has a fighting chance of emerging from that environment with cognitive and social skills.