On the liberal, woman-centered daytime talk show “The View,” Joy Behar called homeschool children “demented.” Let the video load and skip ahead to around the 7:00 mark:
“A lot of those kids are demented…”
Here are a few of the “demented” children who were homeschooled:
- Twelve year-old Bryceson Harvey, winner of “the 14th annual ‘Can You Find the Mapman?’ Contest”
- Haley Stewart, winner of the Reading Rainbow Competition
- Nathan Cornelius, winner of the 2005 National Geographic Bee
- 16-year-old mathematician Michael Viscardi, winner of the prestigious Siemens-Westinghouse Competition
- These “seven homeschooled high schoolers” who “swept the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) World Championship”
- Christopher Paolini, homeschooled author of Eregon, Eldest and Brisingr
- Heisman trophy winner Tim Bebow
- Dakota Fanning, the “most powerful actress in Hollywood”
Homeschoolers generally own academic competitions:
A home schooler, 13-year-old Evan O’Dorney, is once again the winner of the Scripps National [sic] Spelling Bee. In fact, home schoolers took fully one third of the top 15 spots in the Bee, utterly out of proportion with their share (about 1/40th) of the U.S. student population. Another two spots were taken by private school students, and three were taken by Canadian public school students (hence the “sic,” above — we’ve yet to anschluss the Canucks so far as I can recall).
That left five spots for U.S. public school students — the same number taken by home schoolers whom they outnumber by 50 million or so kids. And it isn’t as though the homeschoolers are fabulously wealthy and able to hire special tutors. The winner’s father is a subway train operator and his mother oversees his education.
Homeschoolers excel in such competitions because they enjoy more educational freedom than any other category of learner. They can pursue their interests and competitive drives (spelling isn’t even O’Dorney’s favorite subject) without being constrained by the pace of a classroom targeted at the “average” student — a pace that must be, by definition, too fast or too slow for the majority.
Joy Behar owes the entire homeschool community an on-air apology for her insult. Her ignorant statement is not only offensive, but reenforces a stereotype that is harmful to the homeschooling families in America.
I went to ABC.com and filed the following comment:
I am very insulted by Joy Behar’s comment that homeschool children are “demented.” Homeschool children in American far outperform public school children in academic and now athletic achievement.
There are children all across America who heard Ms. Behar say they were demented. Read the comments on YouTube to see how her liberal bigotry has insulted them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6slZ4Fps6Bo
A formal, on-air apology is necessary. What she said is unacceptable.
Duane Lester
Feel free to leave your own response, either to ABC, or the comments below.
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