Clemson Professor: America’s Homeschooling Mothers Leading Next Revolution

RALEIGH – Historian and Clemson University professor C. Bradley Thompson has penned a book in which he writes, “The leaders of the revolution are America’s homeschooling mothers.” With a burgeoning population of homeschoolers — one of the largest in the country at nearly 130,000 — the First in Freedom state is once again helping lead the charge for choice in education.

In an interview Breitbart News, Thompson spoke of current political division within the context of America as the only nation to represent its own ideology.

“[Americanism] is really an extraordinary concept,” stated Thompson. “The United States of America is the only nation in the world that I know of that is identified as an ism, right? We speak of Americanism, but we don’t speak of Frenchism, Italianism, Germanism, [or] Persianism. It’s only Americanism. Americanism is associated with an idea or with principles, and the idea of America, the ideology that is America, the ideology that has attracted tens — if not hundreds — of millions of people to this country over the course of the last several hundred years is, I think, associated with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.”

That ideology, one of independence, is best expressed today, Thompson says, by those homeschooling mothers. In removing themselves from the public education system they’re exercising their independence to raise and educate their children. In North Carolina, political divisions over education pit leftist union public school interests and their Democratic allies against school choice advocates and conservatives that take the idea of independence seriously. It’s an active battlefront, and advances in choice have been on the march here in the Old North State. Obviously, that comes with the scorched earth politics from the Left who wishes every child went straight to Leftist union government run schools at age 3 with no competing interests for students of taxpayer dollars.

That is especially pointed when it comes to homschooling versus charter or private schools. The numbers are moving in their favor, though; groped together homeschoolers would represent the third largest school district in the state.

The North Carolina Constitution charges the government with forever encouraging the means of education. Freedom to choose that education is the ultimate encouragement, and our state’s homeschoolers are evidence that less government control allows ‘we the people’ to do more for our posterity. It’s heartening to see so many embody the state motto in North Carolina, but supporters of school choice must help elect lawmakers that understand what it means to be, rather than to seem.

Click Here to listen to Thompson talk about his book, America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It. Read more about North Carolina’s growing homeschooling movement here.