The United Nations has now set its sights on home education — and make no mistake: this is not about helping children. It’s about centralizing control, eroding parental authority, and imposing a globalist ideology under the guise of “education standards.” A new report from the UN Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) titled “Homeschooling through a human rights lens,” lays out recommendations that verge on totalitarian. It calls for states to adopt binding international norms for home education: mandatory guidelines, accountability, oversight, and monitoring.
Implicit in this agenda is the idea that homeschooling is a “risk factor” to be regulated, not a right to be protected. Public bureaucracies would have the authority to peer into private homes, dictate curricula, and demand conformity with secular and progressive social views. The very presence of alternative education becomes suspect. For Christian, conservative, or freedom-loving families, this is nothing less than an existential challenge. Homeschooling today stands as one of the last bastions of parental sovereignty: the ability of moms and dads — not distant elites or global agencies — to teach their children according to conscience, faith, and family culture.
But the U.N. wants to rebrand that independence as an “anomaly,” something to be tamed, measured, and regulated. If this trend advances unchecked, we can expect to see: licensing regimes for homeschoolers; mandatory curriculum standards that embed gender ideology, sex education, or critical race theory; audits of teaching materials, and home visits; and the suppression or criminalization of curricula that contradict “international norms.” This is not hypothetical. Already in states across the U.S., bills are being introduced to increase oversight of home education, if not eradicating it altogether.
The goal of UNESCO’s report is to convert homeschooling into “public school at home,” tethered to the bureaucratic state. It shifts the narrative so that parents become the regulated, not the regulators. Those who cherish religious liberty and the rights of parents must mobilize. We must insist that no international treaty, no agency, and no global court has the power to override constitutional, state, or local protections that enshrine homeschooling as a fundamental right.
When technocrats lecture us about “standards” and “equity,” they are really demanding ideological uniformity. The real right to education lies — as always — in the hands of parents, not distant bureaucracies. Homeschooling is not a relic to be crushed — it’s a hedge against cultural decay, and we must defend it.
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This post originally appeared at https://phyllisschlafly.com/national-sovereignty/globalism/united-nations-takes-aim-at-home-schooling/