Earlier this week, news outlets Vice and HuffPost wrote of an Ohio couple who had created a neo-Nazi-themed homeschooling channel, “Dissident Homeschool,” to distribute elementary school lesson plans to a group of 2,400 subscribers. Interested parents can download antisemitic and racist lesson plans to teach Nazi ideology, along with anti-LGBTQ+ videos and other hateful content.
By the spring of 2020, 5.4% of families were homeschooling at least one child — a number that more than doubled, to 11.1%, by the fall of 2021 during the height of the pandemic.
The story draws attention to a strategy that has long been key to white supremacist groups: indoctrinating their children through curriculum designed to teach white supremacy, while keeping them out of what they see as the brainwashing multiculturalism of public schools. The school superintendent of the Ohio city where the neo-Nazi homeschooling curriculum is being used noted that the district “vehemently condemns” the resources, and the state’s department of education is now investigating the neo-Nazi homeschool network.
Homeschooling has exploded in popularity since the pandemic. The movement gained initial momentum in the 1960s and 1970s as it was embraced by a complex mix of fundamentalist Christians and other religious conservatives, counterculture hippies, and educational radicals promoting “unschooling.” By the spring of 2020, 5.4% of families were homeschooling at least one child — a number that more than doubled, to 11.1%, by the fall of 2021 during the height of the pandemic. Although some of those families have since returned to traditional schools, local data suggests that the numbers of homeschooled students remains exceptionally high.
Homeschooling as a strategy to indoctrinate children into white supremacy is nothing new — although the phenomenon represents a tiny minority of homeschooling families. Even before the internet, women in the white supremacist movement wrote…
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