Florida quarterback Tim Tebow is the first sophomore to win the Heisman trophy as the nation’s outstanding college football player. Since 1935 every previous winner had been a junior or senior. He’s also surely the first homeschooled athlete to win the award. In the past decade or so we’ve gotten used to homeschoolers winning spelling bees and geography bees and science fairs. But who ever heard of a homeschooler winning a top athletic prize? Well, now we have.
Tebow benefited from a Florida law that allowed homeschooled students to play on public school athletic teams. Some states bar students who don’t attend a particular school from participating in extra-curricular activities. No doubt fans of the University of Florida Gators are glad that their state was so open to letting homeschoolers develop their athletic skills.
He sounds like a fine young man–born in the Philippines, where his parents were Christian missionaries and where he often spends summers preaching and doing charity work. And even more startling, he says he’ll return to the University of Florida for two more years rather than taking the big bucks from the NFL now.
Isabel Lyman wrote about homeschooling in a Cato study here. Of course, some people, like Russell Shaw at HuffingtonPost, don’t like homeschooling. They want to require that all parents turn their children over to the all-knowing, all-wise, efficient, effective, politically correct government schools. And they’re appalled at the idea that parents, not the state, should assume primary responsibility for the upbringing of the children they bring into the world. Shaw is afraid that Christian parents will teach their children creationism and other anti-scientific ideas. (Presumably not the parents whose homeschooled children are winning science fairs.) I wonder if he’d feel differently if he knew that homeschooling families are politically and culturally diverse; as Lyman writes, “There are two historical strains of homeschooling, a religious-right thread inspired by author Raymond Moore and a countercultural-left thread inspired by John Holt.” Or does he just think that, left or right, all children need to get the same thoughts drilled into their heads from the same textbooks?
