Prof. West does not hold unregulated home schooling in high regard (hat tip to Walter Olson's tweet, The Common Room's post, and Big Journalism's note):
The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner. These families are not living in romantic, rural, self-sufficient farmhouses; they are in trailer parks, 1,000 square foot homes, houses owned by relatives, and some, on tarps in fields or parking lots.
Robin L. West, The Harms of Homeschooling, 29 Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly 7, 10 (2009).
As (1) an atheist (2) living with an anything-but-submissive wife (3) in a pleasant home closer to 10,000 than to 1,000 square feet we own (4) in the wealthiest large county in the U.S. (5) in small, but not completely insignificant, part thanks to once upon a time having aced Prof. West's jurisprudence class and received a letter of recommendation from her, but who (6) nevertheless intends to home school his toddlers with his wife and without regulation, I am not quite sure how to respond to this.
PS to Prof. West: Rawls's maximin principle so does too imply an extreme form of risk aversion inconsistent with observed preferences!
