Homeschooling (on the) ABC

The ABC is Australia's public broadcaster.

As near as I can tell from my own ABC radio listening, and sites like the wonderful Get Religion, the ABC shares characteristics with other public broadcasters.  It is accused of being left leaning, but denies this religiously. It seems overly quick - indeed almost hungry - to adopt an anti-Church line, like rolling out a host of negative church stories and no positive ones. And when it does decide to run a 'positive' church story, its generosity is given to liberal stories where the theme is anti-orthodox.  The recent US nun fiasco being the latest example - poor, helpless 'nuns' being beat up on by dreaded Rome etc.

Sometimes, however, there are stories that don't quite fit the mold, at least when they first break onto the scene, when media tropes are yet to be established.  One of these, at least in Australia, is homeschooling.

In January 2012, the ABC ran a news story reporting that the numbers of homeschooled children in Australia is under reported.  The story bought its media currency by running an 'illegal homeschooling' line, and focused on a family who had not registered their daughter, and were brought before a court for this terrible crime.  Yet, the story was surprisingly positive, or at least balanced. It also received an in depth current affairs run on a highbrow radio program 'Background Briefing'.

In a way, I can see the balance in the story arising from what I imagine to be the inner conflict in an ABC's editor's brain, which I take to be like a Daleks:

Left side of ABC editor's brain:  'Homeschooling is a liberal activity. I must obey the ABC. I must run a positive editorial line.'

Right side of ABC editor's brain: 'Homeschoolers are quite likely to be Catholics of an orthodox persuasion. I must obey the ABC. I must run a negative editorial line against such people.'

Combined brain: 'Where there is a liberal/orthodox conflict, I must run a liberal editorial line.  But in this story the liberal line will be the orthodox line.  That does not compute. I am a confused Dalek. This is not in the ABC manual. I will need to adopt a novel approach of being balanced.'

To be fair, I do not know how the ABC's editor's work - but I would not be surprised.

Anyhow, just yesterday there was another story on the ABC's Radio National Life Matters program.  It also had balance - have a listen. There was also a similar show on 'Counterpoint'. 

Balance is, of course, not perfect.  The shows have themes including socialisation and an in-studio expert singing the praises of education as a profession which is to be handled by professionals.  But to me these are all okay - after all they are questions often asked by our own acquaintances when they hear of homeschoolng. It is good to have these put out into the public and discussed. (I do think that these programs would benefit from a more fundamental question - what is the best way to educate someone, rather than treat public schools as a default.)

At the moment these are good days for Homeshooling in the eyes of the ABC.