For many years, we have all understood how cult-approved homeschooling failed the Duggar children.
Little moments from the infamous family’s erstwhile reality TV career have served as glaring reminders.
Fans have recently revisted a number of moments, including the signage put up by Michelle to instruct her children.
When there’s a glaring spelling error plastered on the wall, what kind of education are the kids getting?
Superintendent is not the easiest word in the world to spell, but Michelle is a grown woman.
“SuperIntendant” is written next to her name, on a document posted to remind her children of the basic rules for homeschooling.
Duggar critics on social media are getting a hearty chuckle over the mistake, though some point out that it’s not really funny.
Look, we all know that people make typos every single day. The same extends to writing by hand.
The more that you write, the more typos that you make because you have more opportunities to make them.
Additionally, people are more likely to make simple spelling errors while making signs than they are during normal writing.
So yes, of course the Duggars make little errors — in spelling and beyond.
(I mean, most of us would double-check things in an educational context, especially before filming a reality show, but that’s neither here nor there)
But … just because they do something like the rest of the world does doesn’t mean that their blunders happen for the same reasons.
The Duggars are known for many things, but especially for their toxic restrictions about clothing, gender roles, and human sexuality.
Education is not that much of a priority, however.
When it comes to their children learning, the focus is more upon what the Duggars do not learn — sex education, human rights, important notes of science and history — than what they do.
The Duggar children cannot learn about the real world in useful ways, not in the ways that everyone else does.
Simply put, the extremes of growing up in a fundamentalist cult require near-total isolation.
Any unsupervised contact with people dressing or speaking normally could lead to the Duggars realizing that the outside world is not so scary, and forming their own ideas.
There is another angle to all of this, which is that giving their children a real education — even if it didn’t mean contact with their peers — would give them more options.
The Duggar cult emphasizes marrying them off as soon as they legally can, cementing their role before they have a chance to try something else.
Many of the husbands work within the cult. Someone going to a university and finding their own, independent job would be a threat — a threat nipped in the bud by their shoddy homeschooling.
So when the Duggars have these little slip-ups, we are all reminded of the opportunities denied to the children.
All 19 of Jim Bob and Michelle’s children were born with the same intrinsic rights as everyone else. Many — most — of those were denied by their parents.
Instead of getting a series of qualified teachers from different backgrounds, they had “SuperIntendant” Michelle. It’s a tragedy.
