With the release of Jill Duggar's memoir, Counting the Cost, earlier this month, a lot of skeletons have been let out of the former reality TV family's closet. And now, Jill's husband, Derick, is sharing a pretty big one. In a new interview, Derick claimed that none of Jill's siblings have an education past the seventh grade, once again calling Michelle's homeschooling methods into question — and this isn't the first time fans have wondered what, if anything, she's actually teaching these kids.
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Derick opened up about his in-laws in a new interview.
While talking to the Los Angeles Times, Derick and Jill spoke about the ethics of children filming reality TV, and he raised the concern about no laws being in place to be sure that kids are getting the education they're entitled to while filming.
"If a family sees an opportunity to make money, they can justify taking away their kids’ time [in school] because, well, they don’t need education, they can just have this money to support them. Jill can attest to this, but from what we can tell, none of her siblings really had much education past the seventh grade," Derick said.
According to Derick, filming was more important to Jim Bob and Michelle than education.
Derick said that once 19 Kids & Counting really took off, that became the priority in the Duggar household.
"It was like, 'Well, if the show requires most of the filming hours during the weekday, then school is not really that important,'" he said.
Judging by what we've heard in Jill's book about how much Jim Bob adored being in the spotlight, this isn't surprising at all to hear.
Jill admitted she felt she and her siblings had been deprived of an education.
"I went on to take some college classes. I got my midwifery certifications. I’m currently inactive on my status now. But I do think that the show took priority in a lot of areas of our lives," she said. "Yes, there were great parts to it. But there were also very difficult parts that I would not choose, if I got to go back and I actually had a choice."
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It's telling that Jill has chosen a different method of educating her own children.
Although her other siblings have chosen to homeschool their kids so far, Jill has gone a different route. Instead, her older sons, Israel and Samuel, attend school, so it sounds like she's hoping to give her kids what she was unable to have in her own childhood.
These recent interviews are very revealing of what was going on behind the scenes of their show.
And with the success of Jill's book — and the docuseries released earlier this year, Shiny Happy People — something tells us that this isn't the end of those big reveals about who the Duggar family actually is.
If what Derick and Jill are saying is true, hopefully, the younger Duggar kids will be able to get the educations they deserve soon because they spoke out.
