Who Do They Belong To?

One of the idols of our age is the state. And education is very important to the state, particularly the leftist state which seeks to control and manipulate every area of life to achieve utopia. They need to produce compliant citizens who will follow their dictates mindlessly. Part of this of course is that much of what they say is arrant nonsense, and it takes a certain type of idiot to listen to them. For example, only someone bereft of sanity – an idiot – can sagely proclaim that a man with a few bits chopped off and given some hormone treatment is a woman. So you see, they believe they must control education, and education is not about developing critical thinking and intelligence as much as they try to tell you that. If it was, they would free it up to different views and approaches.

You don’t believe me? At teacher’s college, I wrote an essay suggesting that teacher registration was a waste of time, because it didn’t protect students, and it didn’t improve teacher standards. Moreover, I argued that independent schools should have the freedom to employ people who have not jumped through the ideological hoops required by registration since to attract students who pay fees when the government holds a monopoly of ‘free’ schools obviously forces those schools to provide a superior service. Predictably, my essay was not looked upon favourably. Written comments from more than one lecturer were recorded on the paper which I had never seen before. One comment in particular stuck with me. “We must have gatekeepers.” Yes, quite. The statists have to control who teaches your children. That is an assumed good.

So statists, and unfortunately most teachers are statists, do not believe that parents are responsible for the education and training of their children. Setting themselves against Christ, they believe that children must be rendered unto Caesar and his bureaucratic minions. They arrogate to themselves what belongs to parents. In New Zealand, we see this in their monopolistic control of education generally, and in their zoning rules (and a host of other rules) specifically. We also see it in the way teachers think they have the right to teach values contrary to the wishes of parents.

Indeed, this evil has saturated the Western world. A couple of recent examples are in order. In Loudoun County, Virginia, the district educational leaders have proposed policies requiring teachers to use a child’s preferred gender pronouns. At a public meeting on this issue, parents were so opposed to this, that the board closed public comments at the meeting, and the police declared an unlawful assembly. Two parents were apparently arrested for refusing to leave the meeting. There is nothing so frustrating to these control freaks than to have parents arrogantly assume they have a say in what their children are being taught.

In other parts of the US, teachers, are complaining about the crackdown by conservatives on critical race theory being taught in schools. Here’s one example of the kind of ill-educated brainwashing robots government schools tend to attract.

So what should you do? Get your children out of government schools. Seriously. What are you waiting for? Do not render to Caesar what belongs to God. Give your children an actual education. “Free compulsory education” gets a one out of three. Yes, there is compulsion. It’s not free and it’s not education. It costs the souls of our children and stifles their ability to think and challenge the idolatrous State.

Why Statists Fear Homeschooling

Recently we looked at Elizabeth Bartholet’s attack on homeschooling. There have been many excellent articles critiquing her thinking. One such, written by Kevin D Williamson appeared in the National Review. Williamson notes the reason many like Bartholet fear homeschooling and want it banned. School is an essential part of state monitoring.

Homeschooling inhibits the ability of the state to conduct surveillance on some families. “There is no way of knowing how many homeschooled children experience a childhood comparable to Tara’s,” she [Bartholet] writes. “But we do know that the homeschooling regime permits children to be raised this way.”

In addition, Williamson further highlights why Statists love public schooling, and fear homeschooling: public schooling is actually for the benefit of the State.

The economic argument is straightforward and points back to Prussia, the spiritual homeland of progressivism. From Frederick the Great and Johann Julius Hecker through the Progressive Era to today, schools have been treated as factories that produce what the state needs: able administrators and bureaucrats in the context of the emerging Bismarckian welfare regimes and, later, workers in the industrial economies. Schools organized this way do not exist to serve children or families: They exist to serve the state, and children are not the customers — they are the product.

Williamson argues that what is being fought over here is whether children are the property of the state, whether education exists for the student or the state, and whether there is any private realm.

Homeschooling is based on a radical proposition that is utterly incompatible with Professor Bartholet’s politics. Homeschoolers insist that their children are not the property of the state, to be farmed and dispatched in accordance with the state’s needs; the homeschooling ethos insists that the purpose of education is to serve the needs and interests of students rather than those of the state or of business; it insists that there exists a sphere of life that is private and not subject to state surveillance, and that this sphere covers family life and child-rearing unless and until there is some immediate pressing reason for intervention. 

So what is the debate really about?

The debate about homeschooling is not really about educational outcomes — there are good and bad homeschooling practices, good and bad public schools, good and bad private schools, etc. — but about who serves whom and on what terms. Do American families serve the state or does the state serve them? Do we live our lives and raise our children at the sufferance of the state, or is the state an instrument of our convenience?