Posted by Hadenuff on September 09, 2002 at 00:31:29:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Why should we have to defend teachers? posted by Another View on September 08, 2002 at 15:36:02:
Do you believe that children have a fundamental right in becoming autonomous? This is nothing new. It comes right out of the child's rights movement as espoused by Hillary Clinton's, It Takes a Village to Raise a Child. This view smacks of egalitarianism which asserts that children should be able to make decisions for themselves. The child must be able to think independently of their parents, so the parents wouldn't have the right to dictate when they go to bed, what they watch or do not watch on television, what activities are good for them, what friends are good for them, or whether or not they should obey their parents. Fortunately for society, our law recognizes that until children reach a certain age they do not have the capacity to make these decisions and their parents are presumed to direct their children in making the right decisions.
You believe that home schoolers are dangerous because they do not expose their children to public schools where they would be subjected diverse ideas independent from their parents? To ensure the children's autonomy, would you use the power of the state to ensure that all children, regardless of the environment in which they were schooled, receive an education that exposes them and engages them with values and beliefs other than those they find at home? Is your view that allowing only the child's parents to convey to them their worldview is dangerous to the child and society? Would you rather trust the state-sponsored education to teach the child that he can view the world as he wants, and certainly in contradiction to his parents?
This position assumes is that the state education is neutral. But no education is neutral. Every child is being taught a worldview by someone. I surmise that the worldview that bothers a lot of home-schooling detractors is that there are moral absolutes. These moral absolutes come with religion which necessitates the teaching of truth. Quite frankly, this is one of the main reasons why home education has exploded as a movement, because public schools no longer teach absolute truth.
It is easy to see why homes schoolers would be frustrated with this kind of thinking. They demonstrated through objective standardized testing that they are providing a superior education to what the public school can offer the average child. Yet, they will continue to face these challenges to reduce the freedom key to their success as long as there are fuzzy thinkers who are more concerned about what the child believes than what the child knows.
This position is summed up by Paul Blanchard, while he was the contributing editor of a magazine called The Humanist, with the following statement: "I think that the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is 16 tends to lead toward the elimination of religious superstition."
What is obvious from this kind of statist thinking is that home schoolers must be on guard in protecting the freedom they have obtained. The "educational elite" will never be content with allowing children to be beyond the influence of state approved teachers. They will not yield in their desire to impart their worldview of relativism and secular humanism on all children in America, even those being schooled at home.