Dear Mr. Rockwell,
My children started school last week – at the kitchen table. With the beginning of a new school year come the same questions that I have had every year for the past eleven years of homeschooling. Why is there such strong opposition to the growing homeschool movement? Why do parents who homeschool their children need to seek legal support and constantly defend their rights? Why do parents who home school their children have a fear that Social Services might storm in one day, on an unsubstantiated accusation from a nosey neighbor, and take their children away?
Homeschooling has proven to be an excellent method of educating children. Standardized tests, college-entrance exams, national spelling and geography bees, all show that parents can not only teach their children at home, but also gain results exceeding the national average.
Not only are homeschooled children excelling academically, but they are doing it at the expense of their own families. Homeschooling parents still pay taxes to support the public education system, as well as providing the means to educate their own children at home. They often do this with the income of only one parent. This, however, is a sacrifice that they are willing to make. This is a devotion that you will not find in the government school system.
In his essay, The Law, Fredrick Bastiet wrote, "You say: u2018There are persons who lack education,' and you turn to the law. But the law is not, in itself, a torch of learning which shines its light abroad. The law extends over a society where some persons have knowledge and others do not; where some citizens need to learn, and others can teach. In this matter of education, the law has only two alternatives: It can permit this transaction of teaching-and-learning to operate freely and without the use of force, or it can force human wills in this matter by taking from some of them enough to pay the teachers who are appointed by government to instruct others, without charge. But in this second case, the law commits legal plunder by violating liberty and property."
Shouldn't the government, instead, have to defend itself for forcing the American public to hand over their hard-earned money to support a failed school system? Is this why there is such opposition? Or, could it be that the opponents of homeschooling realize that they are losing the battle in brainwashing homeschoolers and their parents into believing the lies about the glories of the government found in government-approved textbooks touted by government-approved instructors?
I have searched the Constitution and have not found in it anywhere, the right of government to intrude in the educating of children. I did, however, find the concept of "Free education for all children in public schools," in The Communist Manifesto.
Sincerely, Laura (a stay-at-home mom)
August 30, 2001
