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Living the Outlaw life: An education in freedom
www.backwoodshome.com...
There are three fundamentally subversive things an Ordinary American Outlaw can do to increase freedom while going about daily life. Two can be dangerous to your well-being. The third is overwhelmingly rewarding and hardly hazardous at all.
Subversive acts #1 and #2 are: 1) don’t pay your income taxes and 2) quit using a government-issued centralized citizen tracking number—aka social security number. (See the sidebar concerning a future article that will be about not using your SSN.) Both of these acts of subversion are fine ways to help chop the tentacles off government and to retain some control over your own life and labors. But well...sometimes they can really mess up your tidy little routine.
The third act of everyday subversion—the nice one—is: teach your children at home.
Since homeschooling is legal (mostly), infinitely more effective than the government alternative, healthy for your relationship with your family, cheaper than any of the alternatives, good for freedom, fun (often), educational (always), and these days quite often risk-free—why not do it?
The collective knows why not...
A brief lesson in the history of government education:
* The U.S. government education system was deliberately patterned after lowest of the three ranks of the Prussian education system—whose major purpose was to produce competent-but-conforming citizen-workers and obedient soldiers.
* Government schools didn’t arise because American families wanted them; they were conceived by the New England Protestant elite to be imposed upon the dirty immigrant masses with their dirty foreign ways and dirty foreign religions.
* One-hour learning periods, bells, rigid age grouping, rigidly segmented subjects, and force-feeding of information to a passive student body were all designed to discourage students from following their own interests, from seeing connections between different subjects, or becoming deeply committed to personal projects.
* Literacy in the U.S. was higher before government education than it has been since.
* In some places, compulsory government schooling had to be imposed upon independent Americans literally at gun point—with children being wrenched away from their parents and force-marched off to the new schools.
Education and the Constitution
www.cato-at-liberty.org...
Does the Wall Street Journal think the Constitution is suspended on the weekends? Two weeks ago on Saturday, April 15, the Journal claimed on its front page that “the Constitution guarantees a public-school K-12 education for every child in the U.S.” Then this past Saturday, April 29, the Journal’s usually reliable editorial page deplored the “states’ rampant noncompliance with the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act” and the “lax enforcement of NCLB” by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.
In both cases the Journal seems to have forgotten that the U.S. Constitution grants no authority over education to the federal government. Education is not mentioned in the Constitution of the United States, and for good reason. The Founders wanted most aspects of life managed by those who were closest to them, either by state or local government or by families, businesses, and other elements of civil society. Certainly, they saw no role for the federal government in education.
Once upon a time, not so very many years ago, Congress understood that. The History of the Formation of the Union under the Constitution, published by the United States Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission, under the direction of the president, the vice president, and the Speaker of the House in 1943, contained this exchange in a section titled “Questions and Answers Pertaining to the Constitution”:
Q. Where, in the Constitution, is there mention of education?
A. There is none; education is a matter reserved for the states.
Not only is the Constitution absolutely silent on the subject of education, but the U.S. Supreme Court has also refused to recognize any right to a taxpayer-funded education. As Timothy Sandefur, author of Cato’s forthcoming book Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21st-Century America, points out, in San Antonio Independent School Distict v. Rodriguez (1973), the Court specifically declared that education, though important, “is not among the rights afforded explicit protection under our Federal Constitution. Nor do we find any basis for saying it is implicitly so protected.” Nine years later, in Plyler v. Doe, the Court held that if a state chooses to give such an education to citizens, it must also offer it to the children of illegal aliens. But it has consistently recognized that taxpayer-funded education is a privilege, and not a right.
Obama Urges Students to Stay in School and Maintain Focus
www.foxnews.com...
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President Obama plans to tell the nation's school children that they ultimately are most responsible for their own education.
Sign of the Times
www.infowars.com...
An Infowars reader sent in the following photo. “No story needed really. Sign of the times. Bad times are these,” he writes. It is also yet another example why children should be home schooled.
Originally posted by Hx3_1963
The third is overwhelmingly rewarding and hardly hazardous at all.
*snip*
The third act of everyday subversion—the nice one—is: teach your children at home.
Amanda Kurowski is a 10-year-old homeschooled girl who performs well academically and is socially well-adjusted. But her strong Christian beliefs were reason enough for a New Hampshire court to order her out of homeschooling and into a public school.
As part of a continuing divorce case, Wake District Court Judge Ned Mangum, in North Carolina, said last Friday that it would be in the "best interests" of Venessa Mills' three children to go to public school this fall.
A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution.
An apparent paperwork error by state officials has resulted in a jail threat to a Utah homeschooling family. Denise Mafi must enrol all her children in a state school immediately or face the state seizing them and even a possible jail sentence for truancy.
Just before Christmas in 2008, Heather officially withdrew her son from public school and began homeschooling. On January 5, the LaSalle County truant officer called Heather to inform her of a meeting that had been called about her children’s “situation” and to avoid court action. Heather, her sons, and several school officials attended the meeting, during which they accused Heather of improper motives for homeschooling. The school also had a reporter document the meeting but refused to provide Heather with a copy of the notes for her records. Ultimately, Heather was told that if she did not re-enroll her son in public school, the truant officer would file for educational neglect with the state's attorney.
According to the organization behind the standardized test for high school achievement and college admissions, the 11,535 homeschoolers who took the ACT in 2009 scored an average of 22.5. The average score of the total 1.48 million students who took the exam was 21.1.
"This is a remarkable achievement and shows that homeschool parents are successfully preparing their children for college," commented Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association.