From Homeschooling to No Schooling

In recent insanity, the Second District Court of Appeal of California has made a new ruling that prohibits parents from controlling their children's education. On the contrary and to put it positively, a parent has the right and obligation to control how their children are raised. End of story. To put it negatively, no one else has any authority over this parental right. The new resolution runs entirely contrary to the basic decency and good sense of proper child development. The act of requiring a child to go to a public school (or any day school for the matter) against his family's desires entails (among other things) that: 1) That child is prohibited from receiving his guardian(s)' provision for physical well-being viz. the parent's concern for the child as it involves safety, exercise, food, nutrition, and special medical needs 2) That child can not refer to his parents/guardians for conceptual points of comparison and other follow-up questions. It isn't entirely unusual for a teacher to offer up a subject matter in a manner that is offensive to both the child and his parents. Consider the trend of giving sexual education to increasingly younger children with greater explication and frequency. 3) Further, consider the extra burden that this involves. A parent who invariably already has his and his child's daily routine set, now has to disorganize that and start over. The parent would have to take additional time for scheduling and come up with requisite transportation. He'd also have to consult with a variety of public school agents for his own comprehension of how the school administers its programming. Plus, he would have to further consult with school staff in meetings instigated by their whims and arbitrary scheduling. 4) Then, there's additional financial costs. The public school scheme as we know it is more of a 20th century manifestation of multi-tentacled Modernism than anything the American Founding Fathers could have envisioned. That is, it amounts to an excuse for greater taxation which in itself will likely beget more taxation and regulation as it always has. Obviously, all of the aforementioned would invoke sudden psychological turmoil for the members of an affected family as well.

It should be noted that any legislative Constitution can only acknowledge and protect individual rights. It's a total and fundamental self-contradiction for legislators to write laws that "give" rights. Rights are not given by a legislative body or anyone else for the matter. Rights are derived from an individual human's nature i.e. his conceptually-oriented ability to negotiate reality, and those rights exist prior to society. In fact, as Ayn Rand indicated, society is held back by rights so that any individual may live according to his own respective consciousness as he sees fit so long as he doesn't violate others' rights.

A parent raising his own child in no way violates anyone's rights. Again, a parent is, if anything, morally obligated to look after a child's education. Legislators most certainly do not know of and couldn't possibly keep track of every parent's particular pedagogical agenda. It's simply off-the-charts ludicrous to suggest that a governmental bureaucracy could even begin to have a hope of properly raising children. Consider the track record of modern government these days. Governments around the world constantly violate individual rights even while they operate under the color of supposedly objective laws. (The laws themselves are to be questioned as well as the execution of the laws.) This new court opinion leads to nothing more than another trial balloon and naked power grab.

Politics is derived from ethics. Does the State of California attempt to substantiate its claim with rational morality? No, not at all. What California government has instead given us is an edict from on high via rationalizations i.e. an initiation of force based on the logical fallacy of argument from authority. The appellate court is apparently resting its argument at least in part on the following excerpt from the California Constitution: "A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the Legislature shall encourage by all suitable means the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral, and agricultural improvement." Really now? This is entirely presumptuous. Again, leaving aside the complete impossibility and the abject ineptitude of a governmental body in attempting to provide any of the previous enumerated values, the law is illogical. (...so much for the intellect, ethics and science!)

Note the bait and switch here: If there is an "authority" to be concerned with, then it would be of a pedagogical nature, but that is in using the term authority in the sense of being an expert. When the government claims authority, those agents are entirely depending on the threat of force to coerce parents to follow orders. Also, who decides what educational paradigms and practitioners are best? Caveat emptor! Education, as is the case with every other commodity, must be traded commercially for everyone involved to get the values they seek to obtain. The California government is not only insulting the intelligence of parents by suggesting that they don't have rights to educate their children but that even if they were allowed freedom to choose among competing private educational institutions, those parents wouldn't have the intelligence to decide which organization is best in aiding their children's education.

There's another logical fallacy that the state's argument rests on, and that is that of an anti-concept. In this case, the anti-concept in question is "group rights". In particular, the appellate court invokes that specious idea of public welfare. What is this welfare? For that matter, what is the public? These terms are themselves anti-conceptual. That is, "public" and "public welfare" are undefinable, and they are only used to obfuscate issues. As Ayn Rand indicated in her _The Virtue of Selfishness_ book on page 102,

A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.

Any group that does not recognize this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob …

The notion of "collective rights" (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that "rights" belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the "right" to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority.

http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/collectiverights.html

...so the idea of "group rights" is used to mutually reinforce the state's authority (the group's supposed agent) as that authority is used to prop up "group rights". Also, "public welfare" merely skirts the essential issue which is that of man's rights. In effect, the state is saying: "You, the parent, must cede your right to parent to the whim of a nebulous idea of society... because we, the state, say so." Education is not a right in the sense that it's something to be extricated from others by force. There isn't any such "right". As the Founding Fathers noted, a person qua parent has the right to _pursue_ values e.g. the value of education as against having the value handed over to the child at the expense of someone else's life. This itself involves still another logical fallacy of begging the question. That is, the state's argument is a circular and baseless argument. The state legislature is ultimately counting on a conceptual shell game to keep parents confused and preventing them from identifying the root cause of the decline of American education.

A child stands to benefit more from greater interaction with his parent(s). Why punish a parent for trying to offer his child more support? There's a larger context at play here. Along with the problems that the recent appellate court resolution involves, there's the fact that education has been up for grabs in political circles for decades. There are pressure groups including those of the teachers' unions that wish to gain ever greater authority over the decision-making possibilities that are yielded by past governmental encroachment.

From the related San Francisco Chronicle article at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/07/MNJDVF0F1.DTL, we have this:

The ruling was applauded by a director for the state's largest teachers union.

"We're happy," said Lloyd Porter, who is on the California Teachers Association board of directors. "We always think students should be taught by credentialed teachers, no matter what the setting."

Of course, this further begs the question of "What is the basis of teachers' credentials?" It just so happens that I personally was raised in a family of teachers. I know from hearing stories from my family and their co-workers that there's entirely too many parties pulling at teachers for them to do their job properly these days. ...and that is leaving aside the condition of school curricula.

What's also disheartening is that the teachers themselves are unlikely to fight the trend of greater state control. They are beholden to the state for their jobs since the state has what nearly amounts to being a monopoly. In recent decades, it isn't as if homeschooling parents have ever represented the numerical majority of parents, so neither homeschooling parents nor the teachers who are sympathetic to those parents have much leverage in this situation (unless they protest the infernal legislation which the several courts depend on of course!)

Parents and teachers alike need to understand that if they are sincere in having children receive proper education they must not get in the way of laissez-faire Capitalism. That is, everyone involved must take responsibility for their own respective role (and only that personal role!) in educating children. They must also understand that government has no value to offer; it can only take away values if it's improperly directed. At best, government can only protect an ideal educational system... rather an educational _industry_ if it's ever allowed to develop. Parents must continue to fight for greater recognition of the fact that they are the first and last authority in respect to their own children's development. That means, parents must have a minimal understanding of the basis for laissez-faire, and they must be willing to speak out in support of such a theory.