YOU GOTTA PAY BUT YOU DON’T GOTTA PLAY
As anyone who has kids in school will tell you, you must send your progeny to the government school, but the government is not required to teach them anything. It appears in fact that the union bosses who run the show would rather they unlearn some basic stuff they might have accidently learned from you along the way as you fed them, clothed them, housed them and loved them.
And there you have a very strange anomaly. All states have enacted over the past century statutes outlining the duties of parents to their children. Parents must feed, clothe, house and educate them. But the state co-opts only the educate part. The clothiers union does not show up to provide the kids with clothes. The Amalgamated Food Tainters Union isn’t at your doorstep every morning to feed Wilma and Cadwallader. Nor does the Toss Em Up Home Builders provide them housing.
The State has declared its monopoly over what goes into the minds and what we used to call characters of these intruders in your home until they are in at least their mid teens. You, who used to be called parents , are to take care of the KP, runny nose and supply sergeant duties. You can be fined, thrown into jail or both for not living up to the standards set for these jobs by the state.
But the part they stole from you is different. Their only obligation is to make sure that the kid shows up. The mind control union, aka the National Education Association,- a fine nominal irony considering the inability of most kids in government schools to read , write or speak English – has no obligation to teach anything to their five-hour daily jailbirds. That is why they are called compulsory attendance laws.
But something has gone wrong in this garden of learning. Cadwallader and Wilma come home without basic tools like math and literacy. In the place of these anticipated skills, they are now equipped with a whole new surly attitude. They have rights which you must accord them. Dad is a boob and Mom is a caricature from the most recent hilarious TV series about illicit sex and the stupidity of their parents’ generation.
This state of affairs rumbled along, accelerating as government programs will for more than a decade. But then even the self absorbed generations x,y or z began to notice that this state of affairs was beginning to interfere with the comforts of their home life and the kids were staying around longer and pushing their credit limits.
A drumbeat of dissatisfaction was heard in the land. Whether you call it voucher or charter school even the most uncaring of parents began to grumble a the lousy job being done by the kids’ gurus . There is even a growing segment of the population which has abandoned government “education” entirely. Rather than risk the total dumb down of their kids, these hardy souls teach them at home.
This last group, the home schoolers, are the most dangerous to the unions running the schools. The home schoolers are harassed, bureaucratized and made to appear as invisible as the government can make them. One recent estimate put their number at fewer than 800,000. The stark reality is that there are ten times that many.
Given the state of the law why aren’t these “truants” prosecuted. The answer is twofold. First, the government not anxious for a full scale battle over who has rights to inculcate a value system into young minds.The government is winning by default. It won’t risk the whole swindle in an open fight with a still relatively small segment of the victim population.
Second, the individual states continue to count home schoolers in their population for federal grant percentages. Everybody knows they are lying, but it is only the feds and the states distributing what they stole from you in taxes, so it ok to publish the lies.
So what? The government taxes us and damages us in return. What else is new? It is what is old that is at issue here. The unseen battle here is do we own ourselves or are we possessions of the state. Several months ago, I wrote about Pierce v. The Sisters where the Supreme Court struck down an Oregon statute because it violated the parents right and duty to raise their children.That was in 1925.
But a court in California, three quarters of a century later, can say “The child is an asset of the state.” Serrano v. Priest. I would simply ask two questions. When did the Constitution change, so that kids were off-limits to the state in 1925, but are assets of the state now.
The meatier question is, if the child between 6 years of age and 18 years belongs to the state, when and how do we stop being state property and become our own people. Or perhaps our government sees us as its permanent property. And suddenly the education fight sounds a lot like what has got the Tea Party people all upset. Do we own the government or does it own us. Have government schools completed the transformation into training schools for serfdom.
Cave docentes et dona ferentes.
James McKenna
catemckenna
