"There is no power the state doesn’t have if it has a power over your children that supersedes your own."

If you are a homeschooler (or, an American that actually cares about things like the First Amendment) and you don't know Matt Walsh, then you need to get to know Matt Walsh.

The Matt Walsh Blog

Here's a post from today that is a must read:

Politician: “Let’s treat all homeschool parents like felony child abusers”
Posted on December 18, 2013 by The Matt Walsh Blog

Let me try to explain why you should care about homeschooling rights, even if you aren’t a homeschool parent:

Because we don’t have any rights at all if we don’t have the unquestioned and absolute right to teach and raise our own children. In a country where you do not have a right to your own offspring, to what else could you possibly have a right? Your home? Your car? Your body? Not in a nation ruled by bureaucratic deities so powerful that they may deign the very fruit of your loin to be their property. If we forfeit our jurisdiction over our sons and daughters, where else can we draw the line. “Sure, government, regulate how I educate my kids, but you better have a warrant if you want to take a peak in my glove compartment!” We all have to pick a hill to die on, I suppose, but mine will be the hill of Family Sovereignty.

Let me put it another way:

There is no power the state doesn’t have if it has a power over your children that supersedes your own.

Let me put it still another way:

If you do not have the right to teach and raise your own children on your own terms, then you don’t have the right to free speech, religion, association, or privacy, and you are not protected from unreasonable government intrusion into your personal life.

How could it be that so many who describe themselves as “pro-choice” would then turn around and argue against homeschooling rights? As terrifying as it may be, we need to confront the fact that our society is filled with people who honestly believe that you ought to have the right to kill your child, but you shouldn’t have the right to educate him.

When I call such people “lunatics,” I do so with great optimism. I’d prefer to be surrounded by delusional maniacs than to be surrounded by rational individuals who have actually reached the conclusion that a person’s only fundamental parental right is to butcher their children.

So, if liberty — true, God given liberty — is your thing, you might take a particular interest in the story of an Ohio Democrat who wants to require all homeschool parents to undergo a Social Services investigation. To make his case, Senator Capri Cafaro is repulsively exploiting the child abuse death of a 14 year old kid. Teddy Foltz-Tedesco died last year after his mother pulled him out of school to hide his abuse from authorities. The boy was finally beaten to death by the mother’s boyfriend.

In keeping with the government’s long tradition of being incompetent in every possible facet of existence, this young child’s abuse was already reported to Social Services. Social Services failed to act, and now, in response to THEIR OWN failures, politicians want to give them MORE power. This is a brand of mania that you can only find in government: an agency bungles its authority, and the solution is to give them more of it.

In any case, this is a tragic, awful situation. The mother and the mother’s boyfriend ought to be charged to the fullest extent of the law, and that means they should spend the rest of their pitiful lives in a cage.

But only a manipulative tyrant would take this one isolated incident and use it as a tool to intrude into the lives of every homeschool parent. And not just every homeschoolparent, but every parent, period. This proposed piece of legislation, or any law in any state that regulates or oversees how parents teach their children, has the effect of giving the government a claim to your child. Certainly, you should be able to lose your claim over your child if you are truly abusive, or if you commit any felony crime that would put you in prison and require your kids to be cared for by someone else, but homeschool lawsassume abusive and criminal intent in every parent. If that is not tyranny, then there is no such thing.

Moreover, if the rare case of an abusive homeschool parent can serve as an indictment of homeschooling, why can’t the more common case of a sexually abusive teacher serve as an indictment of public schools? By this politician’s own logic, all government schools should have been shutdown long ago. In fact, there was a 2004 study titled, “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature,” commissioned by the Department of Education. It received no attention from anyone, but the findings were terrifying: nearly 10 percent of all public schooled students had been raped, abused, or sexually harassed by teachers.

TEN PERCENT.

That makes the sex scandal in public schools many, many, many times more prevalent than the abuse epidemic in the Catholic Church. It’s not even close, actually. The Hofstra researcher who conducted the study had this to say: “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”

And homeschool kids are the ones at risk?

Add school shootings, gang violence, fights, bullying, and administrative abuse in the form of zero tolerance policies that brand and label young kids as criminals, and public school is clearly a much more dangerous proposition.

But what serious attempt have our politicians made to curb the sexual abuse of kids in public schools? It’s hard to address a problem if you’ve decided that the problem doesn’t exist.

Some teacher’s unions even think teachers ought to be given cash rewards after being found guilty of serial rape. A severance package for a man who sexually abused a young boy for three years? That’s not just “inappropriate,” that’s co-conspiratorial, as far as I’m concerned.

The government has no place pointing the finger of suspicion at parents. We are the ones who have every possible reason to be suspicious of them. The vast majority of us are doing our best to raise our kids in a hostile environment; an environment made all the more hostile by the very government entities that pretend to be concerned about the health and safety of our children.

We have a problem, America. We seem to be under the impression that our kids are safer in government buildings than they are in our homes. We have succumbed to a brainwashing campaign so effective that it makes me wish that the State was half as good at constitutional governance as it is at convincing its citizens to hate freedom.

Homeschooling laws vary by state. Some have virtually no regulations, some make moderate efforts to “keep tabs” on those dangerous homeschooling terrorists, while others are ruthless in protecting and expanding their government education system. In these states, homeschooling parents have to (among other things) register their curriculum with the education department, and even endure home visitations from government agents.

Surely, we can all see how terrible that is, can’t we? A government agent invading your house to investigate what information you’re passing on to your child? Can any substantive notion of freedom coexist along side such a thing? Extremist that I am, I don’t think homeschool parents should be required to make any effort to “check in” with any government agency, no matter how convenient they make the process. But even if you aren’t ready to meet me there, even if you can’t quite get on board with full parental liberty, aren’t we at least on the same page that homeschool parents shouldn’t be treated like sex offenders on parole?

No? We can’t even agree on that point?

I didn’t think so.

Well, carry on, Freedom Fighter.

Politician: “Let’s treat all homeschool parents like felony child abusers”

The power of Man to make himself what he pleases means the power of some men to make other men what they please.

The modern institution of public education in the United States has its beginnings in Prussian Socialism informed by Marx and Hegel, and pragmatised by Bacon, Dewey, and Mann. The goal was not to educate an embodied soul, but to school a child into a specific kind of citizen – the product desired by the state. Family, traditions, religion, traditional morality and ethics were all obstacles to this production and therefore are to be “schooled” away.

In The Abolition of Man (1944), C. S. Lewis prophetically warned of the day when the state would successfully impose its program upon mankind. How very right he was, and is:

“The final stage [of Man’s conquest of Nature] is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have ‘taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho’ and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

“…the man-moulders of  the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.”

“In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao [Logos, Absolute, etc.] – a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgments of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education.”

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1944.

What do public education, the breakdown of the traditional family, the ghettoization of the church, and the morality of our culture have in common?

The public school system in the United States has become, and not recently, a machine of the state having the purpose of producing the kind of citizen that most benefits the state’s purposes and desires. What the state most needs to stifle is individuality and individual thinking and creativity. Here’s a quote from  a 30 year teacher in New York City schools and former New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, from his book Weapons of Mass Instruction – A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling:

Take a second to think about these utopian algorithms – dividing people from one another and from their natural allies, is right at the head of the list, but all require wiping the slate as clean of close emotional ties – even ties to yourself! – as possible. Family, deep friendships, church, culture, traditions, anything which might contradict the voice of authority, is suspect. An independent mind  is the worst danger of all, but twelve years spent in a school chair (and now in front of a computer terminal or television, etc.), will convert the most crowded inner life into a virtually blank slate.

From the same book, here’s a quote from William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906 from his book The Philosophy of Education, 1906:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual….

The great purpose of school [self-alienation] can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places…. It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.

Harris is far from a lone radical in the history of public education in America. The model is a Hegelian one from Prussia, used by American industrialists like J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie and communists and socialists like Karl Marx alike. Thus, education isn’t actually a political issue, but an instrument wielded by those in power regardless of their political affiliations. All the other social issues we wrangle with – marriage, sexuality, abortion, women’s rights, religious discourse in the public square, gun control, the nature and meaning of life, etc. – are indoctrinated into our culture and society through the public school system. We learn what we are wanted to learn – nothing more, nothing less.