Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
The above quotation is one of many guarantees nation-states have made to respect parental rights. The Berlin Declaration, presented and signed at the 2012 Global Home Education Conference, quotes it and several other human rights declarations, all with nearly identical guarantees.
Despite these guarantees, many public officials have seen fit - as they often do - to violate the rights of their citizens. To understand the rationale of public officials, one need only watch this heated exchange between parents and Dominic Cardy, Progressive Conservative Party member and Minister of Education for New Brunswick, Canada.
Notice that Cardy responded to one parent's concerns about vaccine mandates on children by saying, "They're our province's children." Minister Cardy is not alone in this sentiment. Terry McAuliffe, Democratic Party Governor of Virginia 2014-2018, stated in a 2021 election debate, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach," to the great displeasure of voters and The Parental Rights Foundation.
Terry McAuliffe: "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." pic.twitter.com/7S15pTv1gY
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 28, 2021
With these guarantees and shocking statements in mind, we will embark on an overview of parent-led education movements, the State's past and present relationship with education, and State abuses of children and parents around the world. As we will see in the latter section, the opinions on education expressed by Minister Cardy and former Governor McAuliffe are common-place in public policy and are often enshrined in law.
Education and the Home
Home education is the oldest form of education. According to the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), it was the most common form of education in the United States until the beginning of the 1900s. By the 1970s, home education had been all but eradicated in the U.S. Despite this, it is currently experiencing a resurgence, as approximately 6-7% of U.S. children are home schooled.
While some alarmists have argued that allowing homeschooling without strict regulation would lead to abuse, this review by Dr. Brain D. Ray of NHERI found no correlation between regulation and abuse in home-educated children. This review by the same researcher found that rates of abuse in secular private schools and home schools were lower than those in private catholic schools and public schools.
Concerns about academic achievement are just as baseless. This study in The Home School Researcher showed that GPAs at the University of Florida were higher among home-educated children by a statistically significant margin. Another systematic review by Dr. Brian D. Ray found that 78% (11 out of 14) peer-reviewed studies showed, "a definite positive effect on achievement for home-schooled students."
Despite their children scoring higher on standardized tests, home-educating parents only spend, on average, $600 per year on education. By contrast, public schools in the U.S. spend an annual average of $14,243 per pupil enrolled, according to the 2021 report from the National Educational Association.
While Dr. Ray cautions that a causal relationship between home education and the factors above has not been established, the present research indicates positive rather than negative outcomes are associated with home-education.
School Choice for All
While home education has better outcomes and far less waste for the taxpayer, not everyone can quit their job and teach their kids full-time. For this reason, the school choice movement has begun demanding that private schools be made more accessible to everyone, not just the upper economic strata.
Types of School Choice Programs
School choice programs come in four basic varieties, with adjustments to fit each locality they are implemented in. These four types of school choice programs include voucher programs, educational savings account programs, scholarship tax credits, and individual tuition tax credits.
Vouchers
With a voucher program, students get tax-funded scholarships for private schools. To qualify for voucher programs, students typically need to be within a certain threshold of the poverty line, have a need for special accommodations, or be currently enrolled in a school that is under-performing. Some voucher programs, however, are universal and place no eligibility requirements on students. There are currently 23 voucher programs in the United States.
Educational Savings Accounts
Educational Savings Account (ESA) programs, of which there are six in the U.S., place the tax money that would otherwise go to state-schools in an account which can be used by parents to pay tuition, buy textbooks, pay for tutors, and use for other approved expenses (although, as we have seen previously, it is not parents who are typically responsible for wasting education money.) There are six ESA programs in the U.S. at the moment.
Scholarship Tax Credits
Scholarship tax credits create a secondary pool of funds from which parents can draw. Scholarship tax credit programs are granted to corporations and wealthy individuals who make donations to scholarship programs. There are 21 scholarship tax credit programs in the U.S.
Individual Tuition Tax Credits
Individual tuition tax credits are tax credits given to parents after enrolling their children in a private school. In order for the tax credit to constitute a school choice policy, it must be an adequate portion of the tuition cost (i.e. approximately $3,000-$6,000). At the moment, there are only two individual tuition tax credits of sufficient size in the U.S.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, while school choice programs are more than a century old in the United States, they gained popularity with the release of Milton Friedman's 1955 work, The Role of Government in Education. In this work, Friedman advocates school choice as a means of introducing competitive selection pressures on schools without sacrificing affordability.
Not only is the popularity of school choice programs on the rise, the research seems to indicate it's the best way forward for public education. In a 2012 article in Education Week, nine scholars and analysts of education policy gave a summary of the research on voucher programs, stating:
Among voucher programs, random-assignment studies generally find modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both. Achievement gains are typically small in each year, but cumulative over time. Graduation rates have been studied less often, but the available evidence indicates a substantial positive impact.
A more recent review of the research from The American Federation for Children (AFC) found that Florida's private K-12 program has better outcomes since adopting school choice, and costs only 55% per-pupil compared to the public system.
Corey DeAngelis, National Director of Research at AFC and Executive Director at The Educational Freedom Institute, has been leading the charge in the U.S. fight for school choice. Even while he's not running those institutions, doing research, or conducting interviews on school choice, he spends his time on Twitter advocating for it and calling out the hypocrisy of anti-school choice politicians who send their own kids to private schools.
In fact, there are so many instances of this, the Educational Freedom Institute has a map that displays all these cases of political hypocrisy. Taking a brief look at the map, it seems we've stumbled upon our old friend Terry McAuliffe! How ironic that a man whose children went to private schools at taxpayer expense doesn't think children should go to private schools at taxpayer expense!
Microschools
Microschools are reduced-cost private schools that represent a high-tech return to the classic schoolhouse model of education that was common in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Microschools are linked together through a Microschool Network. Microschool networks, by using modern communication technology, are able to share resources with all the schools in their network so as to provide all the benefits of a centralized system without all the bureaucratic waste and inefficiency the reader is no doubt familiar with from State-oriented schools.
As State Policy Network explains, microschools and their networks are highly varied, with student bodies ranging from 5 to 150 students per school. The general features include mixed-age groups, individualized learning strategies, guidance rather than instruction-based learning, and focus on hands-on activities.
One of the largest microschool networks in the United States, Acton Academy, operates over 180 such schools. Spanning across borders, from the U.S. and Canada to Guatemala, Acton uses an innovative model based on new technology and old wisdom.
Students at Acton Academy schools typically start the day by learning core math and language skills on individually paced online-platforms. Later in the day, they engage in cooperative and competitive activities related to science, entrepreneurship, and other important fields. Towards the end of the day, the pupils engage in Socratic-type discussions and projects with mentor teams.
The way discipline is approached at Acton schools is especially exciting. Rather than use the typical, imposing system of arbitrary and centralized rule making, contracts are made between the school and the student. This is much more intuitive for children in an Anglo-American society, since the view of the State in our societies is much more contractarian than the Germanic societies our public schools are inspired by.
Schooling and the State
The state is an independent, centralized socio-political organization [...] legitimized by an at least partly shared ideology…
Compulsory Education and The Prussian System
The Prussian Education System was a 19th century system of schooling closely entangled with the State, making it a perfect primer for this section. Its basic outline was first decreed by Frederick the Great and authored by Johann Julius Hecker in 1763. The system consisted mainly of the following features:
- Eight years of primary education
- Reading and Writing skills
- Moral and religious instruction
- Music instruction
- Strict discipline and principles of duty
While growth of the system in the beginning was modest, in October of 1807, the 4th coalition war proved to be a humiliating defeat for the Prussian military at the hands of Napoleon's armies. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, one of the founding philosophers of German Idealism, was forced from his home by the war. In a similar manner to other German reformers of the time, Fichte aimed to save the German nation by reforming the school system even further.
On the other hand, the new education must
consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys
freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate...
In December of 1807, just two months after the Prussian defeat, Fichte delivered his treatise on education in the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and then published them in Addresses to the German Nation in April of 1808. In his view, "self-seeking," was bound to destroy itself, and so the solution was to replace the free will and individuality of pupils with national identity and the will of school masters. The rationale behind this was that only the few men who arrive at morality through God should be allowed their will, and the rest should be instructed in this will rather than be corrupted by their own free will.
Fichte's ideas were highly influential in German culture, and his work went on to influence Willhelm von Humboldt, who became head of the directorate of education the following year. In the period between 1809-1810, Humboldt radically reformed the Prussian education system by introducing national curriculum, state-certification of teachers, tax-funding for all primary and secondary schools, and the University of Berlin.
By the 1830s, the Prussian system had become compulsory for all students, with secondary school being reserved for the higher classes. Throughout the rest of the 19th century, compulsory mass education was adopted all over the European continent, often integrating Prussian elements, and eventually becoming an essential feature of the modern State and state-formation.
The State's Attacks on Parent-led Education
Economist James Buchanan, in his public choice theory, theorized that public officials will prioritize their own good over the public good when the two come into conflict. Since the State requires that at least parts of its ideology are shared by its citizens, and the employment of its officials is sometimes threatened by superior educational models, these officials will go to great lengths to stifle parent-led education.
Totalitarian nations with rigid ideologies are especially intolerant of parent-led education. For example, Germany's current ban on homeschooling is a 1938 policy from the Nazi-era. Other examples include the U.S.S.R. and the South African apartheid government, both of which implemented state-monopolies on education.
South Africa lifted the ban on home-education in 1996, and the estimated number of home-educated children in South Africa is now 120,000. However, in this Daily Maverick article, Anelle Burger - chairperson of Cape Home Educators - raised concerns about new legislative attacks on home education that threaten to revert their progress. The Basic Education Law Amendments seek to expand the State's regulatory powers over home-education. The amendments would also force parents to request permission from the head of the provincial education department - that is, the official with the most to lose - before home-educating their children.
A similar situation occurred this week in the United Kingdom, the HSLDA reported. While the number of home-educated students grew 34% from the 2019-2020 academic year, now 115,542 students, parents were hit by a new ruling that allows officials to request more information from parents about their children's school work. One parent in the above article was even asked to supply examples of her child's work. Recall that research quoted in our first section demonstrated that such regulation does not correlate with abuse, nor with academic achievement.
The State's insistence on imposing its ideology is not limited to home-educating parents. In Ireland, over 90% of schools are controlled by the Catholic Church, according to Teach Don't Preach, a campaign by Atheist Ireland. Teach Don't Preach has been fighting for over a decade against compulsory religious instruction. In addition to having to fight legal battles and supply opt-out forms to atheist parents, they also have the great pleasure of reading and responding to self-contradictory, bureaucratic nonsense.
Abuse Handling
Ireland and other religious states aside, the present State monopoly - or near-monopoly - on education is not unlike the Catholic Church's of the past in two important ways. Firstly, being a monopoly with involuntary funding, it and its employees are immune to nearly all external selection pressures. Secondly, being compulsory for children to attend in many jurisdictions, it is a target-rich environment for child abusers, and is therefore rich with child abusers.
Combined, these two factors produce an environment where child-abusers can congregate with little fear of repercussions. For example, an inquiry into sexual abuse cases in the Tasmanian school system found that the school's reputation and finances took priority over the safety of children - even after objections from teachers and principals - The Examiner reported last November.
In Ontario, Canada, as the Toronto Star reported, there were at least 27 cases of abuse or misconduct by teachers between 2012 and 2017 in which - after the allegations were confirmed - the teachers had been transferred. In nine of those cases, the teachers had re-offended before their case was brought before the Ontario Teacher's College. In the aforementioned article, one retired principal even comments, “You have these predators that are in the school system, and everybody wants to give them a chance, but nobody says ‘ok, that’s enough.’”
One must wonder, if these staff-members were accountable to parents, how many chances would they get?
Conclusion
As seen above, there have been many broken promises regarding parental rights, educational quality, and student safety. Further, a monopoly or near-monopoly model by the State is ill-suited to education due to its ulterior motives and lack of significant external selection mechanisms. When so many high quality alternatives to a State institution exist, as is the case in education, it is no mystery why so many have opted for the alternatives.
The future of our nations, our markets, our planet, and most importantly our children rests on the educational models we choose today. In those cases where the choice is taken from us, it must be fought for if we wish to secure for ourselves and our posterity a future that is better than the present.