Authored by Alice Salles via The Libertarian Institute
& Mises.org,
Parents across America
were caught unprepared for the mass closure of government schools in 2020. Soon
after, however, many decided they and their children had had enough of the
status quo. Now at a crossroads, will they choose reform or repudiation?
The wave of ill-advised
school shutdowns last year compelled tens of thousands of parents to rethink
their children’s education. When the classroom was virtually forced into their
homes via Zoom, parents realized just how abysmal the curricula and tutelage
were. Statistics
on families fleeing to homeschooling must be worrying the education
establishment.
From 2012 to 2019, the homeschooling rate hovered around 3.3 percent
of K–12 US students. That figure rose to 5.4 percent in spring 2020. By the following fall, that figure
had more than doubled to 11.1 percent.
Among black families, the increase was particularly noteworthy
considering only
3.3 percent of black children were homeschooled in spring 2020 versus 16.1
percent in the fall.
While legacy media focused on cases of parents keeping their
kids home out of fear of covid, longtime critics of the public school system
argued that the pandemic actually helped to
expose parents to the abuses and shortcomings that have long plagued public
education.
Some chose homeschooling, but
many other parents took to school board meetings, facing the beast head-on and
ripping apart the deceptive social engineering with the public comment
microphone. All the glory, glitz, and glam has so far gone to the latter group.
They grew a decentralized
movement with immediate political consequences not only in Virginia’s
gubernatorial election but also in school
board races across the country earlier this month.
Axios, the popular DC-based news outlet run by former Politico
journalists, recently reported on the growth of the 1776 Project,
a new political action committee focused on reforming public school systems at
the local level. "My PAC is campaigning on behalf of everyday moms and
dads who want to have better access to their children’s
education," the PAC’s founder Ryan Girdusky told Axios.
The 1776 Project won three-fourths of its fifty-eight races
across seven states, proving the populist Right’s focus on the culture wars to
be smart politicking. Now Republicans in Congress are pushing a "parents bill of rights" ahead of their
2022 primary elections. Included are so-called rights to know what’s taught at
school, the right to be heard, and the right to transparent school budgets and
spending.
"This list of rights will make clear to parents what their
rights are and clear to schools what their duties to parents are," their flier states. The reform position focuses
on schools’ duty to parents and ipso facto their children. But what of the
duties parents owe to their children?
What if, instead of pointing their collective finger at the
school boards, parents looked in the mirror? What if they asked themselves how
or why they feel entitled to have a place to drop their kids off for thirteen
years of government brainwashing?
Any taxpayer has a perfect reason to object to school mask
mandates or the teaching of racist and queer ideologies. Parents must start
thinking more deeply about the situation, though.
Certainly for some, running for school board positions is their
best shot at helping to provide their children and their neighbors’ children
with better education. The problem is that in too many places, there’s an absolute
crisis in education that can’t wait any longer for reform, no matter how severe.
Every family and community ultimately applies the Catholic
principle of subsidiarity, the notion that the best way to organize society is for each action
or decision to be taken at the smallest scale necessary, in
assessing what must be done about things such as education.
By simply refusing to accept what federal or state authorities
peddled throughout 2020, parents rightfully accepted more responsibility,
clearly demonstrating that when things get personal, people will do what it takes to take back
control.
Whatever step in that direction is taken, the child is better
off. In his great essay "Education: Free and Compulsory," Murray
Rothbard argued that public school and compulsory schooling laws tend to
victimize the child: "The effect of the State’s compulsory schooling laws
is not only to repress the growth of specialized partly individualized private
schools for the needs of various types of children. It also prevents the
education of the child by the people who, in many respects, are best
qualified—his parents."
Unfortunately, far too few parents think of themselves as
qualified, much less the best qualified educators of their children. They are
easily led to believe simple reforms will "fix the system" they grew
up dependent upon as children themselves.
"We always hear, Oh it’s broken. It’s not broken. It’s
doing exactly what it was designed to do," Katie Phipps Hague told Mises
Institute supporters at the latest summit in Florida last month.
Hague shared her experience homeschooling her seven kids and
encouraged other parents to give it a try, essentially asking, What have you
got to lose?
I know this sounds like I’m a crazy
person, but if you pulled your children out of school... for a whole year, then
include them in everything that you do in all of your trips and all of your
conversations,
put them around the intelligent, capable people that you all have in your
circles and let them become comfortable around those people, you’d probably do
better for them than maybe anything else you could ever do.
It’s wonderful that the populist movement on the right is
targeting the educational bureaucracy, one of the great roots of societal
decay. There is a lot of potential for good in populism, but not if it sets its
sights on mere reforms. A much brighter future lies in a libertarian populism
where parents free themselves from these decrepit statist systems altogether
and grow alternative institutions.
Parents must be responsible for their children’s education
precisely so that children learn to be autonomous. Autonomous people don’t
support tyrannical policies, so the sooner parents embrace their own power, the
sooner their children will be able to unleash their own.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/what-homeschooling-surge-means-our-future
