As an early leader in the home school movement in the 1970s, the power and "progress" of government education in America, with its attendant and inevitable pitfalls and dangers, captured my attention. As things now stand, regrettably, charter schools, even most private schools and many home schooling endeavors, in part due to the lack of availability of quality instructional materials, sound teaching methods, and regard for realities of human development, offer little advantage unless parents are unusually astute. Despite this reality, many people think “school choice” will be the panacea that opens the magic door to better education for America’s youth.
School choice has been a recognized danger for decades. Without question, the ubiquity of this re-emerging option, lauded, legislated and offering financial incentives to families as a “solution," should be of great concern to lovers of freedom.
To start, the offer of financial benefit alone is a suspect carrot. Parental choice for the upbringing and education of their children would be better chosen for sound spiritual, moral, social, intellectual, biblical, political, emotional, developmental and other more important reasons than getting "free" money (which doesn't exist). A careful critique of the justifications of this boon should reveal its true intent--including continuing the thinly disguised promotion of tenets of DEI, discrimination, and other "woke" agenda items which can be easily embedded in the allowable materials, methods, and other components of the educational options that are defined in school choice legislation and rules.
Second, of course, no matter how the financial benefit is provided, if part of legislation, it is going to be regulated in some manner by the government. This is emphatically NOT educational freedom. It is a trap to confuse "choice" with “freedom." Everyone knows government endorsed financial benefits OF ANY KIND never come without strings.
Third, legislation with the attendant rules and regulations, i.e. the State with all its police power, will inevitably provide the choices to be given. This limits and controls what will be legally acceptable. How do we think this is freedom? Could it be possible that most people have lost all sense of what "freedom" means and how important it is?
Fourth, it should alarm all freedom-loving Americans that people are again being seduced into accepting a government solution. If there is any area where government needs to be excluded, it is that of parents' right to "Train up a child in the way he should go..." (KJV, Proverbs 22:6) Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is education listed as a power of the state.
Fifth, the requirements for acceptance of the school choice benefits will entail a significant invasion of privacy. This will occur in the application process, the monitoring and data-collection required, financial exposure, and a plethora of other potential state requirements that cannot be avoided by participants. Just these possibilities should awaken some feelings of unease.
Are there any real options? One necessary action is for parents to keep their children out of the public school system, assuming responsibility for the total scope of this action and careful oversight of any use of outside public or private resources themselves. Second, funding for public education must be severely curtailed. And, of course, compulsory attendance laws, that were never designed to promote good education and healthy child development, should be eliminated. If necessary, they may be replaced with laws that target only those who are incompetent, dangerously irresponsible, unable to meet any special needs of their children or family, or otherwise present a clear physical danger to their children or society. The entire design of education and child care and welfare in this country must be re-examined and carefully restructured to balance freedom and safety.
Other institutions need to step up to the plate, including our churches, which have sadly failed us in so many ways by refusing to provide the moral leadership and courageous public speaking, information, and action that is essential to maintain the Judeo-Christian country envisioned by our founding fathers.
We are being led, like children following the Pied Piper, toward a panacea that does not exist, but will become another chain that binds us. May minds be opened and parents vigilant and not greedy, so that we avoid a conclusive and tragic error by championing and accepting school choice and government financial aid with the snares of confusing rhetoric and regulations.
Meg Johnson
M.A., M.Ed., MBA
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