Parental rights

You don't homeschool your children? Then why should you care about homeschooling rights? Matt Walsh answers,

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.

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.

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.

Thanks to April Kellman for telling me about this piece.

Do you think that ten percent figure is accurate? It seems outrageously high to me.