My friend, Leonard Henderson, founder of The American Family Rights Association (AFRA) has a page about homeschooling on the site. It used to be called 'Why The Henderson Family Homeschools' but now the name is 'If you CARE, you Homeschool'.

His homeschooling philosophy is similar to mine so I love looking at the many links he's researched and offered on his homeschool page. Leonard is a great internet researcher extraordinaire!

Just now I opened one that will be printed out to give to the county and administrative law judge during my upcoming hearing on the legitimacy of private school homeschooling in California. The article is What's Behind Home Schooling.

Here's what I like about the article:

"At the heart of this fight over home schooling is a fundamental difference between parents and the public school establishment on the questions of parental rights and religious liberty."

That's probably the most important reason why I'm homeschooling. I also homeschool for the safety of my children, to give them individual attention, to keep them from the public school rigidity that characterizes system education, and to let them follow their own interests. Well, that's a start. There's other reasons but let's get back to the article.

"But the union officials and career bureaucrats who control the public education establishment seem to think that the state - not parents - is primarily responsible for the raising of children and for instilling in them the beliefs it deems most important. Parental involvement is too often viewed as "interfering" with the "professionals" who know best."

The special-ed school my daughter attended in first and second grades didn't win any brownie points from me for forbidding me to sit in on her classroom.

"The general view of progressivism, which peaked at the beginning of the 20th century, supported a vast expansion of state power and a complete devotion of the individual to the common enterprise of the state. Contrary to the thinking of America's founders, who had established clear lines between the public and private, and therefore strict limits on government, the progressives argued that government was, in principle, unlimited because it was based upon scientific expertise."

God help us.

"This argument of the progressives came from the German idealistic philosophy with which most progressive intellectuals had been educated. Karl Marx himself made a direct attack on home schooling, explaining that parental rights over the upbringing of children could not be allowed because parents exploit children. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx asks: 'Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.' He mocked 'the bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child.'"

So public schooling is communist, aka. socialist. Not surprising.

"Fortunately, the Court in the Wisconsin v. Yoder case upheld the "traditional interest of parents with respect to the religious upbringing of their children" — Justice Douglas' dissent notwithstanding. But views like those of Douglas and Mrs. Clinton only show that the troubling tenets of progressivism continue to find adherents, something home schooling parents know well as they fight to fend off the public education establishment."

My main defense of private-school homeschooling will be based on Wisconsin v. Yoder. I'll be posting my statement and briefs to the web as they're written, and will let you know the outcome of the hearing.

  ¶ 11:37 AM