Apparently father (and mother) does NOT know best...
This nice, unbiased article popped up in the Lansing State Journal, written by columnist John Schneider regarding a horror he discovered, the dirty secret that Michigan has long sought to hide: parents of children are not being properly supervised by the state in the raising of their own children! Where is the outrage!? How dare they raise their own children as they see fit!? From this insightful piece of...of...journalism...
PERRY - When the girl got yanked from Perry Middle School for home-schooling, teacher Nancy Head might have shrugged it off as one less mind to feed.
But after 35 years as a teacher, Head has an overdeveloped sense of what's good for kids - and what's not good.
She had a bad feeling about this one, beginning with her doubts that the parents of the girl were capable of providing academic training to their daughter. Head offered me convincing evidence to support those doubts, but asked, for the sake of the family's privacy, that I not reveal the specifics.
What is interesting here is the deafening silence regarding the "facts" surrounding the situation. All we know is that a girl is going to be homeschooled by her parents (or "yanked" from the public school according to Mr. Schneider) and the teacher, who apparently knows better than the parents what is "good" or "not good" for this child, didn't approve. Pretty convenient that we take must take on faith Mr. Schenider's assessment that this situation was "bad" for the kid, and that in the eyes of Ms. Head the parents were unqualified to teach their own child (no word in the article as to what Ms. Head's qualifications are...) Apparently the couple of hours a day that Ms. Head spends with this child counts for more than parental rights, and of course more than the fact that presumably these parents have raised their child from infancy and might just know her and her needs better than the eminently more qualified (we assume) Ms. Head.
Accountability? What accountability do public schools have? If a teacher flat out stinks, what recourse do parents have? Call and nag the principal?
I don't buy into the argument that society has a right to demand that children are raised as productive citizens, and that the only way to do that is to indoctrinate them in public schools. There are plenty of maladjusted people, total screw-ups who are products of the public school system and yet the average parent has virtually no say in how those kids are educated. The farce that is the school board system when compared to the weight of the entrenched, institutionalized education bureaucracy and the mighty teachers union leaves most parents with no voice in the education of their children. Is it any wonder that Christian parents are increasingly leaving behind public schools in favor of educating our children at home, by those who care the most about them and know what is best for them?
One might be paranoid enough to assume that since many, if not most, parents homeschool at least partially for religious reasons, Mr. Schneider has some sort of bias against people of faith. Of course I can't offer any evidence or specifics about this, but then again total lack of evidence (or dare I say journalistic oversight!) doesn't seem to bother Mr. Schenider.
(Christopher Klicka, Home School Legal Defense Association Senior Counsel also responded more formally to Mr. Schenider in a far more gracious manner than I have but being smarmy works for me...)
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