Homeschooling Mantras: Part 3 of 5

Overstatement #2:  Government Has No Business in Education

Many home educators resent having to pay taxes for the education of other children.  I wonder if these homeschooling parents have ever considered the resentment of single adults paying taxes for the education of children that were not their own.  What about elderly or childless couples?  And, what about the couple who has only one child, paying for their neighbors 2.3 children, or the family of eight children taking their unfair share of the tax dollars for themselves?

The purpose of public education is not to offer students opportunity for success nor parents a financing option for educating their children.  Public education exists to meet the needs of the civilization, the common good, the community at large.  A strange perversion of individualism, tainted by relativistic ethics has overtaken our culture.  As a result everyone operates within society from a position of “what’s in it for me?”  But public education isn’t about you, it is about the community. 

The idea is very simple.  If all children within a society are given an equal opportunity to learn, the society will suffer less crime and enjoy greater economic output, greater progress, cultural cohesion and most importantly, the ability to competently sustain a democratic republic.  For about a century public schools in America did just that.  Then, the cultural degradation that slowly resulted from a combination of bad and erroneous ideas from folks like Darwin, Freud and Marx and tumultuous 20^th century events such as devastating war, worldwide depression and the spread of communism eroded our collective perspective on truth, morality and personhood.  Naturally, these influences negatively impacted educational content and behavior.

I do not object to funding the education of “other peoples’” children, but funding the poor and in some ways harmful education of “other peoples’” children.  I mind paying taxes for the compulsory promulgation of propaganda, pseudo-science, and materialism. I don’t mind paying taxes so that future politicians, teachers, business leaders and neighbors can make informed political decisions and behave with a certain amount of civility and responsibility.  I don’t mind paying taxes so that future adults will contribute significantly to the economic growth of my community and nation.  None of us should.  To live in common with other individuals, sharing space, resources and culture, we must agree to shoulder some collective burdens. 

Rather than fight exclusively for the benefits of our own children, we would do well to fight for the educational benefits of all children, even as we withdraw our own children from the system.  Our first responsibility is to our families, but that does not mean we have no responsibility to the community at large.  Government schools do make sense in a democratic republic – the citizenry is the government, and insofar as the citizenry involves itself in civic affairs it will have an impact on government schools.  Frankly, we have more to fear from our culture than our government, history notwithstanding.

There are only 2.3 million homeschooling children in the United States out of nearly 80 million in traditional school settings.  Those remaining 78 million children will comprise the community in which our adult children live.  We have a stake in everyone’s future.