Current Issues in Education – Part 2
In our continuing series of articles about maintaining our freedom, CHN and NHELD bring you yet another “alternative” form of education about which to be aware. During the pandemic, many parents became much more aware of exactly what kind of instruction their children were receiving within the public school system, when the instruction was conducted remotely, zooming into the homes of those parents.
Many, being appalled at what they saw, searched for a new option. Some chose homeschooling, which actually is NOT an “option”, but actually is the statutory duty of parents to instruct their own children. They undertook their obligation to instruct their children at home, using any of a very wide variety of curricula or individualized instructional materials and methods.
Others tried to replicate the public school on their own, gathering with a few friends, engaging an adult to be “the teacher” of a very small group of children. They first called those gatherings “pandemic pods”, and that morphed into the term, “micro schools”. In reality, under the state statutes, these entities actually were very small private schools.
Private schools are subject to several state statutes. Private schools, regardless of their size and composition, among other things, are required to take and report attendance of the children to the state; to report students as truant if students have a certain defined number of unexcused absences; and to require students to be fully vaccinated. While private schools, of all sizes, are allowed to be established, all are regulated to a certain extent by the state.
Furthermore, if those private schools accept federal or state funds or benefits of any kind, by accepting those funds or benefits, they voluntarily agree to the regulatory conditions that are placed on acceptance of those funds or benefits. In other words, parents can escape the thoroughly regulated public schools, but if they escape to enroll or join a private school, the parents are not escaping government regulation, albeit perhaps of a lesser kind.
The issue for all parents engaged in this search, however, is to be fully aware of all of the not so obvious ways that any of the many educational choices out there are government regulated. The key is to not be duped into thinking parents have freedom, when they do not. And so, the parental search for alternate ways of educating their children in freedom continued.
More to come.