In an op-ed published a day after our nation celebrated 248 years of independence, HSLDA President Jim Mason challenged citizens to resist a trend that seeks to shackle an institution of fundamental importance to millions of Americans—homeschooling.
He was responding to an editorial from Scientific American calling on the federal government to establish national standards for home education. The proposal echoes other recent attacks on homeschooling from the media, delivered in an apparent effort to goad lawmakers into enacting new restrictions on the flourishing movement.
“What these calls share,” Mason declares in the op-ed, “is a basic mistrust of parents, a disdain for liberty, and an ignorance of the private, civic institutions that have grown up organically around the freedom to homeschool since the late 1970s.”
Go Back to the Constitution
Scientific American editorial is wrongheaded from the start, Mason points out, as it ignores essential facts about how our government works, such as assuming a power to regulate home education. “There is no general federal power to regulate homeschooling,” Mason states.
What’s more, the array of different homeschool laws in different states and territories is not the result of flawed governance, but of a key feature of American democracy—the power citizens have to legislate based on the needs of their specific communities.
“Who better to decide Ohio’s homeschooling laws than the people of Ohio?” asks Mason.
The Pendulum Can Swing
The alternative is to allow legislators to tinker with our freedoms and characterize each newly established power of government oversight as “modest” or “reasonable.”
“But homeschoolers know that ‘modest’ proposals can end in long ordeals faced by ordinary families,” Mason writes. “Liberty is not always lost in one fell swoop; it is often eroded by small degrees, with those first ‘modest’ proposals as their harbingers.”
For a more detailed description of what’s at stake for homeschoolers, read the full article at National Review.