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Over at Real Clear Education, Homeschool Advocates to Betsy DeVos: We ‘Want to Be Left Alone by Federal Government’

The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) are pretty clear that when the government funds something, it also attaches the strings. On a positive note, "Common Core and other federal overreach in public education has driven more families to choose homeschooling.” The crux of the article is as follows.

In February, Iowa Rep. Steve King created a firestorm when he introduced H.R. 610, the Choices in Education Act of 2017, a bill that Estrada asserted “would be a slippery slope toward more federal involvement and control in homeschooling.”

Estrada explained the bill would essentially create a “federal right to homeschool”:

While this sounds good, HSLDA has fought — successfully—for decades to make sure that there is no “federal right to homeschool” because what could be created by a favorable Congress could be regulated by a future, hostile Congress. It is far better (and far more constitutionally sound) for education decisions—and homeschool freedom—to be protected at the state level. We ask our friends at the federal level to simply leave homeschooling families alone. [bold emphasis added]

While this may be self-evident to the more astute reader, seeing it stated so clearly and forthrightly makes it readily available to many who might read it and go: Hmm. That's a good point.

Many here are aware of lassie-faire with regard to economics transmitting the message of 'leave us alone', or 'let us be' to government—it is good to see it flourishing in the smaller mom and pop gardens on the educational front as well.

Education is far to important to be relegated to the machinery of state.

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  • 6 months later...

The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early-to-mid 19th century, and used by African-American slaves to escape into free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause.

Mark Scott used to tout on his radio show that education was far too important to be left in the hands of government. On occasion, he would reference the comprachicos, or comprapequenos, as Ayn Rand wrote about in her essay originally published in The Objectivist Newsletter in 1970, and subsequently republished in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

An astute observation of hers was the correlation between comprachicos of old, and the comprachicos of new, stated as:

This is the ingenuity practiced by most of today's educators. They are the comprachicos of the mind.

Ingenuity, as used in the above quote, probably should have been placed in scare quotes. It is not ingenuity. Due to a stupefying powder, the disfiguring done of old, was done without the victim's knowledge. The disfiguring done of new, is done without anesthesia, and is a slow, drawn out process. Those who can protect themselves, do. Those who cannot are irretrievably deprived of themselves in such a way as they are unable to detect (this, perhaps, is a supposition on my behalf, and a disguised blessing on their behalf).

Many African-American slaves resigned themselves to the lives they found themselves within. Others suspected that something was amiss. The history of the underground railroad sorted them out accordingly.

It is one thing to move a railroad underground. An underground railroad is what precipitated into this post. This appears to have come full circle. The alternative, as near as I can tell, would be nothing less than an infinite regress.

 

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