Abridging Freedom of Education

We often speak of a slippery slope when referring to a thing that begins small and snowballs into something very bad; an idea that may have been neutral or even seemed good at the time starts society down a path leading us to a place where we had never intended on going.

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There have been many slippery slopes through the history of Mankind. For example, the need for labor in the New World lead to the invention of indentured servitude, whereby a willing person booked passage on a ship to America and his or her passage was paid by a would-be employer, provided the immigrant agreed to work for the employer for a specified period of time. This sounded like a good idea, but it was a slippery slope; voluntary contracts sometimes became inordinately long, and sometimes they weren't so voluntary as ship captains wanted their cargo holds full. Africans would sometimes be taken, forced to immigrate against their will so the ship captains could make a profit. Since these people were being forced into the labor contracts anyway, and since they were less than eager employees, the contracts grew longer until they became contracts in perpetuity, and then the British colonies had slavery. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Eugenics was another such example; many people in America were sold on the idea of using selective breeding to "weed out bad essence" from the human race. The hope was to restrict reproduction by people who suffered from inherited or chronic illnesses, from the mentally deficient or insane. Many who believed in Eugenics had good intentions (we all know what is paved withthose), but they were ultimately sticking their noses where they didn't belong, granting the state and medical science powers to which they had no right. Eugenics metastasized into horrible abuses including forced sterilization of people because of illness (epilepsy was one of their most hated, and the Eugenicistswrongly believed it was caused by "weakness") or for racial or cultural purposes. Virginia, for example, set up an elaborate racial classification system in which a person was declared NEGRO if he had but one percent African ancestry, and the person so declared suffered a terrible fate, unable to use facilities reserved for whites, unable to find employment, unable to attend good schools or universities. This became a weapon in the hands of an enemy-if a neighbor became angry at you and he could cast aspersions on your "whiteness" you could find yourself classified as Negro and be sentenced to a life as a bottom-class citizen. American Eugenics was exported to Germany in the 1920's, and lead to the Thousand Year Reich and Auschwitz. All that because some people felt they had the right to interfere with their neighbors. Often there is a noble purpose that becomes a nightmare. For example, the McMartin Preschool case is a stellar example. In the McMartin case, do-goodersand publicity seekers turned what was intended to be an effort to protect children into a circus, leading the kids to claim sexual abuse where none existed. The lives of the owners of the preschool, and a number of employees, were ruined because psychologists and busybodies wanted to be a part of something big, and they pushed the children to find "repressed memories" which were not memories at all but notions planted in their heads by the investigators. There were no crimes at McMartin except those committed by the good guys. That is why the Founding Fathers placed in the Constitution of these United States the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The Founders, in their wisdom, understood that government is intended to be the servant and not the master, and that people look after themselves better than does the collective. That's not to say that there is no interest of the collective in matters of individuals, particularly where children and the public safety are concerned. Still, those matters are better left to the individual, to the family, to the local community first. That is why a recent divorce case in Raleigh-Durham is so disturbing; a judge ordered the children of Vanessa Mills be forced to attend public school because their mother does not believe in Darwinian Evolution. According to the report from WRAL.com:

"Raleigh, N.C. A judge in Wake County said three Raleigh children need to switch from home school to public school. Judge Ned Mangum is presiding over divorce proceeding of the children's parents, Thomas and Venessa Mills." "Venessa Mills was in the fourth year of home schooling her children who are 10, 11 and 12 years old. They have tested two years above their grade levels" "We have math, reading; we have grammar, science, music,--Venessa Mills said." "Thomas Mills (the children's father) also said he was "concerned about the children's religious-based science curriculum" and that he wants "the children to be exposed to mainstream science, even if they eventually choose to believe creationism over evolution." In an oral ruling, Mangum said the children should go to public school."

Now, such cases tend to be tricky, especially since it was the father's complaint that his children were being taught Creationism by their home-schooling mother, and the father does have some say in the matter. Still, this is disturbing because the father's argument is bogus; the children have to be tested on the subject matter they study and so they ARE being exposed to mainstream science. They are being given an additional perspective, obviously, but I assume North Carolina requires mastery of the material before the children can move on, and that material will undoubtedly require that these children be familiar with Darwinism. Even Timothy Sandefur of the notoriously pro-atheist and Darwinist site The Panda's Thumb was disturbed. "Putting that aside, this is not an easy question to call. Of course, the prospect of a judge basing a custody decision solely on this issue is very troubling-there are far more relevant factors in a custody case than whether a child is receiving adequate science instruction. And a parent has a right to direct the religious upbringing of a child, including the right to teach a child ludicrous religious dogma instead of science. That's a sad thing, but people often think other people's exercise of freedom is a waste. Certainly history includes many atrocious cases in which atheist parents have lost their children because judges thought it was better for the child to be taught religion." "Still, the father also has a right to educate his children, and if he thinks the children are not being instructed adequately, he has a legitimate complaint. There are good reasons to be concerned about the quality of education in home schooling environments (although there are certainly many very high quality home schoolers). In a case like this, it is probably best to ensure that although the mother is free to teach her children her religious beliefs, the father is also free to teach real science to kids if he chooses. But, again, we don't know all the facts, or even the other side of the story." "I think everyone can at least agree that child custody cases are extremely complicated matters-which cannot be accurately described in a brief news story, and obviously should not be decided on the basis of evolution or creationism education alone-and that except in cases of actual abuse, minor children should not be taken from parents because of the religious instruction that parents are giving their kids. The problem is, when does religious instruction become abuse? That line can often be blurry-but if it's just a dispute over evolution and creationism, it's clearly not abuse." (Thanks to Nemo at Darwiniana.com) I find myself in a rare instance of agreement with Mr. Sandefur; teaching Creationism is NOT child abuse, and you have a right to educate your child as you see fit. Yet this right has been denied us to the point where Americans hardly question the usurpation; John Dewey was a leftist radical who founded public education, something that has become tool to deny parents authority over their own children's minds, and we are all forced to pay for this system whether we use it or not. I, for example, have never attended a public school, and have never had anyone in my charge attend one, either, yet I have to pay property taxes on two houses I own to support failing schools in two different communities. Radicals tend to go into education, by the way; just look at former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, who teaches at a university in Chicago also. Think the AnnenbergChallenge. How about Obama's newly funded National Service Plan in which kids will be REQUIRED to work as volunteers under threat of penalty; sounds a bit like the Hitler Youth, doesn't it? At any rate, Americans have lost control of what their children are taught. This goes back at least to the Scopes Monkey Trial in which a volunteer for the ACLU violated a Kentucky law barring the teaching of Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Evolution was then still fairly weak as theories went, although it had gained considerable traction because of the discovery of Piltdown Man (a discovery that proved to be a hoax), and it was hardly settled science at that time. The fundamental argument was not even over Creationism versus Evolution (as it has been famously portrayed by the propaganda play Inherit the Wind) but rather was an argument over the right of the people of Kentucky to decide what their children are to be taught. This was happening all over the country, as Darwinian theory had spawned Social Darwinism and Eugenics, and the Christian Fundamentalist movement started as a reaction to the cold-blooded nature of American Eugenics. The good people of Kentucky and elsewhere wanted to stop the rising tide that would eventually give us Hitler's ovens, and they believed (fairly or unfairly) that Darwinian theory was the root of the problem. They won-along with William Jennings Bryan-but Mr. Scopes was forced to pay only a symbolic fine, and the media spinmeister H.L. Menken and his associates twisted the defeat into a rousing victory. After Scopes the right of parents to choose what their children learned became increasingly circumscribed. This educational briss has given us the NEA and the worthless system we now have in place, a system where education means watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth while learning to actually speak and write, to understand history and science, geography and math, have been scorned as the leftovers from "dead white men". We now have children who cannot write a simple sentence, who think that the first president was Barack Obama, who believe that Iraq is somewhere in the Midwest. In short, we have created a generation of ignoramuses. Ignoramuses are easily swayed. That is why the home schooling movement began in the first place; parents were sick of wasting their children's minds and morals in institutional hell-holes. They were sick of their children being taught cultural and moral relativism, of the ride of Humanistic philosophy, of the dismantling of good values for the sake of tolerance. But the Left is insatiable, and the domain of home schooling cannot be tolerated for long-especially since home schoolers have traditionally outperformed their more traditionally educated peers by a considerable margin. Now, I know this case may not mean the end of the right of parents to choose (interesting how the Left offers no choice in anything except when a woman wants to plunge an icepick into her unborn baby's brain) but it is the first step down that slippery slope. Let's hope that we don't slide to the bottom; the Gulag awaits.