Freedom Lost
The path from educational freedom to educational bondage has been traveled before. See the evidence of the footprints left by those who have gone before. Learn from those who have lost the freedom that we currently possess.
“Vouchers: School Choice Trap,” by Alex Newman appears here, but the original article was written for the New American, Vol. 39, No. 07 on 4/10/23. It succinctly describes the progression from school choice funding of private and homeschools to the complete control of all homeschools.
“The money should follow the child,” they said in the early 1990s. That way, they claimed, parents will have “school choice.” “Fund students, not systems,” went the common refrain. This will introduce more “competition” in the quasi-monopoly education sector, they quipped. And further, we were assured that parents would retain the right to choose the education that best aligned with their priorities.
It all sounded so great that parties from across the political spectrum agreed to give it a try. Even conservative-leaning American think tanks such as Heritage were impressed, trumpeting the policy as a model. But then, in an instant, all genuine choice was abolished with one “education reform” law fewer than two decades after “school choice” was approved.
Suddenly, private schools taking public money were ordered to teach the radical government curriculum, including gender-bending extremism. All had to participate in national testing, too, ensuring that all schools taught what the government wanted taught. With public money there must be “accountability,” they said.
Perhaps even more troubling, supposedly Christian private schools were ordered to stop all Bible reading and prayer during school hours. In the same legislation, homeschooling was banned. Homeschoolers were forced to flee the nation, with armed police grabbing some children, such as Domenic Johansson, as families desperately tried to escape “school choice” to freer nations.
Thankfully, this all happened in Sweden, not America. It began in 1992 with the passage of universal “school choice,” and ended two decades later with a comprehensive education reform law that, while preserving the tax funding for private schools, basically nationalized the entire system and ended all meaningful choice to ensure “accountability” and to protect what the United Nations and the Swedish government describe as the “human right” to a government-approved “education.”
A similar tragedy occurred in Australia. The late attorney Chris Klicka, who successfully represented thousands of families in his role as senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association, explained in a 2001 piece for Practical Homeschooling Magazine that over 10 years, private and Christian schools took more and more tax funding. “The regulations gradually increased until the difference between public schools and private schools was non-existent,” he said.
The same thing happened in South Africa, when the “National Education Act” officially transformed all publicly funded private schools into government schools, Klicka warned. And this writer has documented how public funding of private schools — Catholic and Protestant — across Canada has resulted in all sorts of abuses, including mandatory LGBT indoctrination of all children.”
“School Choice: Parable of Two Roads,” written by Israel Wayne, appeared here on 4/27/22.
This example highlights that regulation always comes with state funding, and that, while the compromise of taking government money now may not affect our ability to homeschool our own children in the short term, it will very likely impact their ability to homeschool our grandchildren.
While the consequences may not be immediate, we can be certain that the government always controls what it pays for. Once the money leaves your wallet through taxation, it ceases to be “your money.” This is true in every society. In Alberta, Canada, private schools – and many homeschoolers who were affiliated with them – received government money annually through a voucher program. This went on for twenty years with seemingly no strings attached, until the government finally dictated a requirement that all schools that received government money must teach an LGBTQ-affirming curriculum. This mandate included homeschools, and ignored the right of families to teach their faith and values in their own homes.
SAY NO TO PUBLIC FUNDING OF PRIVATE AND HOMESCHOOLS!