Robert Kunzman: The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child vs. the Parental Rights Movement
Today’s post is from Robert Kunzman, author of Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling. Kunzman spent ten years as a high school teacher, coach, and administrator and is currently an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Education. He is also the author of Grappling with the Good: Talking about Religion and Morality in Public Schools.
Quick—who are the only two nations who haven’t ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?
Somalia is one of them—no bonus points for that guess. Who else stands against the 193 nations who’ve ratified the treaty? None other than the United States of America. This may change under the Obama administration; U.N. ambassador Susan Rice recently proclaimed the situation a disgrace and indicated that U.S. ratification of the treaty was under active discussion.
But not if the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has their way. Calling the UNCRC “anti-family” and “anti-American,” they have urged their 80,000 members—as well as those who’ve joined ParentalRights.org, a “grassroots” organization founded by HSLDA—to voice their opposition. To further their cause, they have been a driving force in promoting a Parental Rights Amendment, which now has more than 110 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives.
Why does the most powerful and prominent homeschool advocacy organization in the world see the UNCRC as such a threat? Ultimately, it’s an argument about who should have a say in the raising and educating of children.
I’ve spent the past five years exploring the world of homeschooling from a variety of angles, traveling the country and visiting with families in their homes, observing their homeschooling practices and talking with them about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. I quickly discovered that the range of philosophies, methods, and outcomes is vast indeed. But one fundamental conviction among homeschool parents emerges again and again: the state has no business telling them how to raise or educate their children.
This conviction is especially strong among conservative Christian homeschoolers, who most observers agree constitute the largest subset of the likely two million homeschoolers in the United States (HSLDA describes itself as a Christian organization). Not infrequently, parents pointed to the biblical passage of Deuteronomy 6:6-9 when explaining to me their motivation to homeschool. The Message, a popular Bible paraphrase, puts it this way: “Write these commandments that I’ve given you today on your hearts. Get them inside of you and then get them inside your children. Talk about them wherever you are, sitting at home or walking in the street; talk about them from the time you get up in the morning to when you fall into bed at night.”
This orientation toward parenting and education helps explain why homeschool parents are particularly resistant toward any government role or authority in the education of their children. Good parents (whether homeschoolers or not) see education, broadly construed, as part of their job description: raising a child involves constant teaching, and the most important lessons in life generally occur outside of school walls. But most homeschoolers take this a step further. They don’t see any real distinction between this broader notion of education and formal schooling itself—which makes sense, if homeschooling is just woven into the fabric of everyday family life. And if homeschooling is seen as simply part of parenting, then it becomes easier to understand why many homeschool parents view government oversight of education as an unjustifiable intrusion into their sacred domain.
For conservative Christian homeschoolers, educating their children is a God-given right and responsibility, and one they can delegate only at great moral and spiritual peril. Like many in the broader homeschool population, conservative Christians see homeschooling as a twenty-four-hour-a-day, all-encompassing endeavor. For them, perhaps more explicitly than other homeschoolers, homeschooling is a shaping not only of intellect but—even more crucially—character. This means more than just moral choices of right and wrong; character is developed through the inculcation of an overarching Christian worldview that guides those moral choices. These parents share a fierce determination to instill Christian character in their children, a process that entails protecting them from the corrupting influences of broader society. To accomplish this, the family becomes the defensive bulwark and sanctuary wherein children are prepared for eventual engagement with the world.
Parental interests aren’t the only ones at stake in the educational process, of course. A democracy depends upon the cultivation of informed citizens who can deliberate respectfully about the best ways to live together. And while most parents naturally believe that their efforts are dedicated to what’s best for their children, in reality this isn’t always the case; as the UNCRC asserts, children have their own educational interests at stake as well. But in the context of homeschooling—the ultimate in educational privatization—how to define and protect these various interests remains a complicated and contested question indeed.
Related articles
- Children’s right to secular, liberal education (endhereditaryreligion.com)
- Religions use cult indoctrination techniques (endhereditaryreligion.com)
Children’s Rights and the Parental Authority to Instill a Specific Value System
Essays in Philosophy
Volume 7
Issue 1 Liberalism, Feminism, Multiculturalism Article 10
January 2006
Jeffrey Morgan
University College of the Fraser Valley
http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1226&context=eip
The following is an excerpt of the Jeffrey Morgan paper.
Further, whether or not a child is initiated into a specific value system, it is possible to encourage him to be reasonable regarding his values. This is part of the work of Rawls’ concept of “burdens of judgment” (1993). The Muslim child could be raised with specific Islamic values—rejecting the consumption of pork and alcohol, accepting the values of modesty in dress, and the importance of Zakat and Hajj—but nevertheless be aware that other, equally reflective, people live differently.11 Supporting such reflective open-mindedness effectively puts limits on the degree to which the parent can indoctrinate her children.
Finally, it should be noted that children develop gradually, and that it is possible to be sensitive to the emerging identity of one’s child, while steering the child in one direction rather than others. For example, a parent may wish for his son a career in professional ice hockey, and may scaffold his son’s experiences to attain this end. He enrolls his son in minor hockey leagues, skating lessons, and other physical development activities. The father may attempt to instill in his son a love for the game, and the sense that playing hockey represents a worthwhile form of life with the potential for fame, glory and wealth. Nevertheless, such a program need not be so heavy handed that the father is insensitive to his son’s growing interest in other activities, such as philosophy, painting or poetry.12
My view is that the parent who holds a specific worldview or value system is wrong to instill that value system in her child. However, children who are raised to accept value pluralism, who are taught the importance of reasonableness and of burdens of judgment, and whose parents are sensitive to their child’s developing identity, are unlikely to become so close-minded as to be at risk of losing their future autonomy. This still allows the parent ample opportunity to encourage the child to acquire many values, both moral and otherwise, including some of the values implicit in specific religious or cultural traditions.
Noggle may be correct that children have a right to be taught values, but they do not have a right to be taught a doctrinaire system of values that is morally controversial and difficult to reject. Indeed, it is plausible to suggest that children have a right not to be indoctrinated, and that children have an interest in being protected from value systems, especially from value systems that are reinforced by relationships of love and dependence. We must, consequently, reject the alleged rights of cultural or religious groups to perpetuate themselves through direct initiation of children.
Conclusion
In general, Noggle’s general approach to clarifying parent-child relationships is imaginative, clever, persuasive and promising. His argument is that parent-child relationships are a special class of fiduciary relationships, but differ from the standard case inasmuch as the standard case has no analogue to parental authority.
I have not challenged this assertion, nor have I challenged Noggle’s claim that parental authority can be justified under the model of fiduciary relationships. Further, I have not challenged Noggle’s application of Rawlsian ideas to parent-child relationships; implicitly, I have accepted both his metaphor of a parental veil of ignorance and his development of the hierarchy of goods based on the centrality of primary goods. Moreover, I have not even challenged Noggle’s claim that membership in cultural or religious traditions may well be a secondary good, although I have reservations about the generality of this claim, since it appears that many—perhaps all—cultural or religious traditions have serious costs associated with them. However, I have challenged Noggle’s claim that his model of parental authority supports a parental right to instill parochial values in children.
So if cultural and religious membership is a secondary good, and thereby worth passing on to children, and if there is no parental right to instill the values of specific religious or cultural tradition, then we must pass on these values in less direct ways. Archard’s approach to transmitting cultural and religious values indirectly does provide at least one possible approach to parental authority that allows some transmission but does not permit the direct approach favored by Noggle. However, Archard’s approach will seem rather weak to many parents who want to promote their cultural values in their children.
Where does this leave us with respect to the question of liberalism and multiculturalism with which we began? My view is that there are serious costs of allowing that parents have the legitimate authority to pass on their worldviews to their child. My objections are that moral agency does not presuppose anything as strong as the acquisition of a worldview, and that there are serious costs to the acquisition of most traditional worldviews. Multiculturalism, then, must survive without the parental authority to instill value systems or worldviews in their child. That said, I think that parents can—and should—instill values in their child, but that these values: (a) ought not to constitute a system, (b) ought to be presented in the context of a thorough value pluralism, (c) ought to include values of reasonableness and the burdens of judgment, and (d) ought to be presented with awareness of the child’s emerging identity. I believe that these conditions can be met, but that they put strong limits on the degree to which the child can be subject to value systems or worldviews constitutive of distinctive cultures.
Jeffrey Morgan
University College of the Fraser Valley
Related articles
- Children’s right to secular, liberal education (endhereditaryreligion.com)
- Religions use cult indoctrination techniques (endhereditaryreligion.com)
- You cannot end the religious indoctrination of vunerable children (endhereditaryreligion.com)
- Salvation is not a legitimate argument for indoctrinating children (endhereditaryreligion.com)
Children have a right to secular, liberal education
The following is excerpted from a symposium paper by James G. Dwyer, Professor of Family law at William and Mary.
The Liberal States Response to Religious Visions of Education
http://www.stjohns.edu/media/3/bf88cc425d6b44d9b89484d7f8e050af.pdf
There are several points to be made in response to the “parents know best” line of reasoning. First, as noted above, no one seriously maintains that the state should not set the parameters of parental freedom. This is in part because everyone knows that not all parents love their children enough to refrain from acting in ways that the parents themselves know is harmful to the children.
Second, the claim that parents know their children best is overstated. It is true that most parents are more familiar with the individual personalities of their children and with the past events of their children’s lives than is anyone else. But many aspects of children’s welfare are generic or nearly so—that is, certain things are true of all or most children. Thus, knowledge of those aspects of children’s well-being does not depend on intimacy. In fact, many generic aspects of children’s lives are known only by people who have devoted an extraordinary amount of time, even their entire careers, to learning about them. This is true of much of children’s development and health. It would be a rare parent indeed who was not only an expert with respect to her children’s personalities and histories, but also with respect to developmental psychology, educational theory, medicine, and nutrition. With respect to each major area of children’s lives, it seems safe to say that the vast majority of parents know quite little. Very few parents know as much about how to educate children as do professional educators, and most parents implicitly recognize this by seeking schools for their children that employ well-trained and credentialed teachers. Very few parents know as much about health care as do doctors. The state has agencies that employ and draw information from people whose careers are devoted to studying children’s welfare, including their cognitive development, and it is largely for that reason that we repose some trust in state agencies to establish minimum requirements for care and treatment of children.
Third, what is typically at stake in religiously-charged controversies over child rearing is not parental love or parental knowledge; rather, it is ideology and a clash of religious and secular values. Reference to parental love and knowledge is impertinent in these situations. The state’s objection to certain illiberal practices is not that it believes that the parents do not love their children, nor that the parents are ignorant; it is that those practices are harmful to the children from a secular perspective and that the parents are not entitled to say that their religious perspective must control. If one accepts the explanation above as to why the very idea of parents’ rights is misguided, one must, in order to defend the claim that the parents’ religious perspective must control, explain why children have a right to that outcome. The state’s position might be understood to assert that children have a right to protection of their secular interests until they become adults capable of deciding for themselves what religious beliefs, if any, they will hold, and what role any such beliefs will play in their lives, including whether they will sacrifice what is generally believed to be in their secular interests for the sake of religious duty or spiritual aspiration. Those who reject this position need to construct an argument to the effect that children have a right to have their secular interests sacrificed for the sake of what their parents believe to be required by religious command. And that argument needs to be one the state can accept and would find convincing, for as noted above, what religious objectors to state regulation of child rearing are demanding is not state inaction, but rather state action of a particular sort—namely, a state conferral on them of more extensive power over children’s lives. I am not aware that anyone has ever attempted to construct such an argument, and I very much doubt that it can successfully be done.
One way to think about the content of children’s rights that I find helpful is to imagine what rules I would want to apply to my situation if I were told that tomorrow I would be born again, in the temporal sense that I would start all over in my human life as a newborn child, and if I did not know anything else about my individual circumstances—in particular, not knowing who among the vast number of potential parents in our society would become my legal parents. The parents I will have could be people belonging to any one of the tremendous variety of religious denominations in America, people who have a very individualized set of religious beliefs, people who have no religious beliefs, or people who are atheistic. They could be Satanists or sun worshippers, people who believe that one should eat nothing but lettuce, or people who believe children grow spiritually through sexual intercourse with adults. In light of the enormous variety of possibilities, how would I want the state to go about deciding what the limits of parental power and freedom should be in the world I am about to reenter?
I believe this thought experiment would lead to a conclusion that the state should rely on widely shared secular views of children’s welfare or interests, but not on any particular religious beliefs per se. Unless one ascribes to a view that every child just has whatever interests are specified by the conception of the good of his or her parents, or that all efforts to identify interests of children are futile, one would want to guard against the possibility that the parents to whom one is assigned have beliefs inconsistent with one’s interests. Everyone involved in these debates concedes this possibility when thinking about religious practices that seriously threaten children’s health or safety, but without explanation, some refuse to acknowledge that the same possibility exists with respect to children’s schooling. I believe that anyone reading this essay who thinks seriously about the prospect of reentering the world and being assigned to parents of unknown ideological outlook—parents whose beliefs could diverge widely not only from secular views about children’s welfare but also from any religious beliefs the reader now holds— will come to endorse a legal regime in which the state adopts the prevailing secular views concerning children’s temporal welfare and imposes on all parents restrictions on their child-rearing choices that reflect such views.
That thought experiment is designed to model the reality of every newborn child today, to facilitate our putting ourselves in the place of each person who is actually entering the world now. It encourages us to see each newborn child as a morally distinct and equal person and to recognize the great hazard the state creates for children now by assigning them to parents adhering to any one of a vast variety of conceptions of the good without constraining in a significant way parental choices regarding children’s intellectual, psychological, and emotional development. Another useful thought experiment might be to imagine that your own children, or your own nephews and nieces are, for some reason—for example, a family tragedy—randomly reassigned to another set of parents in our society—for example, through the adoption process. How comfortable would you be with the thought that they could be assigned to fundamentalist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians, parents in a cult like the Branch Davidians, members of the Ku Klux Klan, or parents adhering to any other lifestyle and ideological view? Would you not want the state to impose some restrictions and requirements with respect to their upbringing, including the kind of education they receive, to at least ensure that they will develop the capacity to question the beliefs their parents instill in them and perhaps also to ensure that they are prepared—even if they are girls—to pursue whatever careers are well suited to their native talents and abilities and self-chosen values?
I will close by reiterating that ensuring every child a liberal education would not amount to standardizing children. Those adults who attended public schools ought to resent the frequent suggestion that state influence on education results in children being standardized, their individuality expunged. In addition, in and of itself, imposing certain requirements on private schools has no implications for children’s home life or for the freedom of parents to teach and model their beliefs and values. Again, the experience of the 90 percent of adults in this country who attended public schools is telling; the vast majority describe themselves as religious, and I have never heard of any who complained that they were deprived of the opportunity to have a religious upbringing insulated from liberal ideas and secular views and values. In fact, Catholic parents are increasingly comfortable sending their children to public schools, believing that their children can still have a Catholic upbringing, can still learn the tenets of the Catholic faith, and can still live their lives as Catholics, because these parents recognize that they still control most of their children’s daily lives and still have the opportunity to spend a great amount of time instructing their children and modeling their beliefs. I have argued simply that no parent is entitled to complete control over children’s intellectual development and that children cannot plausibly be said to have a right that their parents have such complete control. Rather, every child has a moral right that at least this one limited aspect of their lives—their schooling—be governed by liberal principles whether or not their parents accept those principles.
I am not aware of any religion whose basic precepts are inherently opposed to this position. I would be very interested to see a theological analysis within the religious traditions addressed by the other contributors or any other tradition of what adherents should believe about the respective authority of parents and the rest of society, as represented by the state, over child rearing, and of what specific restrictions the state ought to impose on parental freedom, if they accepted certain of the assumptions and conclusions relied on above—for example, that children are neither property nor appendages of their parents, that children’s separate personhood gives rise to some moral obligations both on the part of parents and on the part of the state, that some parents manifest little love for their children, that most parents are not experts regarding many aspects of child rearing, that the state cannot be expected to adopt any parent’s religious beliefs or assume that such beliefs are true, and that the beliefs parents in our society have about what God commands and about the spiritual interests of their children are infinitely varied and in some cases directly contrary to empirically supported secular views about children’s welfare. It is not obvious to me, based on my limited understanding of various faiths, that such an analysis would necessarily lead in many instances to conclusions much different from my own.
Related articles
- You cannot end the religious indoctrination of vunerable children (endhereditaryreligion.com)
- Religions use cult indoctrination techniques (endhereditaryreligion.com)
- Just How Much Control Over Their Children’s Thought Are Parents Entitled To? (camelswithhammers.com)
Parental rights are not inalienable
- Image via Wikipedia
Here in the USA there is far too much attention given to the doctrine of parental rights and children are suffering for this. Our family laws granting parents so much power rest solely on patriarchal custom, not on ethics and not on an inalienable right. It doesn’t hurt that our judges are just as infatuated with the supernatural as the most uneducated people in the land.
Family law Professor James Dwyer presents the arguments against our current doctrine of parent’s rights in a seminal paper and in his books. Briefly, we do not grant rights to one group of people over the lives of another group of people except in this very unique case of parents and their children. The reason such rights are not granted is that according to our legal theory rights can only apply to an individual and must be self determining not other determining. Rights have a very technical meaning in the law, but people bandy the term around as though they actually know what they are talking about.
We especially should not grant such rights to a group of people who have questionable self serving motives, such as insuring the survival of a religion and using their children as instruments in such a scheme. This is why the Yoder decision will one day be reversed. If we can ever clear out the people like Thomas and Scalia and put the court on a progressive track.
Inalianable: Natural rights (or inalienable rights) are rights which are not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of a particular society or polity. In contrast, legal rights (sometimes also called civil rights) are rights conveyed by a particular legal or political entity, rights as enshrined in law, and as such are contingent upon local laws, customs, or beliefs. Natural rights are thus necessarily universal, whereas legal rights are culturally and politically relative.
Inalienable rights are usually enshrined in human rights declarations. I don’t find anything about parental rights being inalienable in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Obviously, Michael Ferris of HSLDA agrees that our parental rights doctrine is on shaky ground or why would his organization ParentalRights.org be clamoring to amend the US constitution to “protect” parental rights. Which like I say do not exist in the sense of natural rights. What he and his devious attorneys attempt to persuade people with are quotes from legal arguments they take out of context from various court decisions. People who are not constitutional lawyers buy his line. Then, convinced the evil state is trying to rob them of their rights, they get all up in arms and send him money, which is the whole point. He stands as much chance of amending the constitution as I do.
The Swedes, some of the planets most bold social engineers, have created many far reaching laws concerning parent/child relationships. Libertarians, may all swoon now, but the Swedes seem to be doing pretty well as a society. You should know that by now.
Here is some news about how Swedes are going about amending their laws on sex ed.
http://www.thelocal.se/10298/20080306
Related articles
- Children as property of parents (endhereditaryreligion.com)
Children as property of parents
Historically, children were considered the property of parents. Under the scheme of patriarchy wives and children are under the control of the family head, the husband of the family. Much of this hoary antiquated thinking is still promoted by far right conservatives and the vestiges of ancient thinking die hard.
Today, children are persons in their own right and modern progressives recognize the personhood of children. Children have the right to grow up free of debilitating dogmatic superstitious thinking. Instead parents and communities must encourage children to think critically and determine their own path through life to suit themselves.
Authoritarian parents view the autonomy of children as threats to their antiquated way of life. Anachronistic groups like the dominionist inspired and led Parentalrights.org want to seal off the family from the state to avoid heretical ideals like children’s rights or the emancipation of women creeping in. They advocate a constitutional amendment to protect what they call parental rights, but are really restraints aimed at the protection of the antiquated system of patriarchy. This is why they emphasize the taboo of non-interference in family matters (a strong meme). The goal is really to keep patriarchy going and ward off any progressive moves that would liberate wives and children.
Sham homeschools are fostering a radical right wing fifth column
Until the 1980s homeschooling was a benign activity that affected very few children. After homeschooling became dominated by right wing Christian theocrats, millions of vulnerable children (estimates are suspect because of poor reporting requirements) became virtual prisoners in their own homes, pawns in a scheme to overthrow the United States Government and replace it with a theocracy. The theocrats scheme includes lobbying state legislatures, pressing free exercise of religion cases in the courts and collusion with extreme right wing Republican officials. The result is an almost total lack of oversight by government officials. It will require dedication for the new administration to undo the Bush administration handiwork.
Legitimate homeschools are in league with the sham homeschools because they also want to prohibit any kind of oversight or control. Although the legitimate people have a small public voice, the radical right are loaded with resources and lobbyists.
The Supreme Court gave parents the right to teach children the tenets and the practices of their faith back in 1944. (Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 164 (1944). The Prince decision, together with the Yoder vs Wisconsin decision inspired theocratic zealots to create a rebellious strain of home schooling. Lead by radicals, this movement is creating a virtual fifth column of ignorant children raised to hate democracy and to revile and distrust their government institutions. In this way, the theocrats are systematically grooming innocent children through a staged process involving homeschools, a project called Generation Joshua and the Patrick Henry College. Their aim is to quietly infiltrate, hamper, frustrate and then dismantle the government of the United States and establish a theocracy according to Dominionist theology. The theocrats plan seems to be working because the Bush administration opened the doors of government to Patrick Henry College graduates while the general public has taken little notice. But then, the devious theocrats are anything but honest and above board. They are like cockroaches, termites and other vermin that hide out of sight. They will not advocate a public position because they know they cannot win an honest public debate.
No one contemplated the political power extreme right wing Christians would usurp in the latter decades of the 20st century. Nor, how they would first systematically attack the public school system and then in frustration, how they would begin to withdraw their children from public schools in astonishing numbers. Able to mobilize thousands of parents to swamp legislatures with denial of service calls and emails, they steam rolled their agenda of removing truancy laws across the country. There was little or no opposition from the federal or state governments, who depend upon reliable telephone and Internet connections to operate. Denial of service attacks combined with bare knuckle political threats became weapons of choice and are still used today. HSLDA even brags about their success in hampering the functioning of government.
With sequestered children constantly supervised by zealous despotic parents, the indoctrination of a backward debauched religion can take place 24 hours a day seven days a week. Out of sight, the indoctrination goes unnoticed. The unfortunate children’s parents rigorously shield them from civilian authority, and they are not allowed to associate with anyone that has not been pre-approved. Parents heavily monitor and restrict radio, television, movies, the Internet and live entertainment events. When legal problems threaten, parents use the threadbare guise of sacrosanct religious liberty and call on well heeled advocacy groups like Michael Farris’s Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), Focus on the Family, The Pacific Justice Institute, and The Eagle Forum to name just a few far right heavily funded special interest groups of dubious character.
In these families, there will be no nonsense about Title 9 gender equality, or sex education or tolerance of other’s beliefs; parents are convinced they alone have the truth and all outsiders are Satan’s spawn that are going to hell. There is no effort to teach the children how to reason or make moral judgments based on logic; morality lessons consist of picked over biblical dogma.
This trend has been in place for nearly 20 years and has spawned a vast infrastructure of lobbyists, legal assistance groups, and purveyors of “approved” curriculum materials. Many curriculum materials advertise that they teach subjects in a “godly” way. Believe it or not there are even teaching materials that extend this pedagogy to mathematics!
Dr. Rob Reich (Professor of Political Science and Ethics at Stanford University ) explains what he considers is the major problem in terms of parents deliberately frustrating the development of autonomy in their children:
The problem with homeschooling and parental authority over education arises not out of conflicts over whether children should become independent adults. Few people wish to defend the authority of parents who plainly care too little. The problem arises over parents who, as it were, care too much in seeking to prevent the development of autonomy in their children. I mean to suggest that parents who wish to control the socialization of their children so completely as to instill inerrant beliefs in their own world view or unquestioning obedience to their own or others’ authority are motivated often by a fervent care for, not neglect of their children. Even when defined minimally, some parents may object to the idea that their children should receive an education that promotes their critical thinking and capacities for reflection on their own and other’s ends. Being minimally autonomous, I claimed, was in the interest of the child for personal and civic reasons. The fact that autonomy is necessary for citizenship makes education for autonomy an interest of the state as well. Thus, when parents reject the facilitation of autonomy in their children, they find themselves in conflict with both the interests of the child and of the state.
A measure of just how thoroughly the theocrats took control of the US Department of Education can be gained by the comments made by Jack Klenk, Director of the Office of Non Public Education at the U.S. Department of Education at a recent meeting sponsored by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA a vociferous foe of homeschool oversight ) and featuring eight congressional representatives . Here is part of the HSLDA report on their web site:
Mr. Klenk has served in the Department for over 20 years, and he talked about how he has seen homeschooling start and grow through the years. He also acknowledged that the Department of Education has heard the homeschool community’s message that the “federal government must leave homeschoolers alone,” and will honor that message. He closed by sharing his and the current administration’s belief that “homeschooling is good for children, good for families, and good for society.
Have we no right to expect impartial judgments emanating from such a high government official? Mr Klenk has hopefully departed to other pursuits by this time, if he has not been fired.
The corrupt Bush administration and his allied theocrats were determined to surreptitiously undermine and drag down the government of the United States. Accordingly, it should be obvious to Americans that the Obama administration must act decisively to regulate homeschools on an urgent basis.
Professor Rob Reich proposed the following provisional framework some years ago:
A PROVISIONAL REGULATORY FRAMEWORK FOR HOME SCHOOLING
Recall that the purpose of these regulations is to help ensure that the state’s interest in providing a civic education for children is met, and to protect the independent interest of the child in developing into a free or autonomous adult. … I propose three minimal regulations. The results of the democratic process might yield additional regulations, which would not necessarily be inconsistent with my views, but these seem to me the bare minimum, as follows:1. All parents who home school must register with a public official. The state needs to be able to distinguish between truants and home-schooled students, and it needs a record that specific children are being home schooled so that its other regulations can be enforced.
2. Parents must demonstrate to educational officials that their homeschool curriculum meets some minimal standard. The minimal standard will include academic benchmarks as well as an assurance that children are exposed to and engaged with ideas, values, and beliefs that are different from those of the parents. For instance, every home-school curriculum should include information about a variety of religious traditions (I believe this should be the case, as well, for public and private schools.) Parents are free to teach their children that their own religious faith is the truth, but they cannot shield children from the knowledge that other people have different convictions and that these people are, from the standpoint of citizenship, their equals.
3. Parents must permit their children to be tested periodically on some kind of basic skills exam. Should home-schooled children repeatedly fail to make progress on this exam, relative to their public or private school peers, then a case could be made to compel school attendance. Label this educational harm. (The same kind of educational harm surely exists in some public schools, of course. And this is one reason that I believe parents should have the authority to hold the state accountable for public schools by pulling their children from failing schools and enrolling them elsewhere.) In short, these regulations amount to the following:
• The state registers who is being home schooled.
• The state insists upon a curriculum that meets minimal academic standards and that introduces students to value pluralism.
• The state tests students periodically to ensure that minimal academic progress is being made.Would many home schools be unable to meet these regulations? …. If creating and enforcing regulations would prevent even a few children from suffering educational harm or from receiving an education that stunted or disabled their freedom, the regulations would be worthwhile. Strictly enforced regulations ensure that parents do not wield total and unchecked authority over the education of their children. What is at stake here is not a question of social utility or stability, whether home schooling could threaten democracy. What is at stake is the justice that we owe children, that they receive an education that cultivates their future citizenship, their individual freedom, and that teaches them at least basic academic skills, skills that are necessary for ably exercising both their citizenship and their freedom.”
I wish I could be as sanguine as Rob Reich, because our democracy could clearly be at risk if millions of compromised children continue to go through this warped religious soaked system. In addition, why settle for minimum standards?
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1020/cover.html
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7630851222567912489#docid=5881186192356745364
God’s Next Army
Documentary about Patrick Henry College for homeschooled evangelical children.
http://www.truthout.org/article/christian-reconstructionists-trying-take-dominion-america
http://www.parentalrights.org/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={1F86E588-AA4A-43A1-998D-D9BF4FBE4D09} Michael Farris brags about denial of service attack.
About Michael Farris and sham home schools:
http://a2zhomeschool.com/homes
Purge of Professors at Patrick Henry
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/5/26/83129/0021
http://www.publiceye.org/christian_right/dominionism.htm
Reports on the web include:
http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheDespoilingOfAmerica.htm#_edn14
http://www.theocracywatch.org/
http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v19n3/clarkson_dominionism.html
http://www.theocracywatch.org/chris_hedges_nov24_04.htm
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/1/5/155457/0298
http://a2zhomeschool.com/homeschool/2009/06/16/reconstruction-theology-and-home-education/
Books
American Fascists, The Christian Right and The War on America, by Chris Hedges
Kingdom Coming, The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg
American Theocracy, The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury by Kevin Philips
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2047
Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling
Author: Robert Kunzman
Product Code: 3291 ISBN: 978-080703291-6
Copyright Date Ed: 08/01/2009
A compelling look at conservative Christian homeschooling families—and the worldview that could radically alter American political and intellectual life.
Reports on the web include:
http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheDespoilingOfAmerica.htm#_edn14
http://www.theocracywatch.org/
http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v19n3/clarkson_dominionism.html
http://www.theocracywatch.org/chris_hedges_nov24_04.htm
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/1/5/155457/0298
http://a2zhomeschool.com/homeschool/2009/06/16/reconstruction-theology-and-home-education/
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Parents strongly resist anti-spanking laws
Pro-spanking advocates insist they are against spanking bans because they wish to protect the sanctity of parental discretion. Leave aside the ethics or efficacy of using violence against children as a form of discipline. The issue is that parents must not be hampered in any way as they carry out their parental duties in accordance with their personal judgment. But does their argument withstand careful scrutiny?
Few parents would expect to go into a court and defend themselves against a motor vehicle code violation issued for not complying with a child safety seat ordinance. Laws are in effect all over the country that demand children under certain height and weight specifications ride in child seats and not regular passenger seats. This is because in case of a crash, inflatable air bags can actually kill or maim a small child when they inflate. Passenger car seats are designed for adult bodies, not child bodies and can actually produce injuries to children.
The child safety seat laws are founded on scientific research that predicts what will likely happen to children who are not protected by riding in a seat especially constructed for their safe transportation. Likewise, spanking bans are founded on scientific studies of the harm that will likely happen statistically to a number of children if such bans are not in place. Anti-spanking bans are not based simply on conjecture, but derive their authority based on valid data, rigorously compiled and analyzed.
Libertarian supporters of parental rights don’t seem to object to mandatory child safety seat laws. If their concern is really about government interference in their parental decision making, shouldn’t they therefore resist buying and using expensive child safety seats? What right does the government have to insist parents protect their children from harm by putting them in a car safety seat?
Likewise, many cities and towns have vehicle codes that require children to wear safety helmets when riding on a bike or as a passenger on a motorcycle. Do parents who favor unrestricted control over their decision making, think they would survive a court challenge in case they disregard child safety helmet laws?
When you board an airplane your children must wear a seat belt or you and the child will be removed from the plane. Why do libertarians not object to this intrusion into their parental decision making.
The objection to a spanking ban fails for the same reason that the parental rights defense fails in the instances cited. Although parental rights certainly have a place in the overall scheme of how society raises future generations, child safety deserves a higher priority than noble, abstract, theoretical considerations defending unrestricted parental rights.
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Global progress towards banning all corporal punishment of children
- Image by HA! Designs – Artbyheather via Flickr
http://www.endcorporalpunishment.org/pages/progress/global.html
From End Corporal Punishment official web site. In the following text the hypertext links, italicized, are deactivated. Please visit the web site.
Legal reforms to prohibit all corporal punishment of children – in the family home as well as in schools and other institutions and penal systems – are spreading fast.
In many states the law provides defences for parents, other carers and teachers who use corporal punishment to discipline children: provisions which allow “reasonable chastisement” or “lawful correction”. In addition there may be education laws providing for corporal punishment in schools and laws allowing corporal punishment in penal institutions and as a sentence of the courts.
Law reform to end corporal punishment involves removing any provisions authorising corporal punishment and removing any special defences that may exist, so that the criminal law on assault applies equally to any assault of a child, whether or not it is described as discipline. It is a fundamental principle of human rights – upheld in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 7 and in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 26 – that all are entitled to equal protection of the law without discrimination.
In some states the law is silent on corporal punishment of children, but nevertheless it is socially and legally accepted and therefore explicit prohibition is required.
Click (active link at the web site) for the latest summary information on progress towards universal prohibition, and selected facts and figures on states pursuing reform and states so far resisting.
Click (active link at the web site) for information of legislation in states which have achieved full prohibition.
Worldwide, corporal punishment in schools has been prohibited in at least 108 states. But at least 78 states have not prohibited corporal punishment as a disciplinary measure in penal institutions for children in conflict with the law, and 43 have not prohibited it as a judicial sentence of the courts for young people convicted of an offence.
Our online global table shows data for all states and dependent territories on the extent of prohibition in three categories: Home; School; Penal system. Listed alphabetically, select from below
: TABLE A-D | TABLE E-H | TABLE I-L | TABLE M-P | TABLE Q-T | TABLE U-Z (active links at the web site)
Also available from the table are individual reports for each state, with details of laws relating to corporal punishment in the home, schools, penal system and alternative care settings, as well as summaries of prevalence research and extracts from recommendations made by human rights treaty bodies. Click here for individual state reports.
Our global and regional tables, available as PDF files (updated August 2009), summarise the extent of prohibition in the home, schools, as a sentence for crime, as a disciplinary measure in penal institutions, and in alternative care settings. Download from here:
[Please visit the web site for latest data]
This analysis has been compiled from information from governmental and non-governmental sources, including reports on implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Every effort is made to maintain its accuracy. Please send us updating information and details of sources for missing information: info@endcorporalpunishment.org.
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- UN agency adopted a new general comment in 2006 on corporal punishment (endhereditaryreligion.com)
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I love Canadian kids!
- Image via Wikipedia
Opposition to controversial bill voiced on Facebook
By Don Braid, Calgary HeraldJune 2, 2009Comments (4)
http://www.chtv.com/ch/chcanews/story.html?id=1654207
A Facebook group called Students Against Bill 44 had just over 100 members last week.
By Monday evening, as final debate on the human rights amendments was about to start, more than 2,000 people had joined.
Right below that group, Facebook listed another called Students FOR Bill 44.
It had fewer than 35 members.
That’s the way this debate has gone for the government; straight downhill.
It began with a casual political horsetrade within the Tory caucus. Moderate MLAs got two little ponies–enshrinement of gay rights, and retention of strictures against hate speech.
In return, the conservative side of the caucus was handed a runaway horse called parental rights.
Similar to existing provisions in the School Act, it allows parents to withdraw children from classes about religion, human sexuality, and sexual orientation.
At first the Tories brushed off discontent from teachers, gays and opposition politicians. The fuss was a useful counter to charges that the party has moved too far left.
But the initial unease quickly became a genuine uproar.
Surprising coalitions formed. There was rare ugreement among teachers, parents’ councils, the opposition, school boards and human rights groups.
Even people who at first didn’t think the impacts would be serious (including me) had to rethink the issue. Dissent as fierce at this, from people so knowledgeable, is seldom entirely wrong-headed or political.
The opponents made some excellent points about the bill opening the school system to endless complaints and legal challenges.
As if to prove the point, right-wing advocates suggested they would do exactly that.
One said the bill didn’t go nearly far enough because parents, not legislators, should decide what classes their kids should attend in the public schools.
Bill 44 probably still has the support of most voters who back the Tories. As one strategist said, how many conservative-leaning parents are going to argue against parents’ rights?
But the Tories missed a few ominous twists, including the feelings of students themselves.
As the Facebook site shows, they don’t necessarily want their parents telling them what they may learn and not learn.
In fact, they turn out to be far more interested in students’ rights than parents’ rights.
OneUof A student wrote: “This is ridiculous. What about letting children grow up into being their own people? . . . Down with this bill.”
Another said, “This is absolutely stupid. Just because you may not agree with something being taught, who are you to stop your child from forming their own opinion of it?”
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