In what is clearly a victory for homeschooling parents in California and across the country, a California court reversed a lower court decision which had put into question whether homeschooling was a right under the Constitution.
An appeals court in California has ruled that state law does permit homeschooling “as a species of private school education” but that statutory permission for parents to teach their own children could be “overridden in order to protect the safety of a child who has been declared dependent.”
The long-awaited case resolves many of the questions that had developed in homeschooling circles across the nation when the same court earlier found that parents had no such rights – statutorily or constitutionally – in California.
The ruling released this morning by the 2nd Appellate District in Los Angeles said the dispute came out of juvenile court proceedings in which court-appointed lawyers for two children demanded “an order that they be sent to private or public school, rather than educated at home by their mother.”
The dependency court did not agree, “primarily based on its view that parents have an absolute constitutional right to homeschool their children,” the appeals court said. The lawyers then advanced their case to the appeals level, which earlier granted the order.
“We filed our original opinion on Feb. 28, 2008, granting the petition on the bases that: (1) California statutory law does not permit homeschooling; and (2) this prohibition does not violate the U.S. Constitution,” the opinion said.
So congrats to all homeschooling parents and children today. A judge decided you have a right to raise your own children! Is anyone else still shuddering just a little that it was even a question? And probably will be again in the near future.
August 9, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Dear Wormwood,
UGH!
We must get more democrats in power. There is nothing worse for our cause than good loving parents home schooling their children.
How can we hope to win the kids over without sex education in kindergarten? Moral relativism in 1st grade? Enforced indoctrination into Islam in 2nd grade? And let’s not forget, starting in pre school, story books that tell the kids that homosexuality is okay and that at their young tender age they should start experimenting.
Do you know how many children will be lost to the Enemy because their parents teach them about Christianity, and the children learn to love the Enemy instead of our Master and his Secular Culture?
Have you heard of the recent NEA convention? The teachers publicly support everything we support, and the parents keep sending their children into our merciless clutches. As if the majority vote of teachers somehow doesn’t represent what the teachers believe! HAH! Look how much we’ve fooled those parents after just 1 generation in our schools!
Affectionately,
Uncle Screwtape
August 9, 2008 at 9:05 pm
This should never have been a matter for any court in the first place; by default this situation falsely recognizes the purported power of a court to rule in the matter. Raising a child is the parents’ responsibility (if there are functioning parents).
Further, if parents wish to send their child to a private school, they should receive credits on their school taxes for the time the kid is enrolled.
Indeed, I will venture to suggest that perhaps public funding of schools (there is no system; there is only a chaos of local, state, and federal authorities) could be abolished completely, and the parents required to take responsibility. In this scenario, though, there should be NO public funding of any school or any child. As with health insurance, race-based giveaways, artificial concepts of poverty, and other schemes, one observes that the working middle-class will be the one group taxed and the one group denied.
Further, one must wonder if those commenting actually vote in their local school board elections. Let us remember that Rush Limbaugh never registered to vote until he was well into his 30s. Talking isn’t doing. The public schools are exactly that, public, and for good or ill represent the desires of that small percentage of the public who actually vote. Sitting around the coffee shop (or on a blog) gassing off about the problems of the world does nothing to remedy the problems; voting does.
The NEA, manifestly a stooge of the Democratic Party, is only a stooge, and relatively powerless in itself.
In some states, Texas included, teachers are forbidden to bargain collectively. Please employ critical thinking skills before dismissing “the teachers” as a class. I can assure you that in my mostly fundamentalist part of the world priests and Catholics in general are considered Hell-bound. Further, in a public encounter with the IBEW (I was shouted down, but happily didn’t get beaten up), I was accused by union members of being a union member, which is a remarkable comment on the self-loathing of unions. I’m not a union member, and never will be. Don’t stereotype; God knows we Catholics have suffered from it. It is an especially bitter irony when priests stereotype public-school teachers.
As you would not be Jack-Chicked, don’t Jack-Chick.
— Mack, evil, wicked, Pope-worshiping, Templarish, anti-American (blah, blah, blah) Catholic; evil, wicked, Godless, satanic, homosexuality-promoting, America-bashing (blah, blah, blah) public-school teacher; and evil, wicked, child-murdering, poison-gassing, drugged-out, capitalist-stooge (blah, blah, blah) Viet-Nam veteran.