Parental Rights End at the School Door

from the newsletter of www.ParentalRights.org:

If your children attend public school, you are among those parents whose rights will end the moment your child enters the school. That’s because in 2005 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found in Fields v. Palmdale School District “that the Meyer-Pierce right [of parents to direct the upbringing of their children] does not exist beyond the threshold of the school door.”

You read that right. Parental Rights “[do] not exist beyond the threshold of the school door.”

“We conclude that the parents are possessed of no constitutional right to prevent the public schools from providing information on the subject [of sexuality] to their students in any forum or manner they select” (emphasis added).

Of course, most parents contend they don’t have a choice in where their children are schooled. Either economic constraints or personal circumstances leave them with no practical alternative to the local public school. And that leaves no parental rights at all.

Kent comments:

This illustrates, once again, the insidious nature of governments doing things that governments are not competent to do.

“Public schools” are a fraud beginning with the very name.  They are government schools.  In the government’s schools the public – in this case parents – have no rights.  No matter how long the history of this institution might be, we should have known that it would eventually come to this.  Sooner or later, it always does with governments.

It sounds so noble to provide every child an education.  But when we allow governments to do this, they do it the way governments do everything they do – by force and coercion, and without regard to what anyone wants except those who run governments.

We thought we were helping children when we bought into the idea of governments “providing” schools for everyone.  But now, to borrow a phrase from B. H. Obama’s minister, our “public school chickens have come home to roost.”

Now, people are forced to pay exorbitant extortion money (sometimes called “property taxes”) to be allowed to live in their houses, drive their cars, or buy almost anything.  This extortion money is delivered to education bureaucrats and teacher’s unions to create institutions that purposely exclude parents.  Sounds fair, doesn’t it?

As much as the education establishment would like us to think, it is not “society’s” responsibility to educate your children.  That is your responsibility.  But the whole concept of “public education” is bases on the idea that parents are not responsible for their own children’s education.  So why should it surprise us when high courts hold that parental rights end at the school door?

“Public schools” are now an irredeemable and unreformable mess.  It is long past time to stop trying to “fix” them and work to do away with them.