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restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations
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The Right to Homeschool Comes from God, Not Government!
For over one hundred years Americans have been running a gigantic experiment in government schools, trying to find out what a society looks like without God. Now we know. – Douglas Wilson
I have frequently argued that the war for our culture—the war about how we live our lives and the kind of life we want to pass on to our children—is at the bottom a spiritual war. This means that if we are to rebuild sound foundations in a secular society, we must have a biblical perspective. A case in point is the debate over public education. It’s so easy to forget that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t even mention the issue of education for children. In fact, it leaves this matter entirely in the hands of the parents, where it belongs.
This laissez faire attitude by our Founding Fathers was not accidental. From at least the 1700s, common law has held that parents had total and complete authority over their children. This position has been steadfastly upheld by American courts for the past 200 years. This means that if in a state’s law homeschooling isn’t considered equal to “private education,” that state’s law is unconstitutional. States may try and prove that they have “compelling interests” in controlling the education of children, but such a claim is a false boast. No one possesses a higher compelling interest in the education of their child than his or her parents! It is not only their right as parents, it is their responsibility.
The right of parents to control the education of their own children is protected by the Constitution under (1) freedom of speech, (2) the freedom of religion, and (3) the right to privacy. But even more importantly, the right to educate our own children is a God-given, unalienable right. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t give it to us; the federal government doesn’t give it to us; God Himself has given it to us!
The decision to withdraw from the public school system should be based not on what may be wrong in a public school but on a recognition that a God-centered and Bible-based education is mandatory for Christian parents. If you think you can keep your children in a secular school system and escape the dumbed-down, amoral, and immoral results of humanism in schools, you are sorely mistaken. The reason is that secularism is itself a religion. In fact, the biblical view of man’s nature is in sharp conflict with humanism, which teaches that man is basically good. Every man-centered system of education is, consciously or unconsciously, built on this philosophy. Christians, on the other hand, speak of the “bondage of the will” (Luther) or “total depravity” (Calvin). The humanist believes that the evil a man does is the result of evil influences in his environment, but Jesus says that a man needs to get a new spiritual nature “from above” by being born again spiritually.
Some have argued that vouchers would bring better accountability by making all schools part of the public system. Vouchers may sound like the solution, but there are two unavoidable pitfalls: (1) federal school choice vouchers would only continue the unconstitutional federal involvement in education, and (2) government control always follows government money—if not immediately, most certainly eventually!
In his fictional look at the future, Brave New World, written in 1934, Aldous Huxley wrote:
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to the ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and school teachers (emphasis added).
The “new” education imposed on America’s schools in the last 60 years has fulfilled this prophecy almost to a “t.” It’s an “education” that has eroded and destroyed the biblical and constitutional foundations upon which a stable society must rest. In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court banned Bible reading and a 22-word prayer recited in the schools of New York. The prayer the Supreme Court declared “unconstitutional” said:
Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our Country.
If the Bible-based foundational concepts of education upon which our nation was built had not already been so badly eroded, there would have been a massive uprising of indignant parents in America. They would never have tolerated the Supreme Court’s decision striking down what had been fully constitutional for 175 years! But because most Americans had already given up Bible reading and prayer in their own homes, they meekly accepted the Court’s appalling reinterpretation of law.
Let it be repeated: Our Founders did not give us our rights and freedoms. We didn’t get them through our Bill of Rights or our Constitution. What makes America unique in the annals of history is that our Founding Fathers discovered and set forth the truth that the rights of the individual come not from a king, a government, or a Constitution, but from God. The Declaration of Independence affirms:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed (emphasis added).
If God Himself gives men their rights, then government can’t tamper with them!
June 23, 2003
David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.