Children as the Tools of the State: Educational Bait-and-Switch

When parents object to political indoctrination and sexually intrusive questions aimed at their children by public school officials, the courts insist that they have no right to object because they supposedly “voluntarily” sent their kids to the public schools, and parents’ constitutional rights to direct the upbringing of their children supposedly stop at the “threshold of the school door,” according to a California case called Fields v. Palmdale School District.

But when parents respond to such rulings by exercising their choice not to send their kids to a public school, but rather home-school them, the courts then switch arguments to claim that there really is no such choice, claiming that the State can prevent anyone who lacks State-approved teaching “credentials” from teaching children, and that “parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,” according to the California Court of Appeal’s disturbing ruling in another case, In re Rachel L. (2008).