BlueRidgeForum

Readers are invited to review center-right commentary on what the Home School Legal Defense Association here termed Friday “A Great Victory for California Homeschoolers.”

Here is the decision itself.

CEI’s Hans Bader wrote last Friday here:

“The California Court of Appeal has reversed its earlier decision that home-schooling is generally illegal in California. I criticized the decision banning home-schooling here. (The decision really st[r]uck a nerve among California’s 166,000 homeschoolers, thousands of whom signed a petition asking the California Supreme Court to depublish the decision to deprive it of precedential significance. Few of my blog posts get as many hits as that one did, although the bulk of my criticism is contained in the first comment to that blog post, not the blog post itself).”

Today NRO’s Ed Whelan here draws our attention to the Los Angeles Times coverage of the decision:

“‘It is important to recognize that it is not for us to consider, as a matter of policy, whether home schooling should be permitted in California. That job is for the Legislature. It is not the duty of the courts to make the law; we endeavor to interpret it,’ Justice H. Walter Croskey wrote in a ruling signed by the two other members of the panel. ‘Our first task, interpreting the law of California, is made more difficult in this case by legislative inaction.’

To that end, the court said additional requirements for home-schoolers in other states such as standardized testing or home visits should be considered by the California Legislature.”

Michelle Malkin here goes, as always, to the heart of the matter:

“The bad news is that the teachers’ union/Big Nanny war on homeschooling never ends. Homeschoolers are a threat to their turf, a threat to their funding, a threat to their long-held and fiercely protected monopoly.”

Conservatives must expect continuing attacks on home-schooling across the nation - - - not just directly but through plausible sounding regulatory schemes. Such assaults are part of the Left’s hostility to traditional culture.

Today’s public schools (and too many fashionable private ones) fail to teach serious American history including a passing acquaintance with the debates of the constitutional convention and The Federalist as well as the business and religious history of the American people, and to advance core civic values such as patriotism. Reformers are right to underscore mathematical and scientific competence, but without civic competence in each new generation, our heritage of freedom and self-government are in jeopardy.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed