Education & Parenting

When the student has to guess what the test writer means, or accept the teacher’s arbitrary pronouncements about what the vague problem “means,” the student “learns” not to solve math problems using his mind, but to doubt the efficacy of his mind and to become dependent on the teacher’s say-so.

Fractured political control may in some ways be slightly less-bad than centralized political control. But the only approach consistent with individual rights and with the aim of quality in education is to remove political controls from education entirely and thus to enable a free market in education to thrive.

The solution consistent with individual rights is neither to force students to pledge allegiance to a nation “under God” nor to forbid them to do so. Rather, the solution is to get government out of education altogether and leave private schools to establish their own policies on such matters.

Government funds its schools by forcibly confiscating wealth from individuals, in violation of their moral right to decide for themselves how to use their money. An inevitable consequence is that government seizes wealth from many people who do not benefit from or approve of the government schools they are forced to finance.

Last month, Ohio state senator Capri Cafaro proposed heavy regulations on all homeschooling parents in the state when she introduced “Teddy’s Law,” which would require parents or legal guardians seeking to remove children from public schools to go through background checks, have interviews conducted in their homes, and to allow…

SkyView Academy, a government-funded charter school in Colorado, recently cut ties with a religious charity after the American Humanist Association threatened to sue over the charity’s involvement, as the Denver Post reports. As part of a community service project, students helped the Samaritan’s Purse organization send “shoeboxes filled with hygiene…

Daniel Wahl reviews The Emergent Reader Series, by Laura Appleton-Smith. emergent-reader.jpg

Picks up where Thompson’s essay “The New Abolitionism: Why Education Emancipation is the Moral Imperative of Our Time” (TOS Winter 2012–13) left off; asks and answers questions such as: What would a fully free market in education look like? How would it work? Would it provide quality, affordable education for all children, including those from lower-income families? If so, how?

Kevin Douglas reviews The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, by James Tooley.

To the Founding Fathers, “equality” meant all citizens have equal rights and thus should have equal standing before the law. To today’s so-called liberals, “equality” means everyone should have equal opportunities in life. A recent illustration of this can be seen in an article John Cook wrote for Gawker, “There’s…