Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

How secure are you feeling about your freedom to home school your children? Today on Home School Heartbeat, Michael Smith, talks with Tom Washburne, about a dangerous new challenge to the right to home educate.

Michael Smith:


We're talking this week about a paper recently delivered by Dr. Rob Reich, a Stanford University professor, in which he challenges the fundamental right of parents to determine how their children should be educated. Please tell our listeners how freedom of religion impacts this threat to home schooling.


Tom Washburne:


As we were discussing yesterday, home schooling rests on the constitutional rights of parents to raise children. If the government is going to regulate home schooling, it must be careful not to run afoul of these parental rights. This legal framework has guided courts and legislators since at least the 1920s. With such a bulwark in place, it is very difficult for the government to place regulations on home education. For many, this fact -- that parents can educate their children without the government, without the educational elite, in a Christian environment, is simply unacceptable. But the Constitution is in the way and a real problem for them. To counter the constitutional right of parents, Reich needs a new analysis. And it is in the right of children that he turns. He wants to assert that children have a basic right to autonomy in their education. He argues that they should have the right to choose in their education morals and beliefs different than their parents - and that the state should ensure that this choice right of children is enforced. Were a court to seize on this theory, Mike, home education could be in peril.


Michael Smith:


Tom, I'll be interested to hear how the legal and constitutional arguments go against his arguments tomorrow.