Following a flood of worried email and my own children’s concerns based on news stories in, of all places the Los Angeles Times, there is good news to report: home schooling is still legal in California.
The best summary of the issue is found here. The bottom line is that if your child is enrolled in a “private school,” which is what most home school situations are in California, your situation is secure.
The HSLDA (which defends the right to home school) does point out troubling language in the ruling.
The difficulty for me is that it is hard to see that anybody has a “constitutional right” to home school. We do have rights that will allow most sane people to home school, but traditional Christians must avoid the modern inflating of “constitutional rights language” to include every single thing we want to do.
Government did not give me my rights as a human being and I don’t like the eagerness of some conservatives to justify every thing they do with law.
I don’t need a constitution to tell me that God gave me the right to life, liberty, and the ownership of private property. The sanctity of my home does not depend on the state and the state had better stay away.
Of course, we should always be ready to defend our right to make the best decision for own children, but for the moment this right seems reasonably secure in California.
Bluntly, we do ourselves no good if we overreact to false information, though when that false information appears in, what has been until recently, the most prestigious media outline in Southern California, there is good reason for the initial overreaction.
We now have even more reason to check every story in the Times . . .
Whenever we hear such a story, as home schoolers Hope and I use it as a chance to check out what we are doing with our children academically. Is the quality good? Would it withstand critical scrutiny? This is a good exercise and does no harm, if it is done reasonably and not in a “stressed out” manner.
Home schoolers at a high school level are concerned about the quality of education they offer their children, because they are their children! Of course not every family can or should home school and many of us cannot home school all the subject areas without help.
We might also need help transitioning our children to college.
Sometimes when looking at our own gifts Hope and I have had to admit we need help. Fortunately we found such help in our own area.
When Hope and I struggled to maintain quality in our own junior high and high school program we found the Biola STAR program and especially Torrey Academy helpful for our oldest children. As our oldest gets ready to head for college, we are happy with the help that our son received academically and spiritually from these fine programs.