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Kentucky's Proposal To
Raise Compulsory School Attendance Age to 18 -- Who Stands to Benefit?
by Theresa Fritz Camoriano
As noted in
our previous issue, legislation has been proposed to raise the age for
compulsory school attendance in Kentucky from age16 to 18. This includes the requirement that a person under 18 years
old who has missed nine days of school without permission or who has
dropped out of school will lose his or her driver's license.
Before
deciding whether to raise the age for compulsory attendance in school,
perhaps our legislators should first consider why we have compulsory
attendance laws in the first place. Who
benefits from these laws?
The facts
are pretty clear that compulsory attendance laws do not benefit parents or
children. The people
who have the primary authority and responsibility for raising and
educating children are the parents. When
the state establishes compulsory attendance laws, it takes away the
parents' right to do what they think is best for their children.
This benefits neither parents nor children.
For example, we have a seventeen-year-old daughter who sometimes
does not complete all her school assignments as we think she should. We have told her that, if she does not make the necessary
effort to succeed in school, we will no longer pay her school tuition and
will expect her to work full time and pay room and board.
We think the state should respect our rights as parents to lay out
these stark options for her. The
state should not force us to send our daughter to school if we think she
would benefit more from the experience of working and earning a living. If the state takes away our ability to set out those clear
options for her, then we will have lost considerable control over our
daughter that we need as parents in order to do what we believe is best
for her.
Do the
all-knowing legislators in Frankfort think they know our daughter better
than we do, so they should be making those kinds of decisions in our
place? Are they then willing
to take on the responsibility that should go with that authority?
Where were the state legislators last night when she was sick?
Why weren’t they helping me clean up the mess?
Where is the bureaucrat to reassure her, help her plan, encourage
her, go over homework assignments, and work through the daily struggles
and challenges with her? Strange
-- the state only seems to be able to hold a gun to our heads, not to do
the things that really need to be done in order to help our daughter
succeed. Thanks, but our
family could do without that kind of help.
The reality
is that the state can never take the place of parents, and, the more it
attempts to do so, the worse matters become.
When we establish a legal arrangement on the premise that parents
are incompetent to raise their own children, we are in big trouble as a
society. Unless parents have
proven themselves to be very abusive, the state should butt out!
And, if the parents are abusive, the state should remove the child
from the parents' control and find new parents as quickly as possible.
Many people
do not appreciate the value of an education until they have tried to make
it in the world without one. Only
then do they have the proper perspective that will encourage them to make
an effort to succeed in school. They
should be allowed to obtain that perspective as quickly as possible so
they can get back to learning. Prolonging
their agony in the formal school setting is wasting precious time. If a student who hated school were to drop out, work for a
while, then find that he wanted more education, he would be much more
likely to learn than if he were simply forced against his will to sit in a
classroom. Students who do
not want to be in school also frequently create disruptions that prevent
others, who really do want to learn, from being able to make the most of
their time in school. Teachers
often complain that, because of a couple of disruptive students, they end
up spending more of their time on discipline than on education.
So, not only do compulsory attendance laws harm the students who
would be better off outside of the school setting, they also harm the
students who are really trying to learn in school.
Compulsory
attendance laws turn schools into prisons, and a prison atmosphere is not
conducive to learning. Instead
of students' appreciating the opportunity for an education, they resent
being forced to be in school. It
is one thing for a parent, who loves his child and knows what is best for
the child, to force the child to attend school, but it is quite another
for a policeman with a gun to come and force the parent to send the child
to school. This is not the
kind of atmosphere we want to foster if we really care about educating
children.
Since
compulsory attendance laws do not appear to be good for children and
parents, perhaps we should begin to ask why some people support them so
vehemently and why, in Kentucky, are people pushing to raise the age for
compulsory attendance? Could
the impetus possibly be coming from the people who benefit from the money
that flows from each child's attendance in school -- namely public school
administrators and teachers -- rather than people who really care about
children? Most government
school funding is based on attendance -- the more students attend school,
the more money the school receives. We
ought to consider that the desire to turn the guns on our parents and
children, forcing the parents to send their children to school, may be
based primarily on a desire to receive that money rather than on a desire
to be sure the child receives a proper education.
It should be noted that the current proposed legislation even
eliminates the previous requirement that the school district provide an
alternative type of education for dropouts before the state can take away
the student's driver's license. This
appears to indicate that the concern is really about the money, not about
the student.
If we really
cared about educating people, we would realize that each individual learns
differently and at a different pace. Instead of providing a
one-size-fits-all product (government school) and then pointing guns to
force people to consume that product, we ought to allow people to take
their education dollars to places that might serve them better or respect
their right to take time away from formal education if the parents think
that is best. A child who is
unsuccessful in a traditional education program might do very well in an
apprenticeship program or in the many other types of programs that would
spring up if people had more control over their education dollars.
As Walter
Williams said in his talk in Cincinnati last week on school choice, if our
local grocery store were selling spoiled meat full of maggots, we would
take our money elsewhere, and that store would either have to improve or
go out of business. Shouldn't
we have the same kind of option with our children's education?
If
legislators' concern were really about the children rather than the
government institutions and the people who benefit financially from those
institutions, they would put away the compulsion and the guns and begin to
search for ways to allow parents to shop freely for what is best for their
children. They would not put parents on the receiving end of a gun,
forcing them to send their children back to the institutions where they
continually fail. The
beneficiaries of compulsory attendance laws are incompetent teachers and
administrators -- not students. People
who really care about children should know better.
Recent
related articles:
"It is
a crime of crimes to compel pupils to attend schools where the teacher
dare not teach moral laws," begins R. C. Hoiles' great indictment of
what he called, 44 years ago, "gun run schools."
http://www.sepschool.org/Edlib/v3n2/21
ways.html
Walter
Williams touts choice at Cincinnati school fair
http://enquirer.com/editions/2001/01/25/
loc_columnist_to_tout.html
The System Is The Problem
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/markovich
1.html
The state vs. families: The kids aren't all right
http://www.free-market.net/spotlight/fami
lies/
Mother cries
foul in chicken-finger-as-gun suspension
http://www.dallasnews.com/texas_south
west/276427_jonesboro_01te.html
Optimism:
School Liberation is gaining.
Marshall Fritz writes why he thinks School Liberation is moving toward
victory.
http://www.sepschool.org/Other/Fritz_
Winning.htm
Fritz claims Bush's Education plan full of contradictions, and even worse,
based on invalid premise.
http://www.sepschool.org/Other/Fritz_bold
_new_vision.htm
Milwaukee choice plan as Bush model
http://www.greenbaynewschron.com/page
.html?article=106127
Teachers respond yea and nay to Bush plan, including vouchers
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/
01/30/fp15s1-csm.shtml
Under fire from educrats, Edison charter in San Francisco may go
public again, despite its success
http://www.examiner.com/news/default
.jsp?story=edison.0125
Charter school firm must pass the parent test
http://www.nypostonline.com/news/region
alnews/22473.htm
Financier Icahn behind one of newly approved NY charter schools
(Site requires registration.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/25/nyreg
ion/25CHAR.html
The blueprint for how to create a charter school http://www.nydailynews.com/2001-01-26/
News_and_Views/City_Beat/a-97380.asp
Bush's education plan
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/bush
education.html
Michigan schools prove competition works
http://www.acton.org/resources/comment/
comment.html
The next chapter in American education
by William J. Bennett
http://www.empoweramerica.org/ea/servlet/
dispatcher/Articlewebcmd?ACTION=get
ArticleContent&articeId=310
Inside Bush's school plan
http://www.nypostonline.com/postopinion
/opedcolumnists/20953.htm
Competition and education
http://www.drhurd.com/news-updater/
archives/25January2001.html
Bush and
education: on the offense
http://reason.com/ml/ml012501.html
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