Utterly Meaningless

I wonder what the results would be if you changed the question to: Should homeschooling be a constitutionally protected right?

I imagine the results would be significantly different. I’m more interested, though, in where the 86% of folks who agreed think the right lies? 9th? 10th? 33 1/3?

Most would say the first, I bet.

A lot of them will probably say the right lies in The Bible.

I figure the closest we got to homeschooling in the Constitution is the 10th amendment: “Anything not in the constitution is none of the fed’s dang business and is up to the states, until such time that the feds make a power play and claim everything under the sun impacts interstate commerce.”

I could, perhaps, buy the 9th Amendment. But not the 10th which really says and does nothing.

John Holt wrote a piece that suggested the first, fourth, ninth and fourteenth amendments were all helpful. . . but Paul Danaher sniffs at that and says Holt overstated the case. I see home education as sort of like privacy and tobacco control laws — not exactly in the constitution but arguably consistent?

Daryl, I love your version of the tenth! So true, so true. . .

Rob’s?

The right to homeschool is not in the Constitution for a very good reason: it would never have occurred to the authors that someone would need, someday, to seek explicit protection in the highest law of the land for the right to educate their own children. They would as soon have thought of including, in so many words, the right to feed them. Homeschooling is not a right but a duty.

I (mostly) agree with Speedwell. It just wouldn’t have occurred to the framers that such a clause would become necessary, since they (obviously) didn’t foresee government schools.

Shoot, yes, I see it was Rob’s — good one, Rob.