www.roanoke.com

Linda Whitlock

Recent columns

• Seeing racism where it's not
• Sanford could still be a hero
• Skeptics or traitors?
• School freedom is elusive

From the RoundTable blog

When my daughter was in high school, she took a note authorizing her early release for a dental appointment to school one day. My daughter wasn't given to skipping school, but on this particular day, the school randomly chose her note for verification.

Did they call the parent who signed the note to check out its legitimacy? No. They called the dentist.

When my dentist's office notified me about the call, I was furious at the audacity of school administrators who assumed they had the right to bypass parents and call a dentist for information the dentist had no business giving out.

Two decades later, their chutzpah still makes me mad. But it's just one example of the myriad ways public schools have pre-empted parental authority and assumed roles that properly belong to parents.

Why have they gotten away with it? Because parents have allowed them to. Long ago, we relinquished our responsibility for our children's education to the public schools.

To be fair, we weren't given much choice in the matter. A century ago, compulsory attendance laws compelled parents to send their kids to school, and lack of money ensured public schools got most of them.

Since then, our public education system has undermined parental authority and contributed to family breakdown because, by their very nature, public schools insert a third-party authority figure -- the teacher -- between parent and child.

When communities were smaller and schools primarily local affairs, the danger that a school's influence would overshadow a parent's authority wasn't so great. Teachers likely came from and shared the same values as the community that hired them.

But, along with compulsory attendance, over time communities and schools grew larger, teacher certification requirements changed, and authority shifted from parent to school.

The parents' schedule no longer controlled the school year; the school year controlled the parents' schedule. The community no longer set academic standards; education colleges decided what teachers would learn and, so, what kids would be taught.

By the time all that happened, parents had come to accept public schooling as the natural order.

Now, in Massachusetts at least, the schools' pre-emption of parental authority can even prevent parents from opting their kids out of an objectionable curriculum. The state, you see, knows better than parents what kids need to learn.

The schools' power grab notwithstanding, if you brought these children into the world, it's your responsibility -- not the government's -- to decide what academic preparation and moral instruction they need.

Maybe that's why -- despite President Obama's speech Tuesday night wherein he named education as one of the three focal points of his plan to remake America -- education isn't a responsibility the Constitution assigns to the federal government.

The Virginia Constitution, on the other hand, does mandate a free public education for all children. No matter. Education is still the parents' province, and parents should reclaim that responsibility.

The economic crisis could provide some parents with the perfect opportunity. If one parent has been laid off from a job, now might be a great time to give home schooling a try, particularly if a child's school will soon be closing.

Home schooling parents, after all, aren't agonizing over what Roanoke or Roanoke County's budget woes will do to their local schools.

Even without a job loss, parents might want to look into home schooling as an educational option for their family.

Home schooling isn't the only route parents can take to regain control of their children's education. But home school resources are plentiful, and home schooling can work even on a tight budget.

And home schoolers no longer need feel like the odd man out. As Milton Gaither writes in the Winter 2009 edition of "Education Next," "over the last decade families of all kinds have embraced the practice."

If you're the parent of a school- aged child, maybe you should consider making your family one of them.

Whitlock, a Roanoke Times columnist, is an adjunct English professor who lives in Salem.