“Education, after all, is typically described as a core, and possibly the core, state responsibility . . . Homeschooling is now such an entrenched practice, recriminalization is not a viable option in any event.” ~ Robin L. West, Georgetown University Law Center

Not a “viable option?” Well at least I can rest peacefully tonight knowing that jack-booted thugs won’t be knocking my daughter’s door down any time soon to arrest her for teaching “the state’s children.” (My daughter would want to know where the state was when she was going through those labor pains to deliver “their” children. By the way Professor, the youngest one has something stinky in her diaper – could you lend a hand here?) Professor West thinks that more government regulation of homeschooling is a good idea:

As the political philosopher and homeschool critic Robert Reich has persuasively argued, curricular review would give the state a way to ensure that the academic content is such as to protect the children’s interest in both acquiring the necessary skills for active, autonomous, and responsible citizenship in adulthood, and in being exposed to diverse and more liberal ways.

Well, gee whiz, that approach certainly has worked wonders in the public schools, hasn’t it? Diverse and more liberal – that’s what this is really all about. Professor West doesn’t like the fact that “the state” is losing the opportunity to indoctrinate OUR children.  Maybe she’s bucking for Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. More here.

President Obama wants kids in school more hours per day, more days per year.

“We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day,” Obama said. “That calendar may have once made sense, but today, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage.”

Please excuse the “un-American” children at 4:22.

(Cross-posted at Underdog Soldier)