Home Schooling, As An Example

Pajamas Media has a commentary on the attempt in CA to require homeschooling parents to have a teaching credential.

Parents who homeschool stress how much better children taught at home generally do academically and socially, and how they win so many national awards. They don't mention the dark underside of significantly ill parents who keep their children isolated from all non-family contact as a control measure. Opponents of homeschooling do the opposite, dwelling on the sick outliers and failing to mention the generally superior education homeschoolers get. I see both.

The point of conflict is usually around what hoops one has to jump through to homeschool, and who gets to make the rules. Parents insist with some justification that the education of their children is their job, and the state should have no say in it. The subtext of this argument is that once the state gets to make the rules, they will add in requirements of what must be taught, and these can potentially conflict with parents' values - often the reason they pulled their kids from public school to begin with. For their side of the argument, schools, boards of education, and the whole earth catalog of educators claim that they have two main interests: preventing abuses and insuring that all society's children get a fair launch.

This provides an excellent illustration of how well-meant government supervision can get out of control. To solve the problem of really sick or neglectful parents, requiring some minimal application and supervision is exactly the right solution. People who are controlling and pathological are very likely to balk at this point, standing on the principle of government non-interference, much beloved by libertarians. This solution exactly fits this problem. But...

The first difficulty is that some others who are not pathological and controlling also balk at this permission-seeking, and deeply resent being branded as some sort of kook or sicko. The fact that evil people hide behind a good idea does not discredit the idea itself. Wolves always hide in sheep's clothing; hiding in wolves' clothing would be pointless.

The second problem ultimately cuts even deeper. It is the natural pattern for power, control, and regulation to increase. Education bureaucrats will naturally keep finding new requirements. We needn't paint this worse than it is. Most of the requirements will be fairly sensible or at worst cumbersome and innocuous. But all will have unforeseen consequences, good and bad.

Third, and deepest of all, there is a vein of pathology that runs through education bureaucracies as well, the mirror-image of the pathological parents. There are enough people who don't like boys (or girls) or religion or independence or western civilization or even children in general that it leaks over into all decisions, all regulations.

Bureaucracies solve problems by going after the low-hanging fruit, and often get that first part right. It is the reapplication of one-size-fits-all solutions to all possible problems that eventually makes them inconvenient, then cumbersome, then useless, then a problem in themselves.