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Public Schools
Private Schools (Vouchers) Homeschooling News Archive |
The public schools are the "ground zero" of the culture war. Due to economic constraints, attendance is essentially compulsory and religious conservatives feel that the schools are an increasingly inhospitable environment. Religious conservatives feel that the schools restrict their childrens' rights of religious observance while pushing a 'secular humanist' agenda of sex education, religion-free classrooms, and 'situation ethics'. The offenses of the public schools in the eyes of religious conservatives, then, are of both omission and commission.
On a historical note, conservative Protestants had seen the public schools as an ally in the first part of the century, where they served as a tool of assimilation for the children of Catholics. Of course, the King James Bible was read in the classrooms in those days, and things were *quite* different. The changing environment of the public schools has changed a feeling of alliance between conservative Christians and their public schools to one of betrayal.
Homeschooling is by no means exclusively a phenomenon among religious conservatives. Indeed, many parents homeschool their children for what could be considered "liberal" reasons. Regardless, the homeschooling movement has grown tremendously in the last ten years, and many see it as an "escape valve" for parents fed up with the public schools.