"That the state is in some way a privileged player in the question of children’s education [is a] faulty assumption."

There is little evidence that home-schooled children are subjected to widespread abuse or neglect, and some evidence that home-schooled children perform as well or better than publicly educated children by a number of measures of assessment. Yet, on the grounds that abuse can happen and occasionally does in the homeschooling environment, Fineman, for example, draws the astonishingly strong conclusion that “public schooling should be universal and mandatory.

What [URL=http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/fatality.cfm#groups] the evidence shows[/URL] is that nearly 76% of all child fatalities occur before the age of 4, and 69% of those were caused by one or both parents. If regulating home education was about preventing child abuse, the state should begin at infancy to engage in the general oversight of families by child care professionals.

This is an important article, if for no other reason than the author demonstrates a deep understanding of how covenant relationships work, or what he calls “the ontology of children and the family.” I hope many home schoolers, not to mention all parents, will pay careful attention to this. Understanding how these relationships work is crucial to understanding how the child’s good is the perfection of the parent’s good and vice versa.

If we could grasp the real idea of covenant relationships, it would go a long way toward routing out unworkable and unrealistic ideas of individualism and communitarianism in churches and political bodies.