Your "freedom" is allowing kids to be abused since they don't have the checks of other adults being able to see them.
A bare minimum "are the kids physically ok" doesn't remove any of your freedom unless you consider starving and beating your kids a "Freedom" you care about.
For any type of education, you can point to instances of abuse. For home schooling, for public schools, for private schools, for religious schools, for universities. Kids are regularly shot to death in numbers in public schools, for example. People have been beaten and abused in private schools.
What they are trying to do is to use scare stories about home schooling to scare people into giving up their freedom. It's the same tactic that's used all the time to get people to give up their rights, to get us into wars, and so on.
I want more freedom, not less. I won't let authoritarian fear tactics change that.
No I it is a reasonable assumption based on how the OP responded to my comment.
I said:
> A bare minimum "are the kids physically ok" doesn't remove any of your freedom unless you consider starving and beating your kids a "Freedom" you care about.
Which they responded:
> I want more freedom, not less. I won't let authoritarian fear tactics change that.
They are trying to justify "more freedom" at the cost of children being abused. The only reasonable reason you would do this, when all I am asking for is basic checks to make sure a child is ok, is that you yourself which to starve and abuse children.
There is NO other valid reason to fight against what should be a basic protection for children. That reason doesn't exist. Especially when your only defense is "fear tactics".
> No I it is a reasonable assumption based on how the OP responded to my comment.
No, it is not any kind of "reasonable assumption".
You are, quite simply, lying. You do understand that lying doesn't really work very well when the person's original words are still there for all to see, right?
> The only reasonable reason you would do this, when all I am asking for is basic checks to make sure a child is ok, is that you yourself which to starve and abuse children.
I was debating on wether or not I was even going to bother responding to this because I feel like the votes are clear...
This is wild. You're comparing killing someone without evidence to protecting children.
Here is the thing, you seem to be assuming I am saying go check in with this officer or something and have my child checked on.
No, that is ridiculous.
I am talking simple things so other adults know your child is even alive. Requiring that they go somewhere for their tests. Maybe physical activity, other completely normal things. Requiring socialization. Idk, something.
> By the way, no one put you in charge of deciding what "basic protections for children" should be. In fact, no one put you in charge of anything.
Last I checked this is a forum and we were having a discussion. I never claimed to have an authority I just question how someone keeps arguing against protecting children without giving a single reasonable reason against it.
Also I would consider basic protections making sure the kid was alive and the kid was fed and not physically hurt. That is such an incredibly low bar that I do not understand how we are having this discussion at all. Maybe instead of attacking me you offer an alternative to this real problem? I would love to hear a solution that we can actually talk about.
I have been accused of fear mongering in this thread and yet it seems that while we have evidence that some parents are using the loopholes in the home schooling system to be able to do this, you don't want to do anything about it.
I have been accused of fear mongering, and yet the people like you responding are using a "slippery slop" argument of surveillance or "Freedom" that is not a valid argument.
> Your "freedom" is allowing kids to be abused since they don't have the checks of other adults being able to see them.
At what cost? Innocent until proven guilty means that we don't treat people like criminals until you have a reasonable suspicion at a minimum.
You don't get to load spyware on everyone's computer because someone, somewhere, committed a crime on a computer. You don't get to remove all end to end cryptography so you can snoop. No, just no. Our society is flirting with these ideas, and they are BAD ideas.
On balance, the abuse happening in homeschooling household is microscopic compared to the abuse happening in current public schools. Both the every day kind and the dramatic makes the news murders and suicides. Put them on even scales rather than putting the specs of dust on the other side under a microscope.
There is a major difference between "make the investigation of crimes easy" and being able to even know they happened in the first place.
Children are incredibly vulnerable and we should be able to put basic protections in place.
It is not surveillance to require in some form that an adult in the system sees your child on some regular basis. This is something that your child simply being in school provides.
Either a way for an adult to notice that something is very wrong or a safe place for a child to report something.
> It is not surveillance to require in some form that an adult in the system sees your child on some regular basis. This is something that your child simply being in school provides.
That is surveillance in the same what that checking in with a probation officer is a form of surveillance. Just like encryption I'm not obligated to live my life in a way that makes detecting crimes easy or possible.
Your "freedom" is allowing kids to be abused since they don't have the checks of other adults being able to see them.
A bare minimum "are the kids physically ok" doesn't remove any of your freedom unless you consider starving and beating your kids a "Freedom" you care about.