Some critics of homeschooling parents may suggest that they will be passing on narrow and bigoted ideas to their children. I would suggest that you do not have a right to try to prevent this from happening, nor can you prevent it even if you send your children to public schools. I would even go so far as to suggest that this is an issue of a free country vs a police state. What do I mean? Well, in a free country, as long as you obeyed the law, you can believe whatever you like. Your beliefs are none of the government's business. They have no right to tell you which of your ideas and which of your ideas are bad. Therefore, I do not believe that it is the schools' "job" to promote the good and stamp out the bad. It is a person's individual right to believe what they want, and then to try to pass their beliefs along to their children.



What about people who are prejudiced, bigoted, superstitious, etc? Many people would say that people can tell their children anything they want, as long as it is true. This brings up the question of who decides what is true? Most people would agree that there is no one in government or anywhere else whom we would trust to decide that. Therefore, I believe that we can't give schools the right to tell all children that some ideas are true and others are not. While those who approve of the ideas being taught or promoted in government schools may be glad to send their children there, people who don't approve of those ideas should have some other choice.

One of the many reasons why growing numbers of people are so passionately opposed to the public schools is that these schools are in fact acting as if someone had explicitly and legally given them the power to promote a specific set of ideas while stamping out another set of beliefs. These people believe that educational bureaucrats, at the state and federal level, largely control what schools say and do. These bureaucrats are increasingly using the schools to promote whatever ideas they happen to think will be good for the children, or the country. Yet, we've never formally decided, through any political process, to give the schools such power, nor have we ever agreed on what ideas we would like the schools to promote. In fact, there's reason to believe that large majorities of people strongly dislike many or most of the ideas that most schools promote today.

Even if everyone agreed that the schools should try to stamp out narrow and bigoted ideas, we'd still have to ask ourselves if this actually works. Clearly it doesn't. Think about it... Almost everyone in this country, except for a few rich kids, has been going to public schools for several generations now. If schools were as good as they claim to be at stamping out prejudice, then there shouldn't be any prejudice left. By simply glancing at the news, you can clearly see that there is plenty of prejudice left in this country today. In fact, I would even go so far as to argue that there is less support today than ever before for the tolerance and open-mindedness that the schools supposedly promote. Therefore, I would argue that homeschooling does not create narrow minds. In fact, in most cases it promotes more open mindedness.