Is It Selfish to Fight for Homeschooling Freedoms? (Part 3)

"But you're different. You really do care about your kids. You really do care about education. What about the people that don't?"

Very few of them homeschool.

Some have been forced into it by the public schools. They didn't want to homeschool. They didn't understand that the public school cannot legally force them to become homeschoolers. And thus, they accepted what the public school decreed and became unwilling homeschoolers. Some of them step up to the plate and make a hearty effort to give their kids what the school wouldn't or couldn't. I hear rumors that there are those who just don't care and don't try. (Never met one.) For parents who became homeschoolers against their will and just don't care, will it help them or their kids if homeschooling regulations are increased?

Also, it seems kinda convoluted for the State to claim that "homeschoolers need regulation because some of them don't do a good job" when their "proof" and "evidence" are the families that the State coerced into being homeschoolers.

Some troubled kids struggle in school. They don't learn in school. Their parents may withdraw them from conventional school (either willingly or because the school tells them they must begin homeschooling). If those parents do a better job than the school was doing, hooray! But if they don't do any better, then can we recognize that nothing's been lost? It's not exactly like the schools have a stellar record on educating kids these days.

There's an old legal maxim: "hard cases make bad law." When laws are written to cover all the "hard cases," the laws get unwieldy. The laws then interfere with good people doing good things, without sufficiently eliminating the problems the laws were meant to solve.

The original question asked about whether we Christians should be willing to forego some of our homeschooling freedoms so that we might be of service to the hypothetical neighbor who is a homeschooled student whose parents are educationally neglecting him. I think the answer is no. I think the cost to society and to individual families would be a greater burden than we realize. If this burden were really a way to end educational neglect, then society would have to weigh the pros and cons of burdening so many families for the benefit of a few. (Maybe I should mention here a recent post about the failures of running a society on the premise of extorting self-sacrifice.)

We need to recognize that most laws develop out of a desire for somebody to do something, whether or not that something will accomplish what it aims to accomplish. We also need to recognize that there are bureaucrats who just can't stand it that there are people who aren't under their control, and they want to get control. If they can use the excuse of "helping those who are educationally neglected" as a way to control the other 99.999% of homeschoolers, then everyone loses. Except the power-hungry bureaucrats. Not even the hypothetical "educationally neglected homeschooler" would come out any better.

When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
When homeschoolers are regulated, those who "don't care about education" will find ways to avoid the regulations. Then alllll the others will have lost their right to obtain an education uniquely suited to their own children, while accomplishing nothing to help the few who were supposed to be rescued by the regulations.