Expert Witness on Education - Bangor Baptist Church vs. State of Maine; pg3

If local, state, and federal government intrusions into parenthood had thus been constrained in the past, far more mothers and fathers could have improved the education of their young by opting out of our enormously controversial history standards; deceptive science demands that offend people of deep religious conviction; mathematics programs that emphasize often-meandering discussion and neglect calculation skills; reading programs that ignore word-deciphering strategies and great literature; bilingual programs that prevent Hispanics from becoming bilingual, multiculturism that castigates our founding fathers while lauding cultures with ceremonies dripping in human blood, discussions permeated with moral relativity, and a whole lot more. Recent evidence on home-schooling, private schools, and public charter schools suggests to me that opting out of public education’s regulatory morass as much as possible is a promising strategy.

Here is an astonishing inconsistency, partly explained by historical events that I cannot discuss here: We let government decide, almost without limit, what will be fed into the minds and hearts of impressionable children, but we refuse to let government decide (by controlling mass media) what will be fed into the minds and hearts of reasonably sophisticated adults. Which feeding is more dangerous, do you suppose?

Government regulation of how young people are prepared for adulthood is especially alarming in the light of the continual expansion of time most youth spend in government schools. Some early childhood experts now rejoice, quite accurately I think, that a public system of education-and-care for the period from birth to age six (a lovely new empire for early-childhood educators, if you will) is developing rapidly.

We need a well-thought-through legal challenge to government usurpation of parenthood, especially one behind which all organizations dedicated to the family unite forcefully. Government should be required to produce evidence behind its choices of programs and standards to be imposed on all children, and when evidence is lacking, to back off. Opinions on what knowledge is of most worth, or even essential to good citizenship, have a long history of disagreement among notable thinkers, and of evidence that many people do just fine, thanks, without learning what some experts pronounce utterly essential.

But to finish with Bangor Baptist:

Fighting emotions and knowing the state was intent on tripping me up, I found the tricky, seemingly endless cross-examination stressful, but was glad to know my testimony was sufficiently alarming to warrant such effort and expense. The darts went astray. William B. Ball mentions Bangor in his statement (see Photocopies) about turning cases into victories. He engaged me later in his three final cases in this area of law (in Michigan, North Carolina, and Nebraska), and attorneys who worked with him continued to choose me as their expert witness as well.

In his 1993 book titled Mere Creatures of the State,” Ball said the three dart-flingers in Bangor “expounded educational theory exquisitely,” but Erickson “turned the case from the world of theory to the world of reality,” and “satisfied the court” in so doing. I’ll settle for that.

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