While I quite agree with your assertions about the importance of the state in public education, I don’t know how committed we really are as a society to that principle.

Even the courts are torn, as especially evidenced by the Supreme Court’s 1972 Wisconsin v. Yoder decision. The justices rules that Amish children do not have the right to a public education or to anything resembling one.

This matter came to my attention through the work of Torah Bontrager, who fled her Amish community at 15 to become one of the only ex-Amish to achieve a post-graduate (and her case, Ivy League) degree.

I live surrounded by Amish communities whose children are excluded from all state education requirements. The limited education they do receive does not prepare them for life outside the Amish world even though a full 40% of them will leave that world before they marry within it.

They don’t learn adequate English. They learn no mathematics beyond arithmetic. They learn next to nothing about how science works and next to nothing about critical thinking. They don’t even stay in school (such as it is) beyond the age of 14. For the many who leave the Amish world in their late teens or early 20s, a total lack of meaningful education mostly dooms them to life on the margins.

The Supreme Court justified this child abuse by citing parental rights, by declaring that parents’ religious rights override their children’s rights to be educated.

I wrote about this some time ago, and I was shocked by the number who people who commented to staunchly defend Amish parents’ “rights” to hurt their children in the name of individual liberty.