Breaking the public education system’s chokehold
Horace Mann, the founder of what we know now as the public education system, was not shy about his goals: He viewed education as a means to force ideological uniformity and believed parents should be treated as obstacles to that goal. We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education, he said, are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.
Decades have passed, but Mann s views continue to be the foundation of the education establishment. Public schools actively block parents from being involved in curricular choices and try to punish them when they push back. In Maryland, Oregon, and Michigan, for example, parents who have requested schools public records regarding the curriculum taught in classrooms (information to which they are legally entitled) have been forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars just to access the materials. One parent in Rochester, Michigan, said the school district tried to charge her a public records fee of $172,951.67 after she filed a FOIA request.