The din of distant battle. There's an interesting posting, and a most interesting discussion in the comments, about home schooling, menace of, etc., at Joanne Jacobs, with lots of links. CBS TV has been laying into home schooling. Once it gets more popular here, we'll have all the same arguments, sparked off by the same media scare attacks. They'll trawl the country for a murdered home-schooled kid, and there's your episode of Panorama. Then the battle won't be so distant after all. And it's already, as reported here, been hotting up in Scotland, because statists there are more confident and meddlesome than in England.

Joanne herself comments:

Not one state requires criminal background checks of parents before they're allowed to take their newborn home from the hospital. Not one state checks parents' qualifications to raise a child. Every day, defenseless babies are sent home with parents who are addicts, alcoholics, violent, crazy and/or just plain stupid.

And then adds in a later comment:

Actually, I was being sarcastic. The implication that parents should undergo a check if they want to educate their kids at home strikes me as looney. If the parents are rotten for whatever reason, the kids already are in big trouble. And wanting to homeschool tends to be a positive sign, not an indicator of bad parenting.

But as I always say, the Be Consistent! argument can be dangerous. They're liable to respond by saying: Good Point. We should indeed have exams for all parents, with all failures surrendering their kids into the care of the state. Here, the rule must be: tell them to do the right thing, as often as they can manage, and more often than they do now.