Sep 08 2009
Freedom of Education?
(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
A court in New Hampshire, recently ordered that home-schooled Amanda Kurowski be sent to public school. The order signed by Family Court Justice Lucinda V. Sandler says the 10-year-old’s Christian faith could use some shaking up—and that the local public school is just the place to do it. So while the child’s lawyers at the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal outfit, filed a motion asking the judge to reconsider, last week Amanda started fifth grade at a local public school.
Amanda’s mother has had primary custody over her daughter since she and Amanda’s father divorced 10 years ago. The father has had long-standing complaints about the effect of home-schooling on his daughter’s “socialization,” even though Amanda has already taken classes at the school and participated in extracurricular activities. But the order appears to be based on the guardian ad litem’s worry about Amanda’s “rigidity on faith.” The order also accepts the same guardian’s conclusion that Amanda belongs in a public school because she “would be best served by exposure to different points of view at a time in her life when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior and cooperation in order to select, as a young adult, which of those systems will best suit her own needs.”
In a state whose motto is “Live Free or Die,” this is an extraordinary line of reasoning. Just how extraordinary might best be appreciated by contemplating the opposite scenario: the reaction that would ensue were a court to order a young girl out of a public school and into an evangelical one so she might gain “exposure” to other “systems of belief.”
We are seeing an ever increasing encroachment of political agenda into religious freedom in this country and regardless of your religious preferences stories like this one should chill us to the bone.
How long will it be before they start telling us which churches our children can attend, or maybe which Bibles we can read, or how long till they tell us that we can no longer send our children to a Christian Day School? While all of this sound far fetched and paranoid and it may well be, the fact remains that up till now I thought Amandas story was to.
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That’s absolutly crazy. How’s that constitutional? A judge imposing her beliefs over a child’s parent for the sake of religion is way out of line.
Sounds like Lucinda is messing in RELIGION. Isn’t that against the law? Will we end up with children turning in their parents because Mom wants them to say prayers at night? Are we promoting exclusively freedom of non-religion or anti-religion?
I didn’t see any credit to William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal where this same story appeared on Sept. 7, 2009 except for the final two paragraphs in your post?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020344-0104574398963953876266.html#mod=djempersonal