This year is the 160th anniversary of public education in California. That might seem to be a landmark — a cause of celebration in some circles. However, the dream that motivated the pioneers of taxpayer-supported schools in the mid-19th century has evolved into a nightmare of illiteracy, chaos, incompetence and indoctrination.

In 160 years, California and, indeed, the nation have gone from the one-room schoolhouse — which was considered a privileged place of learning for motivated students, some of whom had no parents to teach them — to a mandatory state-directed detention of millions of young people from ages 4 through 18 on a daily basis.

There are essentially two purposes to these government education camps: to provide jobs for education professionals and to control and pacify the population by churning out massive numbers of robotlike serfs and subjects incapable of thinking for themselves or demanding their birthright to be self-governing individuals in a free society.

The core purpose of the California Department of Education — a lumbering, corrupt bureaucracy that seizes more than $36 billion annually from 35 million taxpayers — redistributing that amount for the supposed benefit of fewer than 7 million students is "continuous improvement of student achievement, with a specific focus on closing achievement gaps."

By any objective standard of measurement, there has been a continuous decline in student achievement during the past 30 years. So the California Department of Education has focused on the second half of its mission: "closing achievement gaps." This is bureaucratic doublespeak for reaching equality. If all students are mediocre, achievement gaps have been closed. If all students are morally bankrupt and incapable of expressing a coherent thought, the achievement gap has been closed.

I give you this gloomy background as a preface to an alarming story broken in WorldNetDaily earlier this year, when a state judge essentially ruled home schooling illegal.

Whether this ruling is overturned or not, educational fascism has arrived in California already. The state education code requires that home-schooling parents do one of the following to teach their own children:

— Establish a private school.

— Employ a state-certified tutor.

— Enroll in a public- or private-school independent study program.

How do I put this delicately? That's not home schooling!

In just 160 years, California has gone from providing a voluntary program of educational alternatives to forced schooling by state-licensed authorities.

This is not only immoral and repugnant but also a violation of the religious freedom of every Bible believer who takes seriously the commandments of God to parents to train up their own children in the ways of the Lord.

It's no wonder state authorities whose primary goal is equality of underachievement want to ban home schooling. That's because it works! It produces highly literate achievers, who do well on standardized tests, win spelling, math and science bees, and pummel their colleagues in debates and writing competitions. You can't have equality of underachievement so long as home schooling is permitted.

That is the principal reason home-schoolers are the No. 1 enemy of the National Education Association, the racketeering labor union that partners with government to promote its membership's agenda — a radical one that transcends jobs and higher pay for teachers to the socialist extremes of political correctness.

Yet that there is even a question in the minds of ordinary Americans today that parents have an absolute, unquestioned right to direct all the teaching of their own children illustrates just how close we are to losing all our freedom.

The coercive public education laws on the books today have a strong parallel in history. They resemble, in striking detail, those crafted by the Nazis in Adolf Hitler's Germany. In fact, that legacy in Germany today results in parents being arrested for violating laws against home schooling that never were expunged from the books after the World War II liberation of Europe from the Nazi jackboots.

But who is going to liberate us? There is no allied force on the horizon to storm the camps of state indoctrination, chaos and incompetence. There are no liberators on their way to free parents from paying for this horror known euphemistically as public education.

They would have been here by now if only they had been educated to value freedom, independence, self-reliance, limited government, personal responsibility and achievement.

To find out more about Joseph Farah and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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