Friday, January 07, 2011

Court forces schooling decision

The Christian Science Monitor reports:
When divorced parents disagree on whether a child should be home-schooled, how should courts weigh the issues?

It’s a difficult job, especially when part of the dispute is over the religious views that one parent is imparting to the child.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday in a case that pits a mother’s desire to continue home-schooling her daughter against a father’s concerns that the religion-based home-school environment is not giving her broad enough exposure to other ideas and life skills. ...

Home schooling is often a matter of dispute between separated parents, says Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Ore. He has served as a witness in such cases, and in his view, “the vast majority of guardians ad litem are biased clearly in favor of institutional public schooling.”
Yes, of course the guardians ad litem are biased. They should not be making the decisions. There ought to be a compromise to meet the wishes of both parents, without some outsider imposing his views.

It might seem like homeschooling is the one the one irreconcilable issue where there is no possibility of compromise between parents with joint custody, but that is just not true. Here is California we have many students who are homeschooled part time. I even know some who attend our local public school part time.

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