Part 7 of the Build an Ark series
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Our Foundation: Parental Rights and the Right to Own Education
The “we” of Education Independence exists to protect and promote a specific conviction: parents alone hold the authority to decide how their children are educated. This claim rests on a principled foundation, not on how any individual family exercises that authority. Authority is not earned by choosing the right method or achieving strong outcomes. This authority is secured simply by who holds the right to decide.
We are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights, and among them is parental authority, because responsibility and right are two sides of the same coin. What God gives responsibility for, God gives the right to. Governments are instituted to secure that right, not to grant it.
Additionally, when parents fund their family’s education themselves, they are the ones who own it. Ownership is not figurative. It is literal, earned through purchase.
Without ownership, you are left to request access from the legitimate owner. In the case of publicly funded education, the legitimate owner is the public or the collective through their representation. Access granted by the legitimate owner can be revoked at any time the political winds shift.
Everything that follows in this piece exists to keep responsibility, right, and ownership together as essential and to keep these ideas from conceptually sliding into mere preference.
The Line That Holds Us Together
A “we” holds together when it stays fixed on that clear boundary question, who owns this space, and stays out of what is downstream, how this space is used.
When those two things blur, the “we” begins to fracture.
What Belongs to the “We” and What Does Not
Two of the Education Independence pillars define the boundary: Independent Parents and Independent Funding, as laid out in “What Is Our ‘We’?” For our purposes, these pillars are not preferences open to negotiation, because they are foundational to justifying whether freedom exists at all.
The two other pillars name the consequences for society: Independent Pursuit and Independent Ideas. A society where the pursuit of ideas is free from state control is healthier than one where it is not. Unfortunately, the only alternative is a government monopoly on thought.
How any given family exercises their freedom, which method, which idea, is a matter between that family and God. It is not a matter for this “we” to weigh in on. Our “we” is focused on independence itself.
Developing virtuous ways to exercise freedom and providing accountability to pursue those paths have a right time and place. There are many rooms in the metaphorical ark dedicated to various forms and methods of equipping, but how a family uses their independence is not where we, in the Education Independence Ark, draw the line of belonging.
A Cautionary Tale from the Homeschool Movement
The homeschool movement has been navigating the lines of belonging for quite some time. Teasing out where to draw those lines has been a subject of intense debate, and the case study of this debate offers examples of what happens when the lines between protecting boundaries and prescribing what to do within those boundaries have been blurred.
The movement as a whole has navigated a constantly evolving landscape. What began as an endeavor with minimal support and extreme personal investment has, in many places, developed into a climate with an overwhelmingly large array of options and support, with varying degrees of direct parental involvement and a plethora of options for delegation.
How the Lines Got Blurred
Without a consistently shared definition, many organizations have found themselves navigating tensions around deciding who is “in” and who is “not in.” In some cases, families were indirectly excluded because the way they owned, governed, and directed their family’s education looked different from the experience and preferences of earlier homeschool pioneers. At times, the focus has shifted from holding firmly to why we have this freedom to differing expectations around how that freedom is used.
In other places, organizations have had to navigate an overcorrection toward excessive inclusion because they lacked clearly defined boundaries. As the landscape has broadened, questions of ownership, whether the family or the state ultimately governs the homeschool, have sometimes been treated as secondary or assumed rather than clearly addressed. Yet those questions matter deeply, because shifts in funding structures can affect the very basis of the freedom being exercised.
To be fair, part of this challenge is that the movement has attempted to be dual-purpose, trying to address both the political boundaries and the family stewardship of what happens within those boundaries simultaneously. Said another way, organizations within the movement have sought to defend freedom itself while also helping families learn how to use that freedom well. Those are both good aims, but they are not identical tasks, and they are not always best addressed in the same space.
The Drift towards Prescription
These ditches, taken together, have caused many within the homeschool movement to experience a kind of tension between unnecessary exclusion and unwise inclusion, often because there has not always been a clearly articulated, widely shared set of principles guiding the whole. In that environment, there has been a natural pull toward policies appealing to:
- positive outcome data,
- performance-based merit,
- policy preferences about what families ought to do with their freedom, and
- what support families might receive,
rather than toward the foundational questions of authority and ownership.
Each of these substitutes points to something real, but none of them is the actual ground for the freedom being claimed. Take the merit argument. If homeschoolers are exceptional, if the data is strong, if outcomes outperform the alternatives, then surely that justifies the freedom to continue. This reasoning runs backward. Exceptionalism was never the precedent for freedom. Freedom does not depend on performing well, and a movement that ties its case to outcomes is one bad data cycle away from losing it, because it has quietly agreed to hold freedom on loan against performance rather than to own it outright.
The pull toward policy preferences carries a different danger. It shifts the question from whether families are free to what they should do with that freedom. That is not a question the movement has the authority to answer. Once advocacy tolerates prescribing how freedom ought to be used (submitting records, testing, portfolios, pursuing a particular outcome), it has stopped defending freedom and allowed the boundary to be managed by someone else.
When Outcomes Replaced Ownership
The pull toward support and resources runs into a subtler problem, one that hides inside a single word: entitlement. Families are entitled to freedom. It is rightfully theirs, already secured, not something they must qualify for. Without the anchor of ownership held clearly in view, entitlement quietly shifts meaning. It stops referring to what is rightfully owed and starts referring to whatever would be helpful, convenient, or desired: support, funding, access, as though wanting something were the same as being owed it.
None of this happened out of bad faith. These ditches are the natural result of building a movement in real time, without always pausing to name what should stay fixed and what could be left open. This is not a criticism of those who have labored faithfully within the movement. Many have navigated these complexities with great care and conviction. Rather, this history highlights an opportunity for greater clarity.
Advocacy is strongest when it unites around the freedom itself, not around a single vision for how every family must use that freedom. As with religious liberty, the right is best defended publicly, while the exercise of that freedom is worked out within families, churches, communities, conferences, and other free associations.
We would do well to ensure that our advocacy efforts remain fixed on principled arguments for boundaries, while our equipping efforts help families learn to use that God-given freedom well.
Holding the Line
Hold the line at ownership, not at practice. That is the discipline Education Independence intends to keep, fixed at the boundary, open at everything downstream of it.
Knowing who we are and what holds us together is only the beginning. A “we” that is clearly defined still has to act. The next question this series will take up is how that “we” builds, using the same tools our founders protected, so that this space, once secured, is carried forward.
Frequently Asked Questions
Parental rights in education mean that parents, not the state, hold the authority and responsibility to direct their children’s education. Education Independence holds that this authority is endowed by the Creator and secured, not granted, by government.
Ownership follows from who pays. When families fund their children’s education themselves, they own that space. When funding comes from the state, the state, through the collective’s representatives, retains a claim to that space, and access can be revoked as political conditions change.
Defending educational freedom means protecting the boundary of who holds authority over a child’s education. Prescribing its use means dictating which method or which ideas a family should choose within that freedom. Education Independence holds the first as nonnegotiable and leaves the second to each family.
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