I think there's a point where the child needs protection from the parents' views on what is appropriate education. For example, if their views are likely to turn the kid into an anti-social nut. "Education" in the broadest sense requires that the kid interact with a cross-section of the citizenry of his or her own age, not just with the parents, and if they are going to deprive the kid of that experience, it may not be in the child's best interests to let them get away with it.
It is universally correct and sound to allow any child from any nation the opportunity to escape from bigotry and ignorance--even the bigotry and ignorance of their parents if they so be.
So often they be.
The state should embrace the responsibility to enable such opportunities and provide a viable apparatus to permit its manifestation whenever necessary.
Education, employing the principles of liberalism to ensure societal harmony, served this function well until after the sixties in America, when the relentless right wing conspired to kill education in America. Most of the megaphones were handed out to operatives who were preachers of some note, you might recall.
They have succeeded quite well, in that any real respect for teaching is always now suspended from the frivilous involvement of pumped- up, needlesome parents, who have pestered education into granting almost complete compliance to the notion that the idiot parents, often from the Christian Right, can have their way totally in matters of philosophical approach. The operating m.o. has a striking similarity reference to 'lunatics running the asylums.'
A teacher today finds it almost impossible to become the least bit controversial, so they stick to a script that is politcally-correct prophylactic. The students, their minds now dulled with conscripted blandness, become bored and check out completely.
I find it completely in tune with evolutionary law that the outcome and growth and evovlment should sway to the offspring, to correct the errors of the sirers.
Taking kids up and away out of ignorance is the law of education and evolution too.
The polar opposite of this perspective is the perspective of the cultist, wherein instilling and maintaining ignorance is the very meat of creed.
I went to a high school wherein the principal threw a recalcitrant pupil down twenty concrete steps to the sidewalk; when his father, the long term igniter of his hate, arrived to disagree, the principal threw him down the same twenty steps.
The principal confronted ignorance, benefitting the child with the lesson at the expense of the parent and his ignorance.
Clarity.
I perfer this approach to that of a school riddled with holes from within and out by a hoard of swarming born again Christian parents, ever looking to snarl and yell at the first item, however trivial, that can be dissapproved of from a troubled puritan perspective.
The whole of the war about keeping religion out of schools rests on this border. Grant them but a foothold (some prayer permitted on school grounds) and they will seek to overtake the whole philosophy. This is true because their every philosophical approach is one of absolutism. They are afire with the truth, though they be drenched in ignorance.
And when they can't, they get pissed and take their children home, to teach them themselves, even though their preponderant ignorance shines like the Northern Lights. This is abuse.
