Right to Homeschool threatened in California

I heard in Fox News that a California Appellate Court in Los Angeles ruled that a parent is now required to have a teaching certificate to legally homeschool in that state. I found this site from Private and Home Educators from California which offers perspective on the issue.

There was a mini debate on Fox where a proponent of the law stated that children needed the experience of "real" teachers to provide appropriate education, plus they needed a diverse environment to learn from people of different backgrounds. This issues brings forward the question, whose children are they anyway? In fact the ruling, as the above link explains, was based on a tangental argument in a child abuse case. Abuse and neglect happens amongst homeschoolers, as it does in any school environment. Our laws are unfortunately a result of abuse and neglect, going back to the Noahic Covenant. I believe that the right to homeschool, more than any other issue, is the definitive question of who is the primary authority over our children, the state or the family. Yes, the state comes in as a last resort when a family abuses their children. But even Social Services will put the child in the care of an extended family member before placing them in foster care (if this isn't true, please let me know). But to say that the state is a better filter in general as to what a child learns than parents is a step further in a direction I don't think any concerned parent wants to go.

The proponent also said that parents can always "debrief" a child when they get home from school. This is true as a last resort which some parents must utilize depending on their situation, but in my experience children are not the best informed witnesses for what goes on at school, nor do they always tell everything they do or are bothered by either out of fear, not recognizing a bad situation, or loyalty to a friend or teacher. Additionally, the amount of time an impressionable child spends somewhere will affect the child in an unpreventable way.

I have also heard the argument that children should go to public school to be witnesses of their faith. Yes this can have a positive impact on the school, but I personally don't believe children should feel responsible for saving others. They are only children once and for a short period of time, and nurturing them full time in a healthy, protected environment will equip them to be more saintly influences on society if they do not get infected with the passions by how bombarded they are with them at an increasingly early age in the school scene.

I do think that children need to be sensitive and knowledgeable of other points of view, but I am not a proponent of letting children decide for themselves in an unbiased manner at an early age. I believe that the Orthodox Church's reasons for infant Baptism and Communion support the view that children are the Lord's and should be nurtured as such unless they decide differently and actively leave at their "age of accountability". They are to be trained in "the way that they should go" so that "when they are old they will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6).

When it is increasingly easy for children to be exposed to the underbelly of humanity, we parents must work harder and more consistently to protect and nurture them in "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy" (Philippians 4:8 )