Ron Paul's campaign page about Homeschooling is superb. As we've been seeing so far in this series of reviews, I've had several reservations about his positions, but on this one I'm hard pressed to find one - and it is that as President, he will be unable to terminate the massive program of child abuse euphemized as "Public Education" because most of its funding comes via State governments. However, he promises to do what he can.

His page opens with "Ron Paul believes no nation can remain free when the state has greater influence over the knowledge and values transmitted to children than the family does" and that's spot-on. Government schooling was never about education, from its origins in the 1830s - always about indoctrination, and infusing each rising generation with a wholly inappropriate respect for authority. That's the antithesis of freedom, and after eight such generations, this nation has not remained free. There can hardly be any higher priority, therefore, than to break the government school monopoly.

It will shatter in pieces after the last government employee quits his job, indeed a little sooner than that if my estimates in Transition to Liberty prove correct. But meanwhile if a "$5,000 per child tax credit" is handed to homeschooling parents, it will increase the momentum towards the liberation of children from their 12-year sentence. That's quite clever. State governments will never volunteer to provide their schools on a user-fee basis, because they would soon lose all their students under competitive pressure; they will force kids to submit for as long as they survive, and force parents to pay for a school place whether used or not. But this tax credit will reimburse the cost of home schooling - and then some, perhaps, for $5,000 is generous - and so draw much of the sting of paying twice for education.

Of course, it depends on the income tax system remaining in place. As mentioned previously in these reviews, that system is enforced without any statutory basis - by the courts and with the prison system. More: as we saw in Dr Paul's proposals for Taxes, he will abolish it if elected. Where, then, this handsome benefit for homeschooling parents? It's a tough question, but a fair answer is that ending enforcement of the i-tax will bring a much bigger benefit than $5,000 a year and will bring it to everyone.

A question remains: how, exactly, can any President initiate a tax credit? - isn't that something only Congress can do? Unfortunately, that is so. A careful reading of this campaign page shows that the $5,000 tax-credit is something Dr Paul introduced as a Congressman - but was voted down. As President, he mentions no way he could cause it to be granted. So he has either to kill the whole i-tax stone dead as I suggested here, or leave this splendid page on ending child abuse as little more than a wish list.

Let's end with a comparison I was sent a few days ago, in case any reader feels that "child abuse" is a slur on government schools.

SCHOOL	PRISON
authoritarian structure	authoritarian structure
dress code	dress code
emphasis on silence and order	emphasis on silence and order
walk in lines	walk in lines
loss of individual autonomy	loss of individual autonomy
abridged freedoms	abridged freedoms
no input in decision making	no input in decision making
set times enforced for walking, eating etc	set times enforced for walking, eating etc

And then, of course, there is the outrage that after suffering this 12-year term of imprisonment, upon release 40% of graduates are functionally illiterate.