A Declaration for Education Freedom adapted from Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

Parents believe their children are special.  And I say they’re right.  Each child has a gift or two which creates differences among them.   One can be superior in sports and another in academics.  Even in sports one can be really good at defensive tackle in American football but well below average at any position in basketball, which was much like me growing up.  In academics one can, as my mother was, really good in Latin and Math, but really not so good in Spanish and Geography.  Yet, we are traveling through an epoch where our public and private school governors demand all children be the same regardless of strengths and deficits.  Thus, curriculum, teaching and learning, heck, the entire way of American schooling, especially public schooling, has been standardized across the entire country just like my favorite cookie, Oreos, is the same here where I live in Rockaway, NY, or in Santa Clara, CA, where I was for a media convention a couple of years ago.  

But my son and those like him are as far away from the standardized student as they can be.  They belong to a group of youngsters who are gifted and talented but also have a disability.  They are called Twice-Exceptional.  The education field recognizes this category of pupil but the states and the federal government do not.  So, in our State of New York, as in all states with the exception now of Colorado and Maryland, a youngster can be found to be disabled or gifted, but not both.  And they cannot be found twice-exceptional here because, as I have been told by City and State officials, there is no federal law recognizing them and mandating identification of and service to them.  So my son suffered in the mainstream classroom until high school when we were able to finally get him into a setting which understood the mix of gift and disability. 

The crushing force to ignore and to eliminate the cognitive differences among children severely injures our children and causes me to declare the need for parents and children to insist on the natural right of their children's intellectual, neurological and educational freedom.  In Appendix I in Garry Will’s Head and Heart:  A History of Christianity in America is the text of Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.  The more I read it and thought about it over this weekend, the more I found it was that perfect declaration for which I was searching.  All I would need is to replace “religion” with appropriate education words and phrases and edit for my purposes. 

Before going to the appropriated text I would like to say that an implication of this declaration just might be the repeal of each state’s compulsory education law.  Now, I must admit I am not there, yet.  But with the tone-deafness of our political and education leaders to the neurological differences among our children which should mean differentiated schooling structures, curriculum, teaching and learning and quality differentiated outcomes, and the continued hurt to children, especially to those like my son, who are non-persons, I am getting closer and closer to those who are demanding the end to compulsory education.  Still, I do believe in universal, free education, meaning public schools.  But, public education must undergo systemic change from one of massive standardization to one of differentiated service based on the individual neurological differences among its students.

Another implication of this declaration, I’m afraid, might be the possible support for the nativist agenda where bigotry and hatred cause the denial of rights to those the nativist deems inferior.  While I am forced to admit some looking for such preference may find it here, I do not mean it to be taken as such and condemn it in the strongest possible terms.  Regardless of the Divine one conceives there to be, or not to be, I say in the strongest way:   We are All God’s Children, all equal in the sight of the Divine and before Humanity and one must treat the other with peace, love and understanding everywhere, every time.

And, now, here is A Declaration for Education Freedom adapted from Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom as found in Appendix I, pp. 599-601, Garry Wills, Head and Heart:  A History of Christianity in America,  New York:  Penguin Books, 2007:

“We are aware: that the opinions and belief of the young depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, who, being themselves fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the judgments, attitudes, and outlooks of the young, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and such endeavoring to impose them on the young, hath established and maintained a usurpation of the young’s natural right to their own reason, to their own humanity; that all attempts to influence the minds of the young by temporal punishments, or burdens, or by civil incapacitations visited upon them by civil education authority tend to only beget habits of hypocrisy, and meanness.

We are furthermore aware:  that to compel a youth to furnish compliance to the propagation of opinions which he questions is tyrannical depriving him of the comfortable liberty of determining for himself the particular evidence whose powers he feels most persuasive to reason; that the young’s civil rights have no dependence on the state’s compulsory Syllabus, any more than the dogma of religion; that therefore the proscribing any young citizen as unworthy of the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity unless he professes in excellent example the state’s mandated Syllabus is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow adult citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of the free mind education it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its monopolistic jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy; which at once destroys all intellectual liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;  and finally that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; that errors cease to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Thus, We Declare:  that no state has the right to a monopoly of the opinions of humanity and the evidence proposed to minds of the young; that no state has the right to a mandated, universal Syllabus negating the natural right to the exercise of individual, independent judgment, attitude and outlook in matters of the opinions of humanity and the evidence proposed to the mind; that no one be restrained, molested, or burdened in body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of the individual, independent exercise of his own judgment, attitude and outlook in matters of the opinions of humanity and the evidence proposed to the mind; that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of the mind, and that the same shall in no way diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities; that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to narrow its operation, such an act will be an infringement of natural rights.”