Laura McIntyre began educating her nine children more than a decade ago inside a vacant office at an El Paso motorcycle dealership she ran with her husband and other relatives.<\/span>
<\/span>Now the family is embroiled in a legal battle the Texas Supreme Court hears Monday that could have broad implications on the nation\u2019s booming home-school ranks. The McIntyres are accused of failing to teach their children educational basics because they were waiting to be transported to heaven with the second coming of Jesus Christ.<\/span>
<\/span>At issue: Where do religious liberty and parental rights to educate one\u2019s children stop and obligations to ensure home-schooled students ever actually learn something begin?<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cParents should be allowed to decide how to educate their children, not whether to educate their children,\u201d said Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Coalition for Responsible Home Education.<\/span>
<\/span>Like other Texas home-school parents, Laura and Michael McIntyre weren\u2019t required to register with state or local education officials. They also didn\u2019t have to teach state-approved curriculums or give standardized tests.<\/span>
<\/span>But problems began when the dealership\u2019s co-owner and Michael\u2019s twin brother, Tracy, reported never seeing the children reading, working on math, using computers or doing much of anything educational except singing and playing instruments. He said he heard one of them say learning was unnecessary since \u201cthey were going to be raptured.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIt appears that Texas lives by the motto, “If you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, you should start breeding them for stupidity.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is now a case wending its way through Texas courts. Some home schoolers are saying that actually requiring they make an effort to educate their children is a violation of their rights: Laura McIntyre began educating her nine children more than a decade ago inside a vacant office at an El Paso motorcycle dealership …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[968,999,972,1021,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-insane","category-justice","category-religion","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182267"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}