Thomas Edison’s public school expelled him at age seven because his teacher thought he was feeble-minded. Edison, one of our greatest inventors, had only three months of formal schooling. After leaving school, his mother taught him basics at home over next three years. Under his mother’s care and instruction, young Edison thrived.

If Thomas Edison was alive today as that child of seven, school authorities would probably stick him in special- education classes. Poor Thomas would waste his precious mind and be bored to death until they released him from school at age sixteen.

So it turns out that many of famous Americans our children now read about in their dumbed-down public-school textbooks were either homeschooled, never set foot in a government-controlled public school, or thankfully only went to a public school for a very short period of time.

Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.

It is no coincidence that Sparta had compulsory, state-run education. If a society believes that children belong not to parents, but to state, then state must control children’s education by compulsion.

Are our public schools any different than brutal Spartan society in way they treat parents and children? Today, school compulsory-attendance laws force parents to hand over their children to government employees called teachers for eight to twelve years.

In effect, our local and state governments claim that they, like Spartans, own our children's minds and bodies for twelve years. Parents who refuse to hand over their children to public schools can be and have been locked in jail for disobeying compulsory-attendance laws.

In this respect, our public schools today are just as brutal as Spartans. The difference is only in degree. Where Spartans stole children from their parents to serve a lifetime in their military, our local governments create laws that let them, in effect, legally kidnap our children to serve twelve years in their education boot camps called public schools. The brutality of principal is same. Like Spartans, our public-school officials think they own our children, and have contempt for parents' rights.

Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.