Throughout the country, parents are concerned that some public schoolboards, administrators, and associations hold them in disdain and fear their input when they raise legitimate questions about the direction of their local schools. Just short of 50 years ago (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that protects parents in the educational choices they make for their children — Wisconsin v. Yoder. Revisiting Yoder nearly a half-century later is more than a historical exercise. Yoder reminds us that children are not “mere creatures of the state” and that parents retain the right to direct their education. The facts that produced the Yoder case came to a head in 1969. They brought a lawyer by the name of William Bentley Ball down a country road near New Glarus, Wisconsin, where three Amish fathers of school-age children lived. Attorney Ball was an active Catholic layman who was offering legal help to this trio of Wisconsin fathers who had been summoned to appear before a county court on criminal charges. The offense? They held strong religious convictions about who should educate their children and for how long. Specifically, they refused to send their children to school beyond the eighth grade […]
