URGENT: The South Carolina House of Representatives passed subversive ESA bill H.5164 by a 69-32 vote. This dangerous bill how heads to the Senate for consideration. Please contact your state senator, and urge him or her to oppose H.5164.
Members of the South Carolina General Assembly are seeking to expand the state’s “Education Savings Account” (ESA) law to include homeschoolers, a slippery slope toward increased government control over homeschooling via government funding — and the various strings attached. Urge your state legislators to oppose this dangerous bill and to abolish all government involvement in education.
House Bill 5164 (H.5164) is sponsored by 29 state representatives. If enacted, it would expand the state’s Education Scholarship Trust Fund, an ESA program the General Assembly enacted in 2023, to also include homeschooled families. In other words, homeschoolers would be able to access government funds for education-related expenses.
Although this proposal might sound good, it’s actually a slippery slope toward draconian government regulation of homeschooling. All government funding comes with strings attached, and H.5164 is no different.
Supporters of ESAs often describe them as “school choice” or “money following the child.” However, ESAs actually represent a major — and potentially disastrous — intrusion of government into private and home education.
First, ESAs are closely connected to the United Nations and its push to indoctrinate children with international-socialist ideology. For example, the UN’s education agency, UNESCO, has advocated subsidizing private schools with tax money in order to control them — i.e., impose the same leftist standards on them as public schools — thus enabling the implementation of the UN’s totalitarian Agenda 2030 scheme.
As implied above, vouchers and ESAs are dangerous also because government can easily attach strings to the funding, forcing parents and private schools to submit to far-left indoctrination and other draconian government policies. In foreign countries, including Sweden, Australia, and Canada, private schools — including Christian ones — now teach leftist ideology and are practically indistinguishable from public schools, because they are shackled to government funding. The United States is next — there is a growing effort to use ESAs to regulate and eventually eliminate homeschooling.
Furthermore, contrary to the slick “fund students, not systems” slogan, government schools will continue to receive the same levels of funding under ESA/voucher policies. Such policies will simply increase — not shift or reduce — government meddling in education.
More information on the dangers of vouchers and ESAs can be found in Alex Newman’s article “Vouchers: ‘School Choice’ Trap” in the April 10, 2023 issue of The New American magazine, as well as the video “Bringing Homeschools & Christian Education Under Control.”
Ultimately, government must completely abolish its involvement in education — as had been the case in the United States before the late 1800s. Additionally, all parents must get their children out of the government-school system and instead pursue sound alternatives such as homeschooling and patriotic private schools.
Urge your state legislators to oppose H.5164, and to instead support fully defunding and abolishing the government-school system. Only then — rather than by false solutions — will we achieve fully educational freedom.
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