Educators’ Declaration of Independence

When in the course of raising children, it becomes necessary for parents and educators to dissolve the bands which have bound them to “Common” Schools, and to assume stewardship over the direct education of children whom laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all children are created equal, but not the same, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are curiosity, liberty, and the pursuit of learning.

That to secure these rights, schools are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the students and their families, that whenever any form of education becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of parents and educators to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new schools, laying their foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect and strengthen the abilities and curiosities of the children. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to escape such schools and to provide new guards for their future learning. Such has been the patient sufferance of generations of children, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of education. The history of the Common Schools is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute oppression over these students. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

Common schools have refused to recognize each child's individual strengths.

Common Schools have forbidden collaboration, except on rare occasions, preferring instead to condemn children who help one another.

Common schools have refused to entertain students' questions; rather, the teachers first give all the answers, and then they – and only they – ask the questions.

Common schools have called together swarms of children to sit quietly in neat rows for hours a day, despite research showing that children learn better in small groups and when given the opportunity to move.

Common schools have dissolved fine arts programs in order to focus on subjects that can be tested.

Common schools have continued, for a long time, after being proven ineffective, to cause classrooms to be crowded; whereby the education budgets, incapable of making cuts, have guaranteed that all students are held to the lowest common denominator.

Common Schools have endeavored to prevent children from falling behind their peers educationally; for that purpose, obstructing the ability of the same children to get ahead, and raising the conditions wherein all children are expected to be standardized.

Common Schools have obstructed children’s access to real books, refusing them the choice of what to read and instead insisting that each child has access only to books within their reading range, thereby establishing a culture where reading is a chore, not a pleasure.

Common Schools have made teachers dependent on their (the schools') will alone for the tenure of their occupations and the systemizing of the children.

Common Schools have erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of “experts” to harass any child that is found falling behind, and eat out their own desires for something better.

Common Schools have kept among children, in times of learning, tests, grade levels, grading, and common standards, without regard for the individual interests and abilities of any child.

Common Schools have affected to render themselves independent of and superior to the interests of concerned parents and teachers.

Common Schools have combined with outside interests to subject children to social philosophies foreign to core families, and unacknowledged by parents, giving assent to their acts of pretended sophistry:

For protecting students from punishment for any bullying that they should commit on the Inhabitants of these schools.

For cutting off parents who care to be involved.

For imposing standards without consent.

For depriving students, in many cases, of the benefits of collaborative projects.

For abolishing the free thinking of students so as to render them a fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule to their own children.

For taking away curiosity, for abolishing bonds with parents, and for fundamentally altering the most natural and powerful forms of learning.

For suspending learning for learning’s sake, and declaring that schooling is a necessary evil that all children must endure, with the power to enforce through punishments and rewards, until children only know obedience to the rules, regardless of the true impact it carries for the individual.

Common Schools abdicated their responsibilities to children by declaring children’s lackluster interest in learning a social problem, blaming society and the very parents and educators they have marginalized from the process.

Common Schools have plundered curiosity, ravaged inspiration, burnt exploration, and destroyed the innate drive to learn that children are naturally disposed to.

Common Schools are at this time transpiring to collude with mercenaries to complete the works of teaching the “virtues” of good behavior, sitting still, and obedience, already begun with circumstances of punishments and rewards paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally incapable of helping children be the active, vibrant, independent-thinking individuals that nature's God entitle them to be.

Common schools have constrained our fellow educators to follow low-level learning practices against their better judgment, turning them into executioners of logic and reason.

In every stage of these oppressions, there have been brave individuals who have provided alternatives through the most humble terms. Repeated petitions for reason in the Common Schools have been answered only by repeated injury. A system, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyranny, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

We have warned Common Schools from time to time of their attempts to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over learning. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our ambition. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in practice, in peace in purpose.

We, therefore, the representatives of the education of the future, in united voice, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, solemnly publish and declare, that we educators are, and of right ought to be free and independent; that we are absolved from all allegiance to Common Schools, and that all philosophical connection between us and the Common Schools, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that we as free and independent educators, have full power to teach, individualize lessons, contract with agencies, establish authentic schools, and to do all other acts and things which Independent educators may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our support, our ambition, and our sacred Honor.

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