Let’s Separate School and State

(Don Boudreaux)

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Virginia’s new governor, Glenn Youngkin (R), recently issued an executive order that prohibits K-12 government schools in Virginia from requiring that students wear masks. Masks are optional; the decision is up to the student or his or her parents (or both).

But, lo!, at least three school districts, so far, in Virginia have decided to ignore the governor’s executive order and continue to require that the face of each and every child who attends their so-called “schools” be confined behind a mask.

While these school-board actions are maddening, all people of good will and good sense should squeeze these lemons into lemonade. We can do so by trumpeting the fact that such actions as these by these school boards unambiguously reveal at least two detestable facts about the administrators of K-12 government ‘schools’: The people who run these ‘schools’ (1) are either incapable of, or unwilling to, understand factual reality, including about risks; and (2) have little or no interest in the well-being of children, or even in ensuring that children are able to learn while in school.

Either one of these facts should be sufficient to cause parents to keep their children away from these so-called “educators.”

No time within my (now-long) lifetime has been as propitious as now for dealing serious blows to government schooling – for taking a major step toward the noble goal of the late Marshall Fritz, namely, a total separation of school and state.