Celebrating Nation School Choice Week: ‘The Means of Education Shall Forever Be Encouraged’

RALEIGH – This week is National School Choice week and parents around the country are celebrating benefits of freedom in education around North Carolina and the country.

You can access a list of events near you here.

Our N.C. Constitution states that, ‘Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools, libraries, and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.’ This constitutional mandate has been perverted by the Left in recent decades to fuel an agenda of exclusively government run education, at the expense of educational choice. Opposition to school choice is the antithesis of forever encouraging the means of education; promotion of school choice a policy that honors both our constitutional mandate as well as the inherent rights of parents and students.

It’s an issue that cuts across partisan lines for much of the public, despite the entrenched opposition Democratic Party leaders in North Carolina have had to such school choice movements. Luckily, school choice has advanced against the resistance in North Carolina. More than 100,000 students attend homeschools while more than 100,000 others attend private or charter schools, and the number of educational options has been steadily accelerating as choice is recognized as a solution for many public education ills.

Still, according to a leading school choice advocate, a founder of charter schools himself, there is a lot more to be done.

Conservative businessman and charter school founder Bob Luddy says there needs to be thousands more like him to truly disrupt the status quo in education.

In an age of rapidly advancing technology and change, education of the next generation requires the kind of flexibility and responsiveness only achieved through market-based systems. With the incredible diversity of knowledge and demands for new skills growing everyday, there needs to be exponential options for children and their parents to pursue an education. It is necessary in order to fulfill our constitutional charge, and to provide for the  education system the children of North Carolina deserve if we are to BE the kind of State that trusts its citizens to make the decisions best for their families.

In the 2020 elections, choice in education will certainly be a topic of contention between candidates for governor Dan Forest and incumbent Roy Cooper. The former has been a champion for school choice his entire time in office, while the latter has served has fought it tooth and nail and denigrated choice movements as attacks on education.

It follows, then, that four more years of Governor Cooper would be a limiting factor, to say the least, to education in North Carolina. No matter how much money he says he wants to throw at the system.

Instead we need an executive, and a legislature, intent on encouraging ALL means of education, in accordance with our constitution and those truths that remain eternally self-evident. Please join us in celebrating school choice this week, and every week, to that our future generations may have the liberty to pursue education that leads them to happiness and the kind of productive, rewarding lives from which we all benefit.

Have a hot tip for First In Freedom Daily?

Got a hot news tip for us? Photos or video of a breaking story? Send your tips, photos and videos to tips@firstinfreedomdaily.com. All hot tips are immediately forwarded to FIFD Staff.

Have something to say? Send your own guest column or original reporting to submissions@firstinfreedomdaily.com.