Don't Teach Your Children Well

Jeff Miller offers yet another example that Canada continues to slip into surreality:

Homeschooling parents in a Canadian province have been ordered to stop using religious-based materials or other "unofficial" resources when they teach their children at home. ...

The British Columbia Education Ministry insists the order is merely a "clarification" of the rules it laid out in September 2002, which said distance-education students had to follow the same rules as regular students. ...

With regard to faith-based resources, it stated: "Districts must ensure that students are not using religious materials or resources as part of the educational program and that parents are not being reimbursed for using religious materials or resources with students."

Doesn't this seem like exactly the sort of outcome that would be dismissed, if predicted beforehand, into the "don't be ridiculous you paranoid religious nut" category? What has apparently happened is that the Langley school district created a program to enable it to continue collecting per-student funding of $5,408 by offering homeschooling parents about $600 (or about 11% of the money attached to their children) and a provincial certificate upon graduation.

Only in an environment of bureaucratic greed and secular fundamentalism is such a statement as this possible:

"If a district receives full funding for a student, the student is not being home-schooled," the [British Columbia Education Ministry ] stated.

Fair enough. How about sending the full $5,408 directly to the home-schools?