The edRoundtable:

In 1998, Indiana governor Frank O’Bannon appointed the Indiana edRoundtable to investigate and recommend future changes to the Indiana public school system. The members of this group were 40 elite individuals from leadership positions in Education and Industry. There were no representatives of customers and supporters, taxpayers, the people who pay for the education system or the people who receive service from the system appointed as members of the commission. Five years later, in 2003, its recommendations were made public and comments from the public were invited. The edRoundtable suggested drastic changes to our education system.

Listed under one heading in the Plan, under “Communications”, the major suggestions were: School provided pre-natal care for all Indiana citizens, care and experiences provided to those children from birth to seven years of age, full-day Kindergarten, mandatory Kindergarten for all children, tracking of all students through elementary, secondary and college years, tracking of all workers for years after their schooling. Included was record keeping so the schools would have a complete educational history of all students and past students. This record would be available to schools and potential employees and any government agency who wanted access to those records.

The editor of this on-line newspaper thinks these suggestions are overly intrusive into the private lives of all families in Indiana. We do not need a state school system with the government mandated power to provide pre-natal care to every child conceived in Indiana. That right belongs to the family and to its free, unalienable right to select whatever pediatrician it desires to provide those services. This editor thinks the school system would be over-stepping its mandate to go into the homes of every child from birth to seven years of age, remove that child at its whim and provide whatever care and experience it desires to provide to that child. Maybe in Russia, but not in this country.

The school (read the state) has no right to interfere with the inalienable right of all parents to educate and to teach their belief to their own children. Childhood is a special time, a time apart, with claims and needs that only parents can tend to. We must never allow the state to interfere between the parents and their children during that special time.

It is our opinion that the plan proposed by the edRoundtable is the beginning of total state control of Indiana citizens. This plan, if implemented with other proposed plans, called School-to-Work, would control the children in their education and choice of vocation, their careers. It would extend that control throughout their early and their later adult years. We would all be controlled from the “Cradle to the Grave”. We cannot allow that to happen.