Libertarian Party: Nationalise home schooling

Bizarre Posting of the Day goes to the Libertarian Party's Members' Blog. It seems the party wants the state to fund and regulate home schooling.

The posting begins by saying:

the Party will be implementing a Voucher System roughly along the lines implemented in Sweden, this will not mirror any clamp-down or coercive programme directed towards Home Educators that exists there.

Fine, but what would a Libertarian government do about home educators under its new system? Clearly, home educators have as much right as any school to receive payments through the voucher system:

should the Educator request that the taxpayer fund such education – take the State’s Shilling as it were - there would need to be evidence that the funding was in fact delivering an education. It is unreasonable for anyone to demand no strings funding from the Taxpayer and we feel that genuine Home Educators will understand this point completely.

And what would these strings consist in?

In exchange for Taxpayer funding we would expect, in almost all cases, improvements in literacy and numeracy over time, where literacy is one of reading, writing, comprehension and critical reasoning.

Which would presumably entail state testing of any home schooled child whose parents decided to take the government shilling.

The writer does envisage allowing homed educating parents to opt out of the voucher scheme, and thus the testing, altogether. But it is still bizarre, at a time when home educators are trying to fight off greater government involvement in their children's education, for a "Libertarian" party to be proposing such a scheme of testing.

This confirms my suspicion that Libertarians are more interested in demanding that the world should conform to their principles than in devising solutions to the problems we face that expand our freedom.

For more on home education and the current debate read Dare to Know (though I note it is keener on this Libertarian Party posting than I am).