My wife and I were chatting about putting our 4-year-old into private school when he’s old enough.  We don’t have a lot of confidence in the public schools.  We hear too many stories about how it is nearly impossible to fire bad teachers.  The union protects them.  And our son is a little on the bright side and would benefit from the better challenges found in private schools. 

The problem we ran into is that almost all private schools are religious.  We don’t hate religion.  We just don’t want our son to be indoctrinated into a belief system that we don’t agree with.  In our area there is only one private school that is non-religious. 

This got me wondering; why are there so few non-religious schools? 

We know the yearly fees for private school, so from that I did some quick calculations.  I’ll skip the calculations, they are a little mundane, and get right to the point.  The big problem facing private schools is that they can’t make a profit because of taxes.  Since they can barely make a profit, they don’t usually operate. 

I’ve said before that I would like to have a new kind of church, an American Deist church.  It would be based on the same values of classic Liberalism that are the foundation of the Declaration of Independence.  God is the Supreme Judge of the universe.  God has granted us absolute unalienable rights, which are natural rights.  Etc. If I had my way, there would be an American Deist religious organization.  And it would run its own private religious schools.  

We can’t help but teach our kids our own values.  It’s human nature.  A private school for American Deism would acknowledge God, and acknowledge the value of religion in general, and teach the students the meaning of natural rights and the ideas of classic Liberalism, along with the usual school topics. 

Such a school would teach values without teaching the values of religions we don’t believe in.  It would provide affordable and high quality education that focused on natural truths before revealed truths.  It would focus more on philosophy and discourse than indoctrination.  The school would be an extension of the church, so it would benefit from being separate from the state. 

One question would be whether the teachers would be considered ministers.  Since there really can’t be a strong ministry for an American Deist church, the main form of ministry would be in the form of education.  The categorization of teachers as ministers create a legal issue.  The IRS has rules about ministers and teachers and those rules affect taxes.  

Another problem, of course, is finding funding and finding people who would support such an organization.

I am concerned that the current state of affairs of the US government is such that it could prevent something like this, since the current government seems to be of an over controlling neo-fascist bent.  I will be so happy when those folks are no longer in power.  I want to be able to raise my son as I see fit, which is my natural right.  Not just as the government allows.  I fully expect the current US government to become more active in this area any day now.

Stumble it!