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Ohio appellate judges have invalidated a statutory measure that allowed parents to direct modest public funds toward alternatives outside the default district schools. The decision does not rest on narrow statutory grounds but asserts an expansive state interest in controlling the formation of every child within its borders.
Behind the bench sits the Managerial Priesthood, the same class that long ago displaced the household, the guild, and the parish as the proper steward of youth. These officers treat the child as raw material for the administrative order rather than as a soul entrusted first to father and mother under God.
Scripture and the undivided creeds place the duty of instruction squarely within the covenant household. The fifth commandment, the apostolic household codes, and the consistent witness of the Fathers all affirm that parents, not magistrates, answer to the Lord for the souls placed under their roof.
That order was already under siege when the Puritans crossed the Atlantic to erect schools and churches answerable to local elders and fathers rather than distant bishops or crown bureaucrats. The same principle animated the Reformation’s recovery of family catechism and the rejection of clerical monopoly over letters.
When a court declares that the state may withhold even indirect support from any arrangement parents judge faithful, it does not defend neutrality. It enforces the ancient claim of the City of Man that children belong to the collective before they belong to their own fathers.
The immediate consequence is plain. Every family that refuses the district curriculum now faces heightened legal exposure and financial penalty for seeking alternatives. The judgment accelerates the dispossession of parental authority that has advanced through accreditation rules, certification mandates, and curriculum edicts for more than a century.
The faithful remnant must therefore cease petitioning the very institutions that exist to dissolve household sovereignty. They must instead construct and fund parallel academies, recover apprenticeship, and restore the parish school under the direct oversight of fathers and elders.
Anything less ratifies the court’s premise that the state holds superior title to the child. The hour demands concrete withdrawal of cooperation and capital from the captured system, not further litigation before the same priesthood.
