Alarming fact about background checks.

[Igel]

31. Don't need a background check to be a tutor.

Or a parent. Or teach Sunday school (or Sabbath school). Or even Korean school, like some students I knew in California had gone to.

Just when the state or school district hires you or decides for matters of child welfare (or coercing a state monopoly) do you need certification. Then they make the rules for what you need to do to be hired. Pass a subject test? A pedagogy test? Have so many hours student teaching? So many college credits? Go through a registered, certified preparation program? Get your masters within X number of years? Get so many "credits" of professional development per year?

Didn't used to be that way. A few years ago Texas lost a mess of substitutes. They required that subs have so many college credits. My school literally had no warm adult bodies to put into some classrooms on high-teacher-absence days that year. They called in teachers from conference periods, they put administrators up through the principal in the classrooms, and then they moved sub-less classes into rooms with a sub. To reduce the agony to some schools, they assigned equal numbers of subs to schools to keep the "good" and well-behaved schools from having enough subs while the tough schools had nearly none.

But like voting, shacking up, or posting online, gun ownership isn't something the state does for you. You're not using state resources, like when you drive on public roads. There's a fundamental logical difference between the two. One right you just have; it is inalienable. The other right is provided by the state; it's utterly alienable.

If I owned 20k acres and wanted to, I could have cars and big rigs that are uninsured, unregistered, unhindered by safety inspections and speed limits and even let my 12-year-old drive them (as long as he's not hurt or put routinely at risk). I put them on the public roads, and suddenly I'm bound by all the laws stipulating conditions for using the public resource.

If I want to homeschool my kid, only in the most anti-homeschool states would I need to do anything like obtain certification. Even then, it's just if I want to not send my kid to a registered school. What I teach him on the weekend is entirely up to me.