Each month, we will profile individuals who have signed the Proclamation for the Separation of School & State.

"I Want Freedom for Everybody," says Rachel Lloyd

Rachel Lloyd of Bowling Green, Ohio, was a full-time teacher in the government schools for five years, and a substitute sporadically for ten more. Disgusted with the system's intractibility, she has since become an ardent proponent of separating school and state.

"I wanted to treat the students as I would have treated my own children, but I couldn't," she says of her teaching experience. The inflexibility of the state schools' curricula led her to take her own two daughters under her personal tutelage as homeschoolers.

"It wasn't hard to take our older daughter out of the system and homeschool her," Rachel says. Rejecting mass-media myths about the difficulties of homeschooling, she believes that, "Anyone can homeschool. When people have a desire to homeschool, they can."

Her fulfilling and successful experience in educating her own children stands in dramatic contrast to the stifling torpor offered by the government-run, tax-funded school establishment. With her younger daughter nearing graduation, she is devoting more time and energy to working for freedom of education for everyone.

"I want freedom for everybody and I want them to experience the freedom that I found," she explains, adding that state-run education "is antithetical to our nation's founding principles."

She sees widening fissures in the monopoly system's foundation. "The Berlin Wall of the Establishment is cracking; more people want out of it every day. The people are becoming too well acquainted with the arrogance of the people in charge."

A long-time researcher into educational alternatives, Rachel Lloyd has concluded that Separation alone offers the best hope for all children.

Eric Morrison lives in Seattle, Washington. Of his interview with Rachel Lloyd, he commented: "She is an exemplary portrait of a person who rejected government-mandated monopoly and, in the true spirit of American parenthood, took the responsibility for her children's welfare into her own hands. As a teacher, she refused to subordinate her conscience to the dictates of the edcational oligarchy. As more parents and teachers find the courage to emulate such an example, the dream of Separation becomes reality."

This article is copyrighted by the Alliance for the Separation of School & State. Permission is granted to freely distribute this article as long as this copyright notice is included in its entirety.

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