If we want to see where our nation may be headed in the near future, we need look no further than Europe. Two recent news items coming out of Scotland and Portugal may be the writing on the wall for U.S. observers.

Recently, the Scottish government proposed a bill that would appoint a government supervisor to oversee every child in the country from birth onward, as reported by LifeSiteNews. The Schoolhouse Home Education Association has warned that the bill will open up a new totalitarian direction for Scottish society. The group called it “propaganda designed to fool the sheeple.” The bill, they said, is not intended to protect the rights or safety of children. Rather, “it is designed to establish universal citizen surveillance via parent licensing and early interference, effectively ensuring state oversight and ownership of all children in Scotland.”

The New York Times, reported that “[in] Portugal and other nations in Europe, the battle lines are thickening around just how many more cuts to social benefits people will take, as their economies continue to shrink and social imbalances intensify. In a watershed ruling this month, Portugal’s highest court struck down some of the austerity measures included in the government’s initial 2013 budget, saying they discriminated against civil servants and retirees who had been singled out for salary and pension reductions.”

As our economic woes mount, we will increasingly face similar dilemmas. As Neal McCluskey, Associate Director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, says, “Head Start is the federal government’s primary early childhood program, with a budget of almost $8 billion. According to its most recent assessment by the Department of Health and Human Services, it has almost no lasting, positive cognitive effects, and its few, persisting social-emotional impacts are mixed positive and negative. It also suffers from widespread management problems, with federal officials struggling to keep tabs on providers and hesitant to dock poor performers. What seems to have kept it alive is advocacy by providers and widespread support for its mission.”

And then there’s this from Breitbart: “As dissatisfaction with the U.S. public school system grows, apparently so has the appeal of homeschooling. Educational researchers, in fact, are expecting a surge in the number of students educated at home by their parents over the next ten years, as more parents reject public schools. A recent report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75%. Though homeschooled children represent only 4% of all school-age children nationwide, the number of children whose parents choose to educate them at home rather than a traditional academic setting is growing seven times faster than the number of children enrolling in grades K-12 every year.”

As the educational engineers seek greater and greater control over America’s children, every day Americans are removing their children from the government’s indoctrination camps and are choosing to educate them at home. An increase in homeschools and small private schools may very well be what brings down our unsustainable educational monopoly.