Posted on 12/03/2021 9:56:20 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Parents across America were caught unprepared for the mass closure of government schools in 2020. Soon after, however, many decided they and their children had had enough of the status quo. Now at a crossroads, will they choose reform or repudiation?
The wave of ill-advised school shutdowns last year compelled tens of thousands of parents to rethink their children’s education. When the classroom was virtually forced into their homes via Zoom, parents realized just how abysmal the curricula and tutelage were. Statistics on families fleeing to homeschooling must be worrying the education establishment.
From 2012 to 2019, the homeschooling rate hovered around 3.3 percent of K–12 US students. That figure rose to 5.4 percent in spring 2020. By the following fall, that figure had more than doubled to 11.1 percent.
Among black families, the increase was particularly noteworthy considering only 3.3 percent of black children were homeschooled in spring 2020 versus 16.1 percent in the fall.
While legacy media focused on cases of parents keeping their kids home out of fear of covid, longtime critics of the public school system argued that the pandemic actually helped to expose parents to the abuses and shortcomings that have long plagued public education.
Some chose homeschooling, but many other parents took to school board meetings, facing the beast head-on and ripping apart the deceptive social engineering with the public comment microphone. All the glory, glitz, and glam has so far gone to the latter group.
They grew a decentralized movement with immediate political consequences not only in Virginia’s gubernatorial election but also in school board races across the country earlier this month.
Axios, the popular DC-based news outlet run by former Politico journalists, recently reported on the growth of the 1776 Project, a new political action committee focused on reforming public school systems at the local level. "My PAC is campaigning on behalf of everyday moms and dads who want to have better access to their children’s education," the PAC’s founder Ryan Girdusky told Axios.
The 1776 Project won three-fourths of its fifty-eight races across seven states, proving the populist Right’s focus on the culture wars to be smart politicking. Now Republicans in Congress are pushing a "parents bill of rights" ahead of their 2022 primary elections. Included are so-called rights to know what’s taught at school, the right to be heard, and the right to transparent school budgets and spending.
The effects of COVID-19 on public schools: Enrollment fell by 3% in Autumn 2020 as families shifted to options such as homeschooling and private schools. Sharpest declines were in lower grades, especially kindergarten. https://t.co/rRNqVLlWkZ pic.twitter.com/ozauGgBj4t — aedmans (@aedmans) November 26, 2021
"This list of rights will make clear to parents what their rights are and clear to schools what their duties to parents are," their flier states. The reform position focuses on schools’ duty to parents and ipso facto their children. But what of the duties parents owe to their children?
What if, instead of pointing their collective finger at the school boards, parents looked in the mirror? What if they asked themselves how or why they feel entitled to have a place to drop their kids off for thirteen years of government brainwashing?
Any taxpayer has a perfect reason to object to school mask mandates or the teaching of racist and queer ideologies. Parents must start thinking more deeply about the situation, though.
Certainly for some, running for school board positions is their best shot at helping to provide their children and their neighbors’ children with better education. The problem is that in too many places, there’s an absolute crisis in education that can’t wait any longer for reform, no matter how severe.
Every family and community ultimately applies the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, the notion that the best way to organize society is for each action or decision to be taken at the smallest scale necessary, in assessing what must be done about things such as education.
By simply refusing to accept what federal or state authorities peddled throughout 2020, parents rightfully accepted more responsibility, clearly demonstrating that when things get personal, people will do what it takes to take back control.
Whatever step in that direction is taken, the child is better off. In his great essay "Education: Free and Compulsory," Murray Rothbard argued that public school and compulsory schooling laws tend to victimize the child: "The effect of the State’s compulsory schooling laws is not only to repress the growth of specialized partly individualized private schools for the needs of various types of children. It also prevents the education of the child by the people who, in many respects, are best qualified—his parents."
Unfortunately, far too few parents think of themselves as qualified, much less the best qualified educators of their children. They are easily led to believe simple reforms will "fix the system" they grew up dependent upon as children themselves.
"We always hear, Oh it’s broken. It’s not broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do," Katie Phipps Hague told Mises Institute supporters at the latest summit in Florida last month.
Hague shared her experience homeschooling her seven kids and encouraged other parents to give it a try, essentially asking, What have you got to lose?
I know this sounds like I’m a crazy person, but if you pulled your children out of school... for a whole year, then include them in everything that you do in all of your trips and all of your conversations, put them around the intelligent, capable people that you all have in your circles and let them become comfortable around those people, you’d probably do better for them than maybe anything else you could ever do.
It’s wonderful that the populist movement on the right is targeting the educational bureaucracy, one of the great roots of societal decay. There is a lot of potential for good in populism, but not if it sets its sights on mere reforms. A much brighter future lies in a libertarian populism where parents free themselves from these decrepit statist systems altogether and grow alternative institutions.
Parents must be responsible for their children’s education precisely so that children learn to be autonomous. Autonomous people don’t support tyrannical policies, so the sooner parents embrace their own power, the sooner their children will be able to unleash their own.
Haven’t some of the school districts in *BLUE* cities and countries tried (and maybe succeeded) in preventing parents from homeschooling their kids? I figure that’s the next tactic.
*counties
A good start would be eliminating the Dept. of Education
College Ed Depts have been labs for social engineering since the 60’s.
Since the 1896 when Dewey established the lab school in Chicago. Though Dewey would have vocally renounced most of what goes on today. He did start it.
Re: Eliminating the Department of Education
Yes,....The government system of schools is like a big, fat, juicy pimple. It needs to be squeezed from every side.
homeschooling
vouchers
charters
eliminating the Dept. of Education
eliminating teachers unions
separating school and sports
pressure on school boards
The US Dept of Education has very little to do with K-12. It manages college student loans mainly. k-12 is all up to the states. That’s why Trump couldn’t get schools in blue states open, and it’s why Biden loses mask fights with K-12 in red states.
I pulled both my teens out of public school last year—one to private and one to homeschooling. The pandemic closures were just the final straw.
My daughter will be homeschooling her 3 kids if they mandate the shots for school
Same for our grands.
Don’t let a crisis go to waste-heard it somewhere.
Ping
When I was still a school student, I noticed that whenever parents and teachers would talk about students they would speak in abstract clinical terms. It could be pretty maddening that the adult world would only look at you as a lab rat under development.
Vouchers would solve a lot of the problem. Vouchers would also put private school education within the reach of middle and working class families instead of just the upper middle class on up who can afford private schools now.
Imagine if parents could apply market forces to their children’s education. Crappy teachers? Political indoctrination rather than education? Failing test scores for students at a particular school? Pull your kid out and select a new school to get that voucher money. If enough parents do that, a particular school that is crappy gets no funding and goes under. Crappy teachers find their jobs are gone.
Vouchers are popular with everybody but the teachers’ union and the Democrat Party which they support. That includes Blacks that includes Hispanics by the way. The Republicans should be pounding this issue over and over again. They should be pro choice when it comes to education.
I wouldn’t get too het up.
10% homeschooled
10% Perhaps private schooled
80% public schooled
Some have.
Some have not.
Since the Supreme Court has determined that the schools own your kid when he is with them parents have big choices to make.
Says this former homeschooling parent
Vouchers are a nice answer however the Supreme Court denied Vouchers to religious schools. That will need to change.
“The US Dept of Education has very little to do with K-12. It manages college student loans mainly.”
I doubt you even believe that, for a minute.
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