Homeschool jujitsu

There’s a quiet revolution taking place that may finally give parents parity when negotiating with the government about children’s education.

By this time, it has become abundantly clear to everyone that government schools deliberately and consciously scheme to abduct children from their parents and convert them to become good little leftist perverts. This reality has prompted a marked increase in homeschooling, limited mostly by affordability. Technology and the marketplace, though, are coming to the rescue.

The more parents learn about what’s happening in public education, the more there are parents who desire to extract their children from the maw of the government schools but find that extraction financially unworkable: They cannot afford the loss of income that home schooling demands and cannot afford private school. That’s where homeschooling jujitsu kicks in.

The Covid shutdown, conjoined with the entrepreneurial genius of the market, has found a way around the economic demands of homeschooling. The shutdown has revealed that online learning (called DE for “distant education”) is educationally feasible. Additionally, the entrepreneurial genius of the marketplace has designed affordable DE products that employ this feasibility to make possible the exodus from public schools. These DE products can be (1) home-based, (2) church-based, or (3) a hybrid of the two.

There will be pushback from the state govt.

I’m in PA. The law is already very harsh w/r/t homeschooling. It’ll catch up with technological wrinkles like DE.

As things stand now, if you’re not a teacher or a parent, you stand little chance of being permitted/recognized by the state to homeschool a child.

One parent almost invariably has to “be there.” Be the primary educator. For a required minimum of hours. That means no significant employment.

I was homeschooled. I had huge advantages, an extensive home library, the internet, and a genius parent totally devoted to imparting the treasures of knowledge. And still the local school board gave us a hard time (until they got a harder one back).

PA school district admins fight like demons to stamp out threats to their revenue. The laws will toughen if circumstances require it. Whatever keeps the cash flowing.

Not saying it’s a doomed effort, only that I wouldn’t bet on it in my state — an otherwise agreeable place to live (low taxes, gun friendly, conservative God-fearing folks, by and large).

The article appears to be written by someone with no homeschooling experience. I homeschooled 3 children through 12th grade. Two are Ph.D. candidates in hard science/engineering, and the other is a junior in an engineering program. Here are a few observations:

1. Most distance learning curricula are junk. They are government school online.

2. Even if you find a sound online curriculum (e.g. Ron Paul, Thomas Woods), online is a model that is only suitable for highly motivated students, but never elementary school age students. Even with good online material, it is mainly a supplement, and the parent should still be involved in discussing the material.

3. The online approach is generally attractive to parents who still are trying to avoid responsibility for educating their children. Fear of homeschooling and fear of taking educational responsibility for your children are far less rational than fear of flying. Bear in mind, children homeschooled by parents with a high school diploma or less have been found to outperform their government school peers by a substantial margin on standardized tests. Even if you think you are poorly educated, you will learn along with your children, and you will always do better than a “highly trained government school education professional (/sarc/)”.

4. Real homeschooling actually takes very little time (e.g. I taught my children to read through the level of the 1836 edition of the Second Reader of McGuffey’s Readers spending about 20 minutes a day over about 2 years; math took about the same amount of time for two years, about 40 minutes for 3 years, and my time commitment declined thereafter until I was mainly just correcting assignments). Government school parents spend more time on government school meetings, homework, etc. than I did homeschooling. By middle school they also spend more on “fees” and other charges than I did on curriculum (at least in our “much sought after” suburban government school district).

5. Real homeschooling leads children to increasingly become independent learners.

6. Dual credit courses are easy and inexpensive on line. They are pathetic academically, but better to pay next to nothing for them and have the credits transfer (the grades don’t factor into the university GPA) and not pay regular tuition for general education courses taught by fanatical woketards.

The massive online science and math courses offered for free (or for a very small fee if you want a certificate of successful completion) offered by MIT and a host of other universities are very worthwhile if you have a highly motivated student.

7. HSLDA and state homeschool organizations such as the Texas Home School Coalition do a good job of putting the government school pukes in their place. They also provide a lot of other resources. I’d strongly recommend belonging to HSLDA and your state organization.

8. GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS AND GOVERNMENT SCHOOL BASED CURRICULA ARE CHILD ABUSE. It’s been true for more than a generation, but even Stevie Wonder can see it now. AND, NO, your rural or suburban school districts are NOT different.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.