Once again we approach that saddest time of the year: when the majority of parents send their kids back to school; back into the local government concentration day-camps. If you’re someone who mistakes schooling for education you probably believe this is good.
Tag: children
Questioning the Back-To-School Default
Back-to-school time is upon us. My Instagram feed is starting to fill with first-day photos as a new school year begins this week in some parts of the country. For those of us who homeschool, we often get asked, “So, why did you decide to homeschool?” We respond with various personal and educational reasons, including the top motivator for homeschoolers on national surveys: “concern about the school environment.” What always strikes me, though, is that parents who send their kids to school never get asked this question. When was the last time someone asked a parent, “So, why did you decide to send your child to school?”
The History of Private Schools: How American Education Became a Political Battleground
Public schools being an arm of the state are indoctrination centers. This becomes increasingly true as basic skills such as the old “three Rs” of “reading, writing and ‘rithmatic” are jettisoned in favor of climate change, critical race theory and gender ideology – all of which are now part and parcel of a public education in the United States.
Ethical Consistency, Does it Really Matter?
To the best of my understanding, the lack of ethical consistency in today’s culture has led, and continues to lead people toward further social, economic, and foreign policy disasters. For this reason, I wanted to go over the concept of ethical consistency as I see it, the definition of the term, and some examples of how it’s applied in real world scenarios.
Work is Better for Kids than School
In the US, children are forced to labor at a desk in cinder block rooms for 13 years. It is mandatory and very difficult to escape. They have no choice over the work or the schedule. They earn no pay. They gain few skills that are valuable later in life. They are shamed and punished if they don’t enjoy it, aren’t good at it, or slack.
Homeschooling, Ideology, and The “Culture War”
Yes, some people use home education to teach their kids harmful lies while insulating them from competing ideas (truth, reality, and ethics). That’s bad. They should not do this to vulnerable children. Yet, government schools do the exact same thing— even teaching some of the same harmful lies the worst of the homeschoolers are teaching.
The Discouraged Suitor
Labor economists occasionally have a crisis of faith. After years of scrutinizing the unemployment rate, they suddenly remember… discouraged workers. Who are they? They’re people who want a job, but aren’t officially unemployed because they aren’t actively searching for work.
Yes, Parents Are Capable of Choosing How Their Children Should Be Educated
At the heart of debates around education freedom and school choice is the subtle but sinister sentiment that parents can’t be trusted. They are too busy, too poor, or too ignorant to make the right decisions for their kids, and others know better how to raise and educate children. Never mind that parents have successfully cared for and educated their children for millennia, ensuring the ongoing survival and continued success of our species.
Peter Gray: Education and Human Evolution (1h49m)
This episode features a lecture by evolutionary psychologist, research professor, and author Peter Gray from 2016 on how children’s natural curiosity, playfulness, sociability, and willfulness have all been shaped by natural selection to serve the function of education.
How to Deschool Yourself for Success and Satisfaction
Most of us spent at least 15,000 hours of our childhood and adolescence being schooled before we turned 18. Now in adulthood, we may need to unlearn some of what we were taught and embrace self-education for career success and personal fulfillment. Much of what we learned in school was dictated by others, disconnected from…