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100 Reasons to Homeschool Your Kids

June 6, 2019June 6, 2019 Kerry McDonald

This is my 100th article for FEE.org, so here are 100 reasons to homeschool your kids!

Homeschoolers perform well academically.
Your kids may be happier.
Issues like ADHD might disappear or become less problematic.
It doesn’t matter if they fidget.
YOU may be happier! All that time spent on your kids’ homework can now be used more productively for family learning and living.
You can still work and homeschool.
And even grow a successful business while homeschooling your kids.
Your kids can also build successful businesses, as many grown unschoolers become entrepreneurs.
You can be a single parent and homeschool your kids.
Your kids can be little for longer. Early school enrollment has been linked by Harvard researchers with troubling rates of ADHD diagnosis. A year can make a big difference in early childhood development.
Some of us are just late bloomers. We don’t all need to be on “America’s early-blooming conveyor belt.”
Then again, homeschooling can help those kids who might be early bloomers and graduate from college at 16.
Whether early, late, or somewhere in the middle, homeschooling allows all children to move at their own pace.
You can choose from a panoply of curriculum options based on your children’s needs and your family’s educational philosophy.
Or you can focus on unschooling, a self-directed education approach tied to a child’s interests.
Homeschooling gives your kids plenty of time to play! In a culture where childhood free play is disappearing, preserving play is crucial to a child’s health and well-being.
They can have more recess and less homework.
You can take advantage of weekly homeschool park days, field trips, classes, and other gatherings offered through a homeschooling group near you.
Homeschooling co-ops are growing, so you can find support and resources.
Homeschooling learning centers are sprouting worldwide, prioritizing self-directed education and allowing more flexibility to more families who want to homeschool.
Parks, beaches, libraries, and museums are often less crowded during school hours, and many offer programming specifically for homeschoolers.
You’re not alone. Nearly two million US children are homeschooled, and the homeschooling population is increasingly reflective of America’s diversity. In fact, the number of black homeschoolers doubled between 2007 and 2011.
One-quarter of today’s homeschoolers are Hispanic-Americans who want to preserve bilingualism and family culture.
Some families of color are choosing homeschooling to escape what they see as poor academic outcomes in schools, a curriculum that ignores their cultural heritage, institutional racism, and disciplinary approaches that disproportionately target children of color.
More military families are choosing homeschooling to provide stability and consistency through frequent relocations and deployments.
While the majority of homeschoolers are Christians, many Muslim families are choosing to homeschool, as are atheists.
Homeschooling has wide bipartisan appeal.
More urban parents are choosing to homeschool, prioritizing family and individualized learning.
Religious freedom may be important to many homeschooling families, but it is not the primary reason they choose to homeschool. “Concern about the school environment, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure” is the top motivator according to federal data.
Fear of school shootings and widespread bullying are other concerns that are prompting more families to consider the homeschooling option.
Some parents choose homeschooling because they are frustrated by Common Core curriculum frameworks and frequent testing in public schools.
Adolescent anxiety, depression, and suicide decline during the summer, but Vanderbilt University researchers found that suicidal tendencies spike at back-to-school time. (This is a pattern opposite to that of adults, who experience more suicidal thoughts and acts in the summertime.) Homeschooling your kids may reduce these school-induced mental health issues.
It will also prevent schools from surreptitiously collecting and tracking data on your child’s mental health.
Your kids’ summertime can be fully self-directed, as can the rest of their year.
That’s because kids thrive under self-directed education.
Some kids are asking to be homeschooled.
And they may even thank you for it.
Today’s teens aren’t working in part-time or summer jobs like they used to. Homeschooling can offer time for valuable teen work experience.
It can also provide the opportunity to cultivate teen entrepreneurial skills.
Your kids don’t have to wait for adulthood to pursue their passions.
By forming authentic connections with community members, homeschoolers can take advantage of teen apprenticeship programs.
Some apprenticeship programs have a great track record on helping homeschoolers build important career skills and get great jobs.
Self-directed learning centers for teen homeschoolers can provide a launchpad for community college classes and jobs while offering peer connection and adult mentoring.
With homeschooling, you can inspire your kids to love reading.
Maybe that’s because they will actually read books, something one-quarter of Americans reported not doing in 2014.
Your kids might even choose to voluntarily read financial statements or do worksheets.
You can preserve their natural childhood creativity.
Schools kill creativity, as Sir Ken Robinson proclaims in his TED Talk, the most-watched one ever.
Homeschooling might even help your kids use their creativity in remarkable ways, as other well-known homeschoolers have done.
With homeschooling, learning happens all the time, all year round. There are no arbitrary starts and stops.
You can take vacations at any time of the year without needing permission from the principal.
Or you can go world-schooling, spending extended periods of time traveling the world together as a family or letting your teens travel the world without you.
Your kids can have healthier lunches than they would at school.
And you can actually enjoy lunch with them rather than being banned from the school cafeteria.
Your kids don’t have to walk through metal detectors, past armed police officers, and into locked classrooms in order to learn.
You can avoid bathroom wars and let your kids go to the bathroom wherever and whenever they want—without raising their hand to ask for permission.
Research shows that teen homeschoolers get more sleep than their schooled peers.
Technological innovations make self-education through homeschooling not only possible but also preferable.
Free, online learning programs like Khan Academy, Duolingo, Scratch, Prodigy Math, and MIT OpenCourseWare complement learning in an array of topics, while others, like Lynda.com and Mango, may be available for free through your local public library.
Schooling was for the Industrial Age, but unschooling is for the future.
With robots doing more of our work, we need to rely more on our distinctly human qualities, like curiosity and ingenuity, to thrive in the Innovation Era.
Homeschooling could be the “smartest way to teach kids in the 21st century,” according to Business Insider.
Teen homeschoolers can enroll in an online high school program to earn a high school diploma if they choose.
But young people don’t need a high school diploma in order to go to college.
Many teen homeschoolers take community college classes and transfer into four-year universities with significant credits and cost-savings. Research suggests that community college transfers also do better than their non-transfer peers.
Homeschooling may be the new path to Harvard.
Many colleges openly recruit and welcome homeschoolers because they tend to be “innovative thinkers.”
But college doesn’t need to be the only pathway to a meaningful adult life and livelihood. Many lucrative jobs don’t require a college degree, and companies like Google and Apple have dropped their degree requirements.
In fact, more homeschooling families from the tech community in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are choosing to homeschool their kids.
Hybrid homeschooling models are popping up everywhere, allowing more families access to this educational option.
Some of these hybrid homeschool programs are public charter schools that are free to attend and actually give families access to funds for homeschooling.
Other education choice mechanisms, like Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and tax-credit scholarship programs, are expanding to include homeschoolers, offering financial assistance to those families who need and want it.
Some states allow homeschoolers to fully participate in their local school sports teams and extracurricular activities.
Homeschooling may be particularly helpful for children with disabilities, like dyslexia, as the personalized learning model allows for more flexibility and customization.
Homeschooling is growing in popularity worldwide, especially in India, Australia, the United Kingdom, Israel, and even in China, where it’s illegal.
Homeschooling grants children remarkable freedom and autonomy, particularly self-directed approaches like unschooling, but it’s definitely not the Lord of the Flies.
Homeschooling allows for much more authentic, purposeful learning tied to interests and everyday interactions in the community rather than contrived assignments at school.
Throughout the American colonial and revolutionary eras, homeschooling was the norm, educating leaders like George Washington and Abigail Adams.
In fact, many famous people were homeschooled.
And many famous people homeschool their own kids.
Your homeschooled kids will probably be able to name at least one right protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, something 37 percent of adults who participated in a recent University of Pennsylvania survey couldn’t do.
Homeschooling can be preferable to school because it’s a totally different learning environment. As homeschooling pioneer John Holt wrote in Teach Your Own: “What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children’s growth in the world is not that it is a better school than the schools but that it isn’t a school at all.”
Immersed in their larger community and engaged in genuine, multi-generational activities, homeschoolers tend to be better socialized than their schooled peers. Newer studies suggest the same.
Homeschoolers interact daily with an assortment of people in their community in pursuit of common interests, not in an age-segregated classroom with a handful of teachers.
Research suggests that homeschoolers are more politically tolerant than others.
They can dig deeper into emerging passions, becoming highly proficient.
They also have the freedom to quit.
They can spend abundant time outside and in nature.
Homeschooling can create strong sibling relationships and tight family bonds.
Homeschooling is legal in all 50 US states and has been since 1993, but regulations vary widely by state.
In spite of ongoing efforts to regulate homeschoolers, US homeschooling is becoming less regulated.
That’s because homeschooling parents are powerful defenders of education freedom.
Parents can focus family learning around their own values, not someone else’s.
Homeschooling is one way to get around regressive compulsory schooling laws and put parents back in charge of their child’s education.
It can free children from coercive, test-driven schooling.
It is one education option among many to consider as more parents opt-out of mass schooling.
Homeschooling is the ultimate school choice.
It is inspiring education entrepreneurship to disrupt the schooling status quo.
And it’s encouraging frustrated educators to leave the classroom and launch their own alternatives to school.
Homeschooling is all about having the liberty to learn.

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Trump’s Trade Policy—A Reductio ad Absurdum

June 5, 2019June 5, 2019 Robert Higgs

Before and since becoming president, Donald Trump has consistently maintained that the U.S. trade deficit in general—and the trade deficit with China in particular—is bad for Americans. As he says, again and again, Americans “lose” by importing goods from abroad and gain by exporting goods to foreigners. His tariff increases and newly imposed tariffs have been aimed, or so he claims, at reducing the U.S. trade deficit and thereby cutting Americans’ “losses.”

Economists and people with an elementary understanding of economics have condemned this view from the beginning as folly and as harmful to the economic well-being of Americans and foreigners alike. But the president and his advisors have ignored or shrugged off such criticism, dismissing it as at variance with what people can see plainly with their own eyes, such as increased employment in certain firms benefiting from tariff-hobbled foreign competition.

So, let’s consider the president’s trade policy in, as it were, its very best light. Suppose, then, that the government succeeded in eliminating the trade deficit entirely. Residents of the USA would continue to sell huge quantities of goods to foreigners but buy nothing at all from foreign sellers. The trade deficit would be not only diminished but wiped out and replaced by a huge trade surplus. Trumpian triumph!

Note, however, that such an outcome would be impossible to sustain for long even if it could be attained (which in fact it could not). Foreigners would be spending huge quantities of dollars to purchase goods from Americans, but they would have no means of earning dollars because Americans would not be buying anything from them. Foreigners could continue to make such purchases only if they received dollar credits from foreigners. But lenders would have no incentive to lend dollars to the Chinese, say, when they knew that the Chinese would have no ability to repay the loans because they would have no means of earning dollars in the future by sales to Americans. So a big U.S. trade surplus requires that totally implausible assumptions be made about international transactions in general and international lending in particular.

But apart from such practical difficulties and impossibilities, a Trumpian trade triumph, even if it could be achieved, would be a horrible objective to attain. Americans would be employing labor services, natural resources, and other productive inputs to produce goods and shipping them to foreign buyers. In exchange, they would receive nothing but bank account balances. Such a deal! Surrendering huge volumes of valuable goods and receiving in return larger numerals in people’s bank account statements, more dollars that could not be used to purchase anything, no matter how important or desirable, from abroad—all such purchases having somehow been stopped by a harebrained government and the economic ignoramus in charge of it.

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School Will be Remembered Like Leeches and Cigarettes

June 3, 2019June 3, 2019 Isaac Morehouse

We humans have little knowledge of the past or imagination for the future. Present bias makes us dumb, accepting creatures. We assume what is is what must be.

People think schooling and education are the same thing. This is revealed in the way statistics are presented. “Educational level” is measured by years spent in institutional schooling.

Yet school as we know it is only about 150 years old.

Wait, what? How did humans learn stuff the other several thousand years of civilization? How were 80% of colonial Americans literate with no standardized institutional schooling, and when books were rare and costly and most jobs didn’t even require reading? How did people invent stuff, start businesses, write books, create great art, and expand the corpus of human knowledge for thousands of years without certified teachers and grades and degrees?

Really we should ask the opposite. How does anyone retain any of the natural, insatiable human hunger for learning after years in compulsory academic prison cells?

Schooling is a blip on the learning radar in human history. It will die, then we’ll look back on it like other blips. Remember when smoking cigarettes was good for your health? Remember when leeches were needed to suck out the bad blood and cure disease? Remember when people all the sudden thought, despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, that nobody would learn anything without being stuck in cinder block cells for 50 minute segments and forced to turn the wonders of the universe into horrible tedium?

Weird epochs in human history.

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Today’s Schools Are Yesterday’s Streetcars: How Technology Will Transform Education

May 31, 2019May 31, 2019 Kerry McDonald

We can predict the future of education by glimpsing the past of transportation. Fueled by technological innovation, namely electricity, streetcars gradually replaced the horse-and-buggy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, followed by mass-produced automobiles that ultimately toppled the streetcar.

Throughout the 20th century, cars became safer, faster, cleaner, and cheaper and allowed individuals unprecedented mobility and autonomy. Then, in the 21st century, car-sharing applications showed how technology could once again disrupt the transportation industry, expanding rider options and challenging entrenched systems of control.

Personalized Learning

Education transformation will take a similar path. Fueled by technological innovation, schools are now in the middle of their streetcar moment. Chalkboards are still ubiquitous, but computers are increasingly being used not only to supplement learning but also to administer it. Personalized learning, as this technology-enabled classroom education is called, is all the rage.

In public schools like those using Summit Learning, a personalized, online learning approach developed by Facebook engineers and funded by Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the computer becomes the teacher, executing a largely self-paced curriculum and offering more flexibility and autonomy for students.True education transformation will come when learners realize that they don’t need an intermediary at all. The platform has sparked controversy, as some parents and educators resist change. Like the streetcar and transportation, personalized learning in schools is altering and modernizing the educational landscape. But it is just a launchpad.

True education transformation will come when learners realize that they don’t need an intermediary at all. Personalized learning in conventional schools will shift to self-directed education or unschooling, driven by the learner herself using the resource-rich networks of both real and digital communities. As Ivan Illich wrote in Deschooling Society:

The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.

Illich wrote those words in 1970 before the technological webs now at our fingertips were ever imagined. The funnel model of education, even when augmented by technology, is simply passé. Conflating learning with schooling, mired in coercion and a controlled curriculum, is an outdated idea. Schooling is something that others do to you; learning is something you do for yourself.

A New Perspective on Learning Itself

We already see how this works in our own adult lives. Just as the first automobiles began to disrupt old notions of transportation, recent technological innovations are recalibrating the way we learn. Whether it’s using YouTube to fix a toilet, Duolingo to learn a language, Audible to listen to books, or FaceTime to have lessons with your guitar instructor, technological platforms and applications are quickly helping us to shed our schooled vision of learning. Increasingly, we see that we can self-educate by following our own curiosities and pursuing our own personal and professional goals.

We can choose our own teachers and select the learning tools that work best for us. In his book, Illich wrote,

School prepares for the institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

Technology frees us from this institutional paradigm of education and lets us teach ourselves.

It can do the same for our children. As our own relationship to learning shifts in response to new technologies that make information and knowledge more accessible, we may begin to question the worn-out ways our children learn. As we realize the value and reward of self-education in our own lives, we’ll want to give this gift to our children.

Minimally Invasive Education

In his academic papers and award-winning 2013 TED Talk, Newcastle University professor Sugata Mitra explains how children teach themselves without institutional schooling. His “hole in the wall” studies have been widely cited, showing how children from the poorest slums of India to elsewhere around the world are able to learn to read, to teach themselves English, and to understand advanced scientific content (like DNA replication) simply by having access to an Internet-enabled public computer.

Mitra calls this approach “minimally invasive education” and concludes in his talk:

If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It’s not about making learning happen. It’s about letting it happen.

Thanks to technology, we adults now see this learning emerge all the time in our own lives. It can be the same for our children.

In the 21st century, the transportation industry was jolted again by technological innovation. Uber, Lyft, and other car-sharing companies challenged longstanding local monopolies, granting riders more choice and flexibility with better service and lower costs. Next, autonomous vehicles may be the new wave of disruptive innovation in transportation. Meanwhile, in education, technology will continue to expand access to resources, information, knowledge, and skills that make self-education outside of schooling not only possible but preferable.

Like the streetcar and horse-and-buggy, institutional schooling will become a cultural relic, a quaint reminder of yesteryear. We will realize that non-coercive, technology-enabled, self-directed education in collaboration with others results in better, more meaningful, more enduring learning than its institutional predecessors can offer. We will realize that we can be educated without being schooled. Indeed, the future is here.

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War Crimes Pardons: A Terrible Memorial Day Idea

May 23, 2019May 23, 2019 Thomas L. Knapp

On May 16, 2008, near the town of Baiji in Iraq, 1st Lieutenant Michael Behenna, US Army, murdered a prisoner. That was the verdict of the jury in his 2009 court martial, anyway. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, but paroled in less than five. On May 6, 2019, US president Donald Trump pardoned Behenna.

As I write this, news reports indicate that Trump intends to celebrate Memorial Day by pardoning several other Americans convicted of (or accused of and not yet tried for) war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s a horrible idea for several reasons.

One reason is that it’s morally repugnant to excuse the commission of crimes, especially violent crimes, for no other reason than that the criminal is a government employee.

A second reason is that it is detrimental to the good order and and discipline of the US armed forces to excuse violations of law by American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

That phrasing is not random: “[D]isorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces” are themselves crimes under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Yes, Trump has absolute power to pardon under the US Constitution, but this would be an abuse of that power that conflicts with his duties as commander in chief.

A third reason is that pardons of this type essentially beg other governments to take matters into their own hands where allegations of war crimes by US military personnel arise.

Among the US government’s excuses for refusing to join the International Criminal Court, and for forcing agreements by other governments to exempt American troops from prosecution under their own laws, is that the United States cleans up after itself and holds its troops to at least as high a standard as would those other governments. These pardons would give lie to that claim and expose US troops to greater risk of future arrest and prosecution abroad.

Don’t just take my word for these claims. Here’s General Charles Krulak, former Commandant of the US Marine Corps:

“If President Trump issues indiscriminate pardons of individuals accused — or convicted by their fellow servicemembers — of war crimes, he relinquishes the United States’ moral high ground and undermines the good order and discipline critical to winning on the battlefield.”

And here’s General Martin Dempsey, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

“Absent evidence of innocence or injustice the wholesale pardon of US servicemembers accused of war crimes signals our troops and allies that we don’t take the Law of Armed Conflict seriously. Bad message. Bad precedent. Abdication of moral responsibility. Risk to us.”

After World War Two, the US and other governments which participated in victorious alliance versus the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan tried and punished — up to and including execution — German and Japanese soldiers accused of war crimes and the political leaders who ordered, encouraged, or excused those crimes.

If the US doesn’t hold itself to at least as high a standard, eventually someone else will.

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“Socialism”: The Provocative Equivocation

May 23, 2019May 23, 2019 Bryan Caplan

The socialists are back, but is it a big deal? It’s tempting to say that it’s purely rhetorical. Modern socialists don’t want to emulate the Soviet Union. To them, socialism just means “Sweden,” right? Even if their admiration for Sweden is unjustified, we’ve long known that the Western world contains millions of people who want their countries to be like Sweden. Why should we care if Sweden-fans rebrand themselves as “socialists”?

My instinctive objection is that even using the term “socialism” is an affront to the many millions of living victims of Soviet-style totalitarian regimes. Talking about “socialism” understandably horrifies them. Since there are plenty of palatable synonyms for Swedish-type policies (starting even “Swedenism”!), selecting this particular label seems a breach of civility.

If this seems paranoid, what would you say about a new movement of self-styled “national socialists”? Even if their policy positions were moderate, this brand needlessly terrifies lots of folks who have already suffered enough.

On reflection, however, this is a weak objection. Yes, if a label’s connotations are – like “national socialism” – almost entirely horrible, then loudly embracing the label is uncivil. “Socialism,” however, has long had a wide range of meanings. Even during the height of Stalinism, plenty of self-styled “socialists” were avowedly anti-Communist. The upshot: Even if you were a victim of Soviet oppression, assuming the worst when you hear the word “socialism” is hypersensitive. And hypersensitivity is bad.

Yet there’s a much stronger reason to object to the socialist revival. Namely: It’s far from clear that the latter-day socialists do mean Sweden. While some (like John Marsh) plainly say so, others (like Elizabeth Bruenig) are coy indeed. Which raises deeply troubling questions, starting with:

1. Are latter-day socialists unaware of the history of the totalitarian movement that shares their name? Given widespread historical ignorance and the youth of the new socialists, we can hardly rule this out. A troubling thought; isn’t it negligent to champion a radical idea without investigating its history first?

2. Are latter-day socialists ambivalent about the totalitarian movement that shares their name? Do they look on the Soviet Union as a noble experiment with unfortunate shortcomings? How about Chavez’s Venezuela?

3. Do latter-day socialists think of Sweden as a starting point, and something more radical as the ultimate goal? Are there outright crypto-communists among them? If so, do their comrades know? Care?

4. Do latter-day socialists realize that being coy raises the preceding concerns? Do they care? Or is the raising of these concerns a “feature, not a bug”? I.e., they enjoy making people wonder if they’re secret Leninists?

What’s the truth? While I don’t personally know any latter-day socialists well, I do read a lot of articles in The Nation, which publishes a wide range of modern socialists. So here are my best guesses about the preceding possibilities.

1. Older socialists (age 50+) know a lot about the actual history of socialism. The younger ones (age 40 and under), however, know little and care less. They’re negligent romantics.

2. Most historically-literate socialists are indeed ambivalent about the totalitarian movement that shares their name. Very few will defend Stalin, but they just can’t stay mad at Lenin, Castro, or Ho Chi Minh. Even the historically-naive socialists feel pretty good about Cuba today and Venezuela in 2015.

3. Yes, most avowed socialists have a more radical ultimate goal than Sweden. In our Capitalism-Socialism debate, even the reasonable John Marsh mused about a future that realized radical socialist dreams without degenerating into a typical socialist nightmare. How extreme, then, are ultimate goals of the unreasonable socialists? While I really don’t know, videos like this make me strongly suspect that Bernie Sanders is literally a crypto-communist. Even if I’m wrong, how many latter-day socialists would care if Sanders was a crypto-communist?

4. Latter-day socialists really do enjoy making people wonder about their ultimate agenda. When you read The Nation, for example, authors almost never specify exactly what policy should be. Instead, they focus on radical movement in a desired direction, with minimal discussion of their ultimate objective. In particular, they almost never say what would be “too far.” Of course, this describes most political movements; they want to rally the troops, not provide blueprints of an ideal world. But when you cultivate a “radical” image but withhold specifics, you should expect critics’ minds to go to dark places. Rather than try to calm the critics, the latter-day socialists court their disapproval. In fact, most seem to positively enjoy the imagined intellectual trauma they’re inflicting on the unbeliever.

On reflection, then, the return of the self-styled socialist is indeed a travesty. The reason, though, is not that the word is offensive, but that it is deliberately confusing. If you really thought Sweden was a model society, you would just praise Sweden. The “socialist” label, in contrast, is a provocative equivocation. Latter-day socialists adopt it because they would rather insinuate their possible support for totalitarian horrors than earnestly promote an intellectually defensible position.

To what end? In modern parlance, the latter-day socialists could just be trolling. This is bad enough, but some socialists probably sincerely believe what they’re insinuating. Or worse. If all you want is Swedish social democracy, making common cause with such socialists is a grave mistake.

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