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How to Deschool Yourself for Success and Satisfaction

July 12, 2019July 12, 2019 Kerry McDonald

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 our own passions and proclivities. We were taught what to learn, and we learned to be taught. With self-education, we take back control of our own learning, exploring topics and skills that matter to us, free from coercion. In many ways, pursuing self-education is the difference between learning in a library and in a school. A library offers abundant resources to support our learning, including tangible and digital tools, optional classes, and helpful facilitators, but it is free from compulsion. Unlike K-12 schooling, we are not required to learn there under a legal threat of force. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in Between the World and Me, winner of the 2015 National Book Award:

I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. (p. 48)

Granted the freedom to learn, our true talents and ambitions can begin to emerge. But first, we need to deschool ourselves and shed some of the common myths we may have internalized about learning that could get in the way of our self-education and related success:

Myth #1: Color Inside the Lines

One of the first things most of us learned as a tot when we stepped into a classroom is to color inside the lines. Follow instructions, be neat, do what everyone else does. Now as we embrace self-education and discover our full human potential, we need to do the opposite. If everyone is coloring in the lines, we should be coloring outside of them. We should be looking at opportunities for creativity, not conformity. What do we see that no one else does? Where is the market possibility there? Coloring outside the lines may be messy, but it can lead to original ideas and novel inventions that make our lives and those around us better off.

Myth #2: Ask for Permission

In school, we quickly learn to ask for permission. Obedience is heartily rewarded, and non-compliance is swiftly punished. If we want to succeed at playing the game of school, we learn to be led. Now, as a self-directed learner with personal and professional goals, we need to be bold! If we wait around for permission to pursue those goals, we won’t get anywhere. Be intrepid.

Myth #3: Be Quiet and Stay Still

This schooled expectation is getting even worse than it was when many of us were kids. We were all taught to be quiet and stay still (especially when forming those straight lines in the hallway), but today young children are increasingly being diagnosed with and medicated for ADHD when they don’t keep still and remain attentive. Aside from the tragedy of medicalizing what, in many cases, is just normal childhood behavior, we become conditioned to stay passive.

But to achieve our audacious goals in adulthood, what we need more than anything is exuberance. We need to be constantly moving, constantly questioning, constantly exploring new pathways. Energy and agility are critical characteristics for achieving success in a fast-moving, always-changing world.

Myth #4: Don’t Read Ahead

Remember this one? We were often given reading assignments of certain pages or paragraphs with the warning to not read ahead. Now, of course, we need to be curious instead of compliant and seize all opportunities to read ahead! Digging deeply into topics that matter to us or reading a wide variety of different materials to broaden our worldview can help us to uncover our enthusiasms and crystallize our goals.

Myth #5. Winners Never Quit

One of the more pervasive myths we hang onto from childhood is the belief that we shouldn’t quit. Yet, some of the most successful people are those who stopped wasting their time and energy in jobs or activities that were not meaningful to them. As Rich Karlgaard, the longtime publisher of Forbes, writes in his new book Late Bloomers:

“How can the curious and creative, the searchers and explorers, jump off the dominant culture’s conveyor belt and begin shaping our own fates?” We do it by quitting. Quit the path we’re on. Quit the lousy job. Quit the class we hate. Quit the friends and associates who hurt us more than help. Quit the life we regret. (p. 148)

Myth #6. Failure Is Unacceptable

Failure can be as valuable as quitting. Contrary to what we were schooled to believe, failure is an important part of risk-taking and experimentation. If we spend our adulthood seeking only gold stars and Good Job! stickers, we may find only hollow rewards.

The first step in taking charge of your learning and livelihood is to shed these schooled myths and become adept at self-education. Trade conformity for creativity, obedience for curiosity, and compliance for exuberance. Don’t be afraid to quit or to fail. Setting your own path requires a great deal of coloring outside the lines. Don’t wait for the teacher or the buzzer to tell you when it’s time to go.

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What (Other) Economists Think About Democrats’ Education Plans

June 28, 2019June 28, 2019 Kerry McDonald

A recent NPR article, titled “What Economists Think About Democrats’ New Education Proposals,” caught my eye. FEE, after all, is an economic education organization that looks at how free markets and individual liberty lead to more progress, greater prosperity, and better outcomes for all than any other social or economic system ever created. I was curious what these NPR-interviewed economists might say about the Democratic presidential candidates’ education plans, which involve funneling more money into a government system of mass compulsory schooling.

What’s the Plan?

According to the article, Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris wants to spend $315 billion of taxpayer money to lift teacher salaries. Joe Biden wants to increase federal spending to low-income schools with teacher pay hikes. Bernie Sanders wants to impose price controls for teacher salaries, imposing a pay floor of $60,000 for incoming teachers. To its credit, the NPR article explains that by both domestic and international standards, American teachers are already well compensated and enjoy above-average employee benefits.

But that’s not enough, according to one of the economists interviewed. Eric Hanushek of Stanford says: “I think teachers are way underpaid.” Hanushek and others argue that teachers who are able to increase student test scores can improve both a student’s lifetime earnings and contribute positively to society at large.

The NPR reporter, Greg Rosalsky, concludes: “While being a good teacher means huge economic benefits for the people they teach and society at large, teachers don’t get to fully share in all the benefits they create. In economic terms, that’s a positive externality, and it’s a big reason why we should pay them more.”

Duquesne University economist Antony Davies disagrees. Davies, the Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow at FEE, explains that the media often misunderstands and misuses the term “externality,” as NPR did here. “Failing to share fully in the benefits one creates is not an externality,” says Davies. He continues:

The phenomenon is called “consumer surplus.” Not only does it exist in every transaction, it’s the reason we exchange with each other at all. Consider a car purchase. When a car dealer charges me $30,000 for a car for which I would have been willing to pay $35,000, the dealer does not benefit fully from the exchange. I walk away from the exchange $5,000 better off. But that doesn’t mean the dealer doesn’t benefit also. If the dealer charges me $30,000 but would have been willing to take $27,000, then the exchange makes the dealer $3,000 better off. For the exchange to occur, neither I nor the dealer can fully benefit from the exchange. Instead, we share the benefit. How we share the benefit is determined by the price to which we agree.

If teachers benefited fully from the value they create, there would be no point in obtaining an education because the entire value of the students’ educations would go to the teachers. Similarly, if students fully benefited from the value that teachers impart, there would be no point in teaching because the entire value of the students’ educations would go to the students. Instead, teachers and students share the value they create, and both walk away from the exchange better off than they were.

Davies points out a central problem with the Democratic presidential candidates’ education proposals, arguing that creating salary floors or offering universal pay increases do not address the root of the problem. He says:

The problem with teacher pay isn’t that teachers are paid too much, nor is it that they are paid too little. The problem with teacher pay is that it is largely divorced from teacher performance. Because pay schedules are usually set by the school district, principals don’t have the ability to reward outstanding teachers with greater pay nor to punish poor teachers with less.

Angela Dills, professor of economics at Western Carolina University, concurs. “I agree that better teachers should receive higher pay and that that’s more effective than across the board pay increases,” she says.

The inability to differentiate teacher quality and pay teachers accordingly limits the opportunity to reward top teachers and urge weaker teachers to improve. School leaders are not the only ones without the discretion to signal good and bad performance. Parents are also unable to offer these signals, with most required to keep their child in an assigned district school whether they like it or not. According to Davies: “Parents don’t have the ability to reward outstanding public schools and punish failing schools by diverting their tax dollars to the schools of their choice.”

A Better Alternative

Education choice mechanisms, like Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), tax-credit scholarship programs, and vouchers, allow parents to signal quality by opting out of inadequate schools and into higher quality learning spaces that work better for their children. Davies explains:

Voucher opponents claim that vouchers diminish the quality of public education by siphoning tax dollars away from public schools. But regardless of whether the quality argument is correct, the siphoning can easily be avoided. Allowing parents to send their children to any public school they choose and have the tax dollars follow the student—essentially, a voucher program restricted to public schools—would restore the link between pay and performance without removing any dollars from the public school system.

Programs like these can put parents back in charge of their children’s educations and can trigger true educational change. But the current crop of Democratic presidential candidates appears more interested in expanding the government’s ability to impose decisions on us. Empowering people to make their own choices is not in their education plans.

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See What You Can Build on Your Own

June 13, 2019 Kent McManigal

There’s a sense of personal accomplishment, of self-worth, when you make something with your own hands through your own efforts. Even if you seek guidance from someone with experience, you’ve learned more than you knew before. You’ll probably value the results more than if you had no part in making it.

If, after you do the work yourself, you decide you’d rather pay someone to do it for you next time, at least you now know what’s involved. You will probably have a better sense of whether someone is doing a good job or not. You might be able to tell if they are trying to scam you or overcharge for their services.

To prevent someone from making things on their own is bad in two ways. You show you don’t trust them to be competent, and you keep them from becoming competent; from learning how to do things they’ll value. If you never allow someone to succeed or fail on their own, always doing everything for them, they’ll never really grow up. They’ll never learn responsibility.

Self-government is the same way. Until you try to govern yourself, without any laws or representatives to fall back on, you’re not a fully competent human being. You may even surprise yourself when you discover you don’t need those things, nor do you want them imposed on others. I have more respect for myself than to look for someone to govern others — even my enemies — on my behalf.

To me, insisting that others must be governed for my benefit is a sign of weakness and immaturity.

People tend to live up or down to your expectations.

So how do you govern yourself with your own two hands? Be responsible. Don’t pawn your responsibilities onto others. Don’t expect others to take care of you, or to protect you from threats you should be dealing with on your own. Mind your own business and expect others to mind theirs. If someone violates you, deal with it yourself. Only seek help if absolutely unavoidable, and then only from truly voluntary sources. You aren’t entitled to other people’s time or money, so don’t act as though you are. Governing yourself isn’t achieved through voting or expecting representatives to fix anything. If you want to do that anyway, don’t stop there and think you’ve accomplished something.

See what you can build with the effort of your own mind and hands. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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Trade, Tariffs, and some Basic Economics

June 10, 2019June 10, 2019 Parrish Miller

Why does trade occur? Fundamentally, trade takes place in order to better the lives of those participating in the trade. You trade money for food because you are hungry and money doesn’t taste very good. Each party values what they are trading away less than what they are receiving in return. That is why the trade occurs.

Another way to look at trade is that it increases efficiency. As people (and companies) trade, they move closer toward an optimized equilibrium. There is an economic principle known as marginal utility. The idea is that the more of a thing one consumes, the less valuable each subsequent unit of the thing becomes. If you are hungry, a hamburger may be very valuable to you. You might even be so hungry that a second burger sounds good too. But how about a third or a fourth burger?

If you were willing to pay $10 for the first burger, does that mean that you would also be willing to pay $100 for ten burgers? Of course not. The utility of the tenth burger is far below that of the first. The reason this is relevant to efficiency is because trade allows people who have more of something than they need to transfer it to someone who values it more highly. You were willing to pay $10 for a burger. Presumably so are others. You aren’t willing to pay $100 for ten burgers. What about $50 for ten burgers? It’s a better deal on a per-burger basis, but you still aren’t hungry enough to consume ten (or even five) burgers.

What to do with all those extra burgers? Trade, of course. At $5 per burger, you can now trade them to people who want them enough to pay $10 a burger and make a nice profit in the process. By the time the trading is complete, everyone in the room will have had a burger and everyone will be (presumably) more satisfied than they were before the trades occurred.

Another important economic principle here is the subjectivity of value. Value is not an intrinsic quality of a good. It is an externally ascribed quality that is unique to each individual. A burger is not objectively ‘worth’ $10. It is ‘worth’ only what someone will pay for it. If you are willing to pay $10 for a burger, that means you value that burger at a minimum of $10. Someone else might value a burger at $8. This means they would pay $8 for a burger, but no more.

So what does all of this have to do with tariffs? As we already discussed, trade increases efficiency. It allows people to balance their subjective values and surplus goods as the economy (which really just means all the people in the economy) moves ever closer to that optimized equilibrium. It never reaches 100 percent optimization, of course, because people’s wants and needs are always changing.

Government intervention in the economy reduces efficiency. Every tax (and a tariff is just a tax) and regulation serves to decrease the efficiency of trade. Remember the $5 burger you sold for $10? Now imagine a 10 percent sales tax being added to it. Now you either have to sell the burger for $11 to get the same $5 profit or you can still sell it for $10, but only receive $4.09 in profit. Either way, efficiency is lost because some of what is being traded is removed from the equation. In the next trade, either you or your customer (or both) will have less to spend.

In a free market, the more trades the better because even trades that only increase efficiency slightly are worthwhile. In a market saddled with government intervention, the loss added to every transaction makes some previously beneficial transactions impractical. The more taxes or tariffs that are added to transactions, the fewer transactions occur and the less efficient life becomes.

Some people who advocate tariffs believe in a concept called protectionism. This is the idea that if the inefficiencies of high taxes are added only to some goods (or to certain suppliers) of these goods, it will protect other goods or suppliers. Imagine that the 10 percent tax added to the burgers only applied to beef. Turkey burgers could be sold tax-free. This might seem to benefit sellers of turkey burgers as some consumers would see turkey as an acceptable substitute good for beef.

Why is this a bad idea? There are several reasons. The first is that the burger market with the tax on beef is still less efficient than the burger market with no taxes at all. The second is that the consumers who opt for turkey instead of beef just to avoid the tax are not as satisfied as if they had their first choice. A third reason is that the artificial advantage given to sellers of turkey burgers will discourage them from seeking out greater efficiencies or improving their quality or customer service. They don’t need to make these improvements, as their products are already cheaper thanks to the protectionist tax system.

Prosperity is maximized when efficiency in the market is maximized. Your dollars go further, your trades are more beneficial, and your options are expanded. On the other hand, wellbeing is reduced as government intervention increases. Every obstacle which is erected in the path of trade reduces the efficiency that promotes prosperity.

Regulations are another form of mandated inefficiency that governments may inject into an economy. Imagine a new law which requires that every burger be sold with a bib. Who would want such a thing? The bib industry, of course. They would love this idea. Such a mandate might be justified as “saving thousands of jobs in the bib industry,” but would that actually improve the economy?

At first glance, it might appear so, but what is seen is often dwarfed by what is unseen. All the money spent buying unwanted bibs would be diverted from other uses. Every dollar that is spent requires forgoing other options. These rejected alternatives are the opportunity cost of your decision. A dollar spent buying a useless bib can’t be spent on something else that is more desirable or productive. These lost opportunities make the bib mandate a net negative for the economy, diverting resources that would have otherwise been used more efficiently.

There are more problems with the bib mandate, however. A protected industry has little reason to innovate or seek out greater efficiency. The bib industry protected by our hypothetical mandate would have no reason to improve their unneeded product or to adapt their industry in response to consumer demand. Those employed in it would not learn new skills or make any meaningful contribution to human wellbeing.

What of trade deficits? Advocates of tariffs often cite a supposed trade deficit as a justification for intervention in the economy. In short, a trade deficit is the amount by which a country’s imports (typically from one country) exceed its exports (to that country.) The idea that a trade deficit justifies a tariff is incredibly flawed, however. Think about it like this: You buy gas for your vehicle from a gas station. What does the gas station buy from you? According to the theory of a trade deficit, the total amount you spend at the gas station represents a “trade deficit” because the gas station (in all likelihood) isn’t buying anything from you. If you are like most people, the same is true of the grocery store, movie theater, and most other places you frequent.

Is this a bad thing? Not at all. On the contrary, attempting to balance your trade with every trading partner would lead to massive inefficiencies and impose all manner of hardship as you sought to trade your particular skills directly to suppliers of the goods and services required to keep you alive.

Instead, you trade your skills to those who need them, accept money in return as an intermediary, and then trade that money to sellers of the goods and services you actually desire. In this way, you maximize your earning potential by focusing on what you do best and obtain the things you need from those whose areas of expertise are different from your own. This idea is known as comparative advantage. If you are good at painting houses and not very good at sewing clothing, it makes sense to spend your time painting houses and using the money you receive for your painting to buy clothing from someone who is better at sewing. This is another way in which a free market increases efficiency.

Imagine if you had to make everything you consumed. Imagine trying to grow your own food, sew your own clothing (from cotton you grew yourself), and build your own house (from trees you cut down). Yes, people did that for centuries, but now imagine trying to do everything required for a comfortable life in the modern age. Can you make a car? A computer? A smartphone? Can you build an air conditioner or perform surgery on yourself?

Why is it that you can enjoy all of these things without knowing how to make or perform most or any of them? The answer is simple. Trade makes all of this possible. Thanks to trade, you can focus on the one thing at which you are the most skilled while still enjoying thousands of other goods and services provided by other people acting according to their comparative advantage.

Economics can be a complicated subject and many people don’t really understand why the economy works the way it does. That’s okay, but learning about economics and economic principles can also be very rewarding because it helps to explain so much about our world and about human behavior. Learning about economics also tends to make one recognize the foolishness of government intervention and central planning. Such interference not only does not improve human wellbeing, it quite literally cannot do so. The efficiency of the free market cannot be improved through taxation or regulation. The imposition of tariffs or mandates cannot get humanity closer to the equilibrium which all of our trades are chasing. The free market may not be perfect (which is ultimately a subjective opinion), but I truly believe it is as close as mankind will ever get to perfection.

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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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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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