The educational conversation has largely shifted in favor of homeschooling. The remote model introduced in schools at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, questionable racial practices, and the prospect of child vaccine mandates have induced a surge in homeschooling. Public schools have reported staggeringly less than anticipated enrollment numbers for this school year as homeschooling…
Editor’s Note: Over the past pandemic year, parents have been involuntarily thrust into schooling at home. Many have chosen to continue educating at home voluntarily as they have watched government schools failing their children. During this time, many veteran homeschoolers have stepped up, offering advice and resources to these families. Gina Prosch is a homeschool…
School is back in session! Or is it? What students are enduring to secure federal dollars is not and should not be considered ‘school’. Few, if any, of the excessive guidelines set by the CDC and local school boards were created with students in mind. While we can all agree this is a complicated situation,…
Monday afternoon, President Trump and the Coronavirus Task Force announced new guidelines in an attempt to minimize the coronavirus spread. Among other things, he stated, “My administration is recommending that all Americans, including the young and healthy, work to engage in schooling from home when possible…” Today, President @realDonaldTrump and the Coronavirus Task Force are…
As the global coronavirus outbreak closes more schools for weeks, and sometimes months—some 300 million children are currently missing class—parents, educators, and policymakers are panicking. Mass compulsory schooling has become such a cornerstone of contemporary culture that we forget it’s a relatively recent social construct. Responding to the pandemic, the United Nations declared that “the…
The desire to control other people’s ideas and behaviors, particularly when they challenge widely-held beliefs and customs, is one of human nature’s most nefarious tendencies. Socrates was sentenced to death for stepping out of line; Galileo almost was. But such extreme examples are outnumbered by the many more common, pernicious acts of trying to control…
At any moment in time, the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. Manners are missing; ethics are being eliminated; culture is corrupted; social attitudes are supercilious; virtues are vanishing; literature is mostly licentious; industry and commerce are materialistically crude and callous; and humaneness is hamstrung by greed and selfishness. It’s the…
There is a popular saying that “the proof is in the pudding.” In the first part of this article set, my colleague Mike Margeson spelled out the historical roots of the American schooling system. He clearly laid out the blueprint that men like Horace Mann used to build a system that does anything but “educates.”…
While it’s almost universally understood that the American school system is underperforming, “reform,” too, is almost universally prescribed as the solution. Yet in other walks of life, bad ideas are not reformed—they are eliminated and replaced with better ones. Our school system is rarely identified as a bad idea. The system is reflexively left alone…
by Micah J. Fleck When I was a freshman in college, I was in a research-based writing class that consisted of a very small student-to-faculty ratio and allowed us attendees, a roster that barely broke the double digits, to personally interact with our teacher and have meaningful conversations and debates rather than simply sit back…