A startling article in The Washington Post reports that even two years after COVID lockdowns, homeschool remains the fastest-growing form of education in the United States. Consider these stats from the WaPo story: Nearly 400 districts included in this article report
Nov 14, 2023·edited Nov 14, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal
I have known many Christian families who homeschool for religious reasons and short-change their kids on academics, so I share many of your concerns. There absolutely are families that restrict the opportunities of their daughters in this manner. It happens. I can name names. But it's not universal by any means. I also know young women whose parents recognized that the social pressure of trying to deal with the boys' hormones and the girls' social machinations were taking up their daughter's every minute at the expense of academics. I am on-call to help with the math for two of them, if they get stuck. They're doing calculus in ninth and tenth grades, respectively, and are more confident. Girls often lose all confidence in adolescence, and that has a lot to do with schools that are toxic in various ways. The parents have to be committed to providing friendship and community and socialization in other ways, but if they are, it can be a very good option for some kids and some families (key word, of course, "some").
I also think you may underestimate how bad the schools are in some areas--how much it's purely political indoctrination, at the expense of academics. I personally know a 7 yr old whose second grade class gets read books about transgender issues so often that he spent weeks in tears, his parents having no idea what was wrong, until he finally confessed that he was sad because he doesn't want to be a lady when he grows up. He had gotten the idea from being read books about transition daily in school (yes daily, his parents were able to verify this as part of an investigation with the school in the course of trying to get the teacher to read books about other things) that it was part of growing up--everyone has to become the other sex when they get bigger. 3 of 22 students in his class are transitioning (so far). I have no laundry in my apartment so I pay a local 16 year old to do my laundry at his house. He tells me that about 25% of his class identifies as trans on some level, some making medical modifications and some not, and that it gets talked about in every class, nearly every day, but he doesn't mind because he can usually get a lot of his homework done while various teachers check to see if anyone's pronouns have changed since the day before. (To be fair it's Vermont, so cobalt blue and likely more extreme here than in many places, but still, Vermont kids deserve to learn math and science and other things besides pronouns, too.)
All that to say -- homeschooling isn't a monolith and it's a good choice for some kids and some families.
Thanks for reading, Holly. I think I've qualified my points carefully enough to acknowledge the concerns you raise. If my kids' experiences in public schools were less positive and reciprocal, I can't say that I would feel or choose differently. And I'm well aware that some school environments are so disruptive that very little meaningful learning happens.
That Vermont picture you paint is pretty disturbing. When gender transitions or name changes become rites of passage or social expectations, I think we're in dangerous territory. A friend of mine told me about his child's name change after graduating college, how he grieved the loss of a family name but did his best to adjust his own thinking and be supportive. But that landed differently when I learned that a large share of his child's friend group in college was doing the same.
I completely agree with your last sentence. If homeschooling is spiking in NYC, then clearly it's not just conservative religious families shuttling their children away. But I still feel that we might try a little harder to reclaim public education for the unifier that it could be.
Der Juden-Messianismus verbreitet seit fast zweitausend Jahren seine giftige Botschaft unter uns. Demokratische und kommunistische Universalismen sind neueren Datums, aber sie haben das alte jüdische Narrativ nur gestärkt. Das sind der dieselben Idealen.
Die transnationalen, transrassischen, transkulturellen Ideale, die diese Ideologien uns predigen (jenseits von Völkern, Rassen, Kulturen) und die tägliche Diät in unseren Schulen, in unseren Medien, in unserer Popkultur, bei unseren Universitäten und auf unseren Straßen sind, haben unser biosymbolische Identität und unser ethnischer Stolz auf ihren minimalen Ausdruck reduziert.
Judentum, Christentum und Islam sind Todeskulte, die ihren Ursprung im Nahen Osten haben und Europa und seinen Völkern völlig fremd sind.
Manchmal fragt man sich, warum die europäische Linke so gut mit Muslimen klarkommt. Warum stellt sich eine oft offen antireligiöse Bewegung auf die Seite einer erbitterten Religiosität, die sich scheinbar fast allem zu widersetzen scheint, wofür die Linke immer zu stehen behauptet? Ein Teil der Erklärung liegt in der Tatsache, dass Islam und Marxismus eine gemeinsame ideologische Wurzel haben: das Judentum.
Kein Land führt bei dieser Invasion sein eigenes Rennen, weil es alles eine politische Agenda ist, die von den Vereinten Nationen geführt und von den Juden und ihren Marionetten (Politikern) vorangetrieben wird. Die meisten Menschen wollen einfach nicht wissen oder verstehen, dass dies eine politische Agenda ist. Einige schaffen es jedoch zu verstehen, dass Politiker absichtlich daran arbeiten, Muslime zu importieren und die Menschen zu ersetzen, aber das war's auch schon, sie sind wie ein Computer, der nicht weitermachen kann, weil das Programm es nicht zulässt.
Don Rumsfeld hatte Recht mit der Bemerkung: “Europa hat sich um seine Achse verschoben,” die falsche Seite hat den Zweiten Weltkrieg gewonnen, und es wird von Tag zu Tag klarer . . . Was hat die NATO getan, um Europa zu verteidigen? Absolut gar nichts . . . Meine Feinde sind nicht in Moskau, Damaskus, Teheran, Riad oder irgendeinem ätherischen germanischen Schreckgespenst, sondern in Washington, Brüssel und Tel Aviv.
My daughter goes to public school, but I'll admit I have enough issues with how school is conducted that I've thought of opting out. My reasons don't have anything to do with politics, at least not directly. I would be much happier to participate in a school system that doesn't have kindergarteners in formal instruction 7 hours a day, minimal time for free play and outdoor play, and then sends then home with homework in K-2. The frequency of screen use is also an issue I have. I think most kids would be better off with these changes and advocate for them, but it's hard to get much movement on these topics at least in our school district.
As a private school teacher myself and parent myself, I concur. School days are too long for kids and the capitulation to constant screen use is disheartening.
Yes. My thoughts exactly. We are experimenting with homeschooling this year because the elementary school model feels a little sideways. My husband is a public school high school teacher. I desire deeply to contribute and benefit from our local public schools..but maybe we will wait until the long days and extra exposure to screens doesn’t seem as detrimental? Perhaps middle school? I’m not sure, I’d really love to see reform here, and I imagine there would be a lot of parent support.
I hear these concerns and share them. I still wonder if there is room for reform within the system? More integration of Montessori principles? Some private schools do a better job of this, which I realize isn't an option for everyone. I visited a Quaker boarding school in Iowa that held classes in the morning and then broke into groups in the afternoon for experiential learning: tending the school garden, caring for cows and sheep, learning food preservation techniques, and other domestic arts (including canoe making). But the catch there is that for that immersive experience kids have to live there...
More integration of Montessori principles would be fantastic. We live in the country, which is the main barrier to us going to a Montessori school, that and I agree with you, that there are so few places for genuine civic engagement anymore that it feels like a responsibility to fix the existing system rather than opt out. I work in healthcare and I think the reform challenges are somewhat similar between the two systems in that everyone knows the system is a mess, but it seems like there's not a great deal of agreement on what would make it not a mess, and there's really not the large scale (like state or national) level leadership to say, I am willing to stake my career on fixing this issue even if it pisses people off and I never get elected. To be honest, so much happened in both education and healthcare during COVID to show the cracks in the system, that I can't believe we as a society have been so eager to say, "Well, that sucked, let's pretend it never happened."
Was the school Scattergood friend's school? I used to live not too far from there, though it was before I had kids so I didn't really pay attention to what they were doing. That type of education sounds amazing and I think a similar experience could be created at a non-residential school too.
"so much happened in both education and healthcare during COVID to show the cracks in the system, that I can't believe we as a society have been so eager to say, "Well, that sucked, let's pretend it never happened." 💯
Yes, I was referring to Scattergood! I'm sure it has its own problems, but it seemed like a very vibrant place. I taught a creative writing class during my visit and found the students engaged. But it is a private school and so is not really scalable for the public system.
PROTOCOLS OF THE MEETINGS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION . . . Protocol X – Preparing for Power . . . (((SARS-CoV2)))
❝. . . utterly exhaust humanity with dissention, hatred, struggle, envy and even by the use of torture, by starvation, by the inoculation of diseases. by want, so that the “Goyim” see no other issue than to take refuge in our complete sovereignty in money and in all else.❞
Au contraire . . . Pardonne mon français . . . Le judéo-messianisme répand parmi nous son message empoisonné depuis près de deux mille ans. Les universalismes démocratique et communiste sont plus récents, mais ils n’ont fait que renforcer le vieux récit juif. Ce sont les mêmes idéaux.
Les idéaux transnationaux, transraciaux, transsexuels, transculturels que ces idéologies nous prêchent (au-delà des peuples, des races, des cultures) et qui sont le subsistance quotidienne de nos écoles, dans nos médias, dans notre culture populaire, à nos universités, et sur nos rues, ont fini par réduire notre identité biosymbolique et notre fierté ethnique à leur expression minimale.
Le judaïsme, le christianisme, et l’islam sont des cultes de mort originaires du Moyen-Orient et totalement étrangers à l’Europe et à ses peuples.
On se demande parfois pourquoi la gauche européenne s’entend si bien avec les musulmans. Pourquoi un mouvement souvent ouvertement antireligieux prend-il le parti d’une religiosité farouche qui semble s’opposer à presque tout ce que la gauche a toujours prétendu défendre ? Une partie de l’explication réside dans le fait que l’Islam et le marxisme ont une racine idéologique commune: le judaïsme.
Don Rumsfeld avait raison lorsqu’il disait: «L’Europe s’est décalé sur son axe», c’est le mauvais côté qui a gagné la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et cela devient chaque jour plus clair . . . Qu’a fait l’OTAN pour défendre l’Europe? Absolument rien . . . Mes ennemis ne sont pas à Moscou, à Damas, à Téhéran, à Riyad ou dans quelque croque-mitaine teutonique éthéré, mes ennemis sont à Washington, Bruxelles et Tel Aviv.
It’s great that millions of children have parents who don’t make them stay in broken school systems. Public school didn’t fit me, and it doesn’t fit my son. We’re not religious. I just care about my son’s education. I asked the local principal where his daughters go to school. It’s a private school in Durham. That tells you all you need to know.
Good point, Jonathan. And I hear you -- our first priority as parents is our own children.
Private schools offer some of the belonging and social connection that seems absent from homeschooling (or at least from the examples I know best from my own life). But private schools are pretty homogenous demographically, and this is what concerns me about divesting from public education -- we end up sorting ourselves into groups that look more epochs with rampant inequality.
This is what I'm trying to struggle with in this essay, and I'm curious about your take on it. Do we as parents have any responsibility to others' kids? Ideally the public system would reflect our care for others' children and their education, alongside our own. That's what I feel fortunate to have experienced: the knowledge that my kids enrich the schools they attend and that they are enriched in return.
It seems to me the underlying presumption of this viewpoint is that the system of public education is good, but there are varying degrees of flaws within it. If that is the case then everything this author said is spot on. However if the system itself is fundamentally flawed, and has always been fundamentally flawed then the picture is very different. I think this is the reality of the situation.
For example the author seems very concerned that kids might miss out on a college education because that’s a method of economic mobility. That might be true if you’re a minority of some type who is going to be able to pay for their college education with scholarships. However more and more a college education has become a form of debt slavery and it’s something that neither political party is interested in changing substantially. When I was growing up in the 90s and 00s the standard mantra was that if in high school you get good grades (check 4.0) work hard (check) and stay out of trouble (check) then scholarships would be able to pay for most if not all of your degree. If you get a useful degree while following the aforementioned steps and you don’t make stupid financial decisions then that was the road to future financial success. What millions of other Americans (more than 40 million) and I found out the hard way is that’s not true anymore. Hard work and good grades don’t matter when scholarships and financial aide packages are based on other factors like minority status, residency status, and unrealistic monetary calculations about family contribution. Crushing student debt has negated the value of a college education. So as someone who fell into that trap I tell my children every chance I get to go to trade school.
About half my cousins went to college about half went to trade schools and those who went to trade school are more financially stable than those who got degrees (even though all the degrees were in good fields where jobs were plentiful). Of my family who are college educated and financially stable that’s primarily due to the spouse’s contributions and not due to their degree, those spouses went to trade school. There’s a massive shortage of tradesmen and women and with a growing world population those trades will grow with the increase in demand. So I don’t think fewer kids going to university is a bad thing, especially given the pathetic nonsense taught in the university system today.
I think that abandoning public school in order to homeschool is generally a mistake because I think it’s your civic duty to change the system to one that benefits everyone instead of just “saving” your kid. That said, I am lucky in that my school district is small and generally made up with people of a similar values system to my own. Even so, there are certain redlines that if crossed will mean pulling my kids out ASAP.
Excellent point about debt. Totally agree. My own opportunities owe to an excellent public high school and affordable college in the early 90s. I never borrowed a dime in graduate school and was debt free by age 23. But that story is not possible for young people today.
Here's where I respectfully disagree -- the failure of public universities to remain true to their missions, especially land grant universities, does not prove that universities were bogus all along. Public universities were, in fact, engines of mobility when they were affordable. I think that's still a worthy goal to aim at.
However, I cannot argue with the practical exigencies that you describe. One of my cousins is a former Marine, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and he worked his way up from oil roughneck through a series of certifications that now allows him a generous income and flexible schedule. He's a thoughtful person, and we have many meaningful conversations. But he also has a strong foundation from the public school that we both attended.
In the eras before public education, when basic literacy and a trade were all that working people aspired to, the church was the locus of meaning. For much of the twentieth century, I believe public schools and public universities offered a more democratic forum for the examined life -- one that was not explicitly religious. I don't see belief or cultural values as incidental to this discussion. The periods before public schools were rife with religious schisms, violence, persecution, humiliation in the stocks, and more. That's not a Golden Age we're talking about, even if people are successful in their trades. There has to be some kind of shared meaning for a community to hold together. I fear that the erosion of public education is also the erosion of that shared meaning.
For what it’s worth I didn’t mean that the university system was always bogus. I think the public K-12 system was flawed from its inception and that cultural decay corrupted the universities.
Public education never provided that shared meaning, it was always religion that provided it, it was just reflected in the education. Individuals might exist without religion but societies don’t, collective groups of people don’t. In the Soviet Union the religion was communism which was reflected in their schools, in modern America it’s woke progressive ideology with a very loose humanist basis. People thought they could take God and religion out of schools, what happened is God was replaced by the gods of culture.
Say what you want about the past but in the modern age we killed 300,000 Iraqi civilians over a lie and nobody cared and nobody still cares and the public education system certainly shared a role in that. You think the stocks was bad? Try being a reformed convict. At least you got out of the stocks and after a small amount of time the physical evidence was gone. If things were really bad you could move to the next town or to a big city and start over. Now no matter where you go every job application you fill out will ask about your criminal record and most people don’t really care how serious the crime was or if you’ve been reformed. We have all the same problems we did, we’ve just upgraded the technology and told ourselves it’s more civilized that way.
Many American cities have higher crime rates than third world countries. The religious schisms are now between the supporters of Ukraine and Russia, between Israel and Palestine, between BLM and the Proud Boys, they are both the left and the right eating themselves alive and tearing each other apart.
I am not saying that the idea of public education isn’t good or that public schools trying to pass on shared meaning isn’t good. The problem is how our schools were structured from the beginning and that they were based off an education system structured to create good soldiers and tweaked to produce good workers. We need a system structured to produce good citizens.
Yes to this: "The problem is how our schools were structured from the beginning and that they were based off an education system structured to create good soldiers and tweaked to produce good workers. We need a system structured to produce good citizens."
Except I think that schools once produced better citizens. I don't think we need to invent public education for citizenship de nouveau.
They were better citizens but it doesn’t appear they were good enough citizens to prevent this from happening. We don’t have to completely go on our own, there are different school systems and philosophies in use worldwide and some very effective systems and philosophies being used in private schools that could be used to rehabilitate the public sector.
We also have to keep an eye on the future. Technology offers such amazing opportunities, I recently saw a science class on zoom or Skype or whatever with an astronaut on the space station. What an incredible learning opportunity! That is so much more valuable than simply reading about it in some magazine or school textbook. On the other hand overuse of technology is a problem. Many schools are ditching text books altogether in favor of laptops and tablets and while I’m sure it decreases the number of young children with back injuries it worries me. I think reading from a physical paper book is good and important for a variety of reasons, it isn’t something to be nonchalantly pushed aside. As a parent I try to limit my child’s screen time but how can I do that when all the homework is screen based? It’s easy enough for me to have the kids do homework at the kitchen table where I can know their screens are nowhere near, but when they are on the tablet or laptop it’s much harder to see what exactly they are doing. There’s also the kind of access to things that are not valuable educational opportunities that are actually harmful that are enabled by tablets and computers. I know that there’s a wide variety of protections and controls available but I also know that my four year old is a veritable hacker so I doubt those programs are lasting long on the products used by older kids. (I’m convinced that the next time the government needs to hack into something they should just take it to the local preschool and promise juice boxes and goldfish for everyone when it gets done. Guaranteed to be accomplished before nap time.) So any system has to be able to adjust to the realities of the times, increasing technology offerings, a decreased availability of unstructured play time outside of school, how to accommodate students with parents who aren’t involved and might need help with the basics of living while not wasting the time of kids who had parents that actually parented. What are the necessary foundational morals and what is the necessary skill set to create a valuable and engaged citizen? What do we do with people who are not capable of that level of achievement? How do we best discover and nurture the capabilities of children to prepare them not to work the same factory job for forty years but to change fields every 5-10 years as AI and technology collide with our economy? How do we decide which subjects are most important as the collective human knowledge base gets ever larger and never smaller? I don’t see how and prior version of our current system is up to this task.
You can’t change the system when the system is actively hiding what it’s doing from parents and views any dissent from the official dictates as “bigotry” and “right wing extremism”.
In some cases that’s true, but in most it just requires added effort and coordination and the willingness to be called a bigot and not back down. In most of the country school boards control the schools and in most of the country those boards are voted upon positions. If you want to know what’s going on in your kids school and life you’re going to have to do more than just ask “so how was school” while you are multitasking it’s going to take effort and it’s going to take paying attention to what your kid is saying and doing. I bet if most parents paid any attention at all to their child’s social media consumption they would have a very good idea of what was going on at their schools.
I very much disagree with your last paragraph. No parent should have an obligation to torture and abuse their own kid for the sake of helping a broken social institution. Especially since the problems with our public school system are so numerous and deeply embedded that there is no better hope for reform than simply not participating. A switch to universal ESAs, which we're already seeing some states do, is by far our best hope for the future.
The thing about making blanket statements about the “public school system” is that the problems with the system are as varied as the schools are. I agree that no parent should torture their kid to try and change the system. However I see parents pulling their kids from small town public schools whose issues are very fixable because they saw some moron teacher on TikTok was grooming kids in some big city a thousand miles away. If your kid is being targeted or having problems that’s a different story. However I see a lot of parents pulling their kids preemptively because they see something they don’t like in a school a thousand miles away. The problem with pulling your kid instead of fixing the system is the other 23 kids in your kids class are still getting brainwashed and they are going to outvote your kid. Sometimes fighting to save the system isn’t an option, but I see a lot of parents pull their kids from a school that’s fixable because they saw something on the internet that happened at a school in a big city a thousand miles away.
Interesting stats. I think the reasons ppl choose to homeschool are as varied as families are. Many parents are concerned that schools in most progressive states/cities are too focused on indoctrination and not so much as excellence and academics. In our state, homeschooled kids are able to join school groups, play on school sports teams and be involved in all extracurricular activities. Most home schooled kids out perform their in school peers. They test better on the SAT’s and other college entrance exams. I’ve heard such exams have been abandoned as vestiges of white supremacy yet at least half the kids receiving honors at my youngest child’s HS graduation ceremony were children of color.
Homeschooling has positives and negatives but until our educational system regains teaching kids and properly equipping them to move on successfully in life, the trend will continue.
You layout good food for thought though and it’s surely an important topic so thanks for addressing it so eloquently.
Thanks for commenting, Maureen. It's clear that some students test better and hit other markers of academic success more quickly while being homeschooled. However, as George suggests below, there are other factors worth weighing, such as belonging and identity. It sounds like homeschooled kids in your area are able to skim the cream with extracurriculars without contributing to their academic cohort. Every parent weighs these choices carefully, I realize. But it's possible to get high test scores and still be quite culturally or historically ignorant. Really a lot of what I'm struggling with in this essay is a question of trust. If people don't trust the school, then they don't really trust other families in their community, and this distrust manifests in a host of other ways.
Where I completely agree with you is the importance of some academic standard for gauging preparedness and aptitude at the college level. Abandoning the SAT or ACT makes people feel good but creates a host of other problems. Are you really doing a student a favor by admitting them and taking their tuition for a year when it might have been clear from test scores that they'd be unlikely to persist? I once served on an enrollment committee at my former employer where one senior leader blurted out, "We don't want to attract smarter students!" Her reasoning seemed to be that lower-performing students got less financial aid and padded the coffers more, even if they didn't make it all four years. I found that to be a repugnant position and said so.
I also remember a Zoom meeting during COVID when a well-meaning committee proposed abandoning test scores for admissions to our school. I'll never forget the pained expressions on my colleagues' faces in Mathematics, Chemistry, and Physics. They knew all too well that those tests were reliable indicators of success in their fields, and that really all we were doing was enabling an illusion of broader opportunity. But they couldn't say so without fear of being shamed, and so they didn't and the measure passed.
There is no perfect measure of aptitude or intelligence. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to acquire valuable data about student preparedness and success. As Thomas Chatterton Williams and others have pointed out, standardized tests have often made enormous differences for gifted young people from low-income backgrounds. Taking that one advantage away has quashed some of those bright lights.
The author says that his children went to public school - past tense. I don’t know how far in the past that was, but he might not be fully aware of how bad things have gotten over the last few years.
My kids also have gone to public schools for many years. Four years ago, my oldest daughter started high school, and it destroyed her. I would give anything to be able to go back in time and homeschool her. She was a super-smart kid, always in the gifted program, got good grades. Very creative, constantly making up worlds and characters and stories. She did karate and played the violin and was in the school play and tried out for basketball. She read books constantly. She was friendly and talkative and always had a smile, and while she didn’t always fit in with her peers she had a certain confidence that she was going to do things her way and not conform.
Now, that kid is gone, replaced by a sullen, downtrodden young adult using a boy’s name and pronouns. She barely passed any classes in high school and only graduated due to superhuman efforts on my husband’s part to find an online math class she could pass at the last minute. She’s depressed, on medication (a badge of honor for her). She walks around with her head down, refusing to make eye contact, speaking in a weird forced low voice. She is taking a couple of classes at community collage but isn’t really taking steps toward her future. All the hopes and expectations I ever had for a bright future for her are gone. She’s completely brainwashed with anti-capitalist, anti-white, anti-“cishet”, anti-police propaganda that made her believe that she was a terrible person for being a white girl from a middle class family and she was not allowed to speak unless she was a disadvantaged minority. She’s self-diagnosed with autism, ADHD, and dissociative identity disorder.
All of this happened during the first two months of high school, so fast I didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. (Of course the school celebrated her transition to a male name, but encouraged her to keep it a secret at home.) We moved her to a different school but it was too late. The psychological damage was done. She is a shadow of the person she used to be. I don’t know if we’ll ever get her back.
We live in a relatively well-off area with top rated public schools in a red state. If it’s this bad here, I can’t even imagine how bad it is in other places.
How painful for everyone, Dee. My children still do go to public schools. All I can say is that I hope I am given a chance to support them if they have questions like these. All the best to you and your family.
Thanks. This is not a wholesale condemnation of public schools. In fact my younger daughter still goes to one, although not the same one that destroyed her sister. But I completely understand how toxic these environments can be, and I think people who don’t think their kids are able to navigate that successfully are completely justified in deciding to homeschool. I wish I would have been that wise. I thought my kids were too smart and healthy to get caught up in anything like that.
Historically, children were educated at home. Locking them in little prisons to be indoctrinated has lowered educational achievement, destroyed creativity, and independent thinking, it creates a dependence on peers and weakens family bonds. The least capable parents will produce better outcomes on the whole than the best institutions.
Walking into a modern school feels exactly like walking into a prison, the same companies design both. Often there are metal detectors and armed guards at the entrance, too. The perfect place to educate strong independent thinkers.
For the folks in the comments: Maureen, Holly, David.
I think I'll share my personal story. I was home schooled K-12. I got a 30 on the ACT and had college completely paid for including room and board. I was also severely socially hampered in the manner that Joshua describes.
I'll paint the picture. My entire social circle consisted of my family and my church. "My church" = around a dozen conservative white families in Alabama. When I was growing up, the Bugbear of the public classroom wasn't trans-rights and Black lives matter. For my family, it was abortion, Darwinian evolution, Marxism, and "homosexuality." These were the things that made my dad fear and shudder in the presence of the local public school.
By contrast, as a kid, I was taught explicitly that my body was wicked. That Pleasure Was Bad. That romance was dangerous and to be seen with narrowed eyes. That Republicans were the good guys. That the free market is just.
The idea that parents like mine avoided public schooling because it was "politically indoctrinating their kids" makes me scratch my head. Might not conservative parents perform their own brand of lobotomies?
For me it is a very simple math problem: more exposure to more people and ways of life = less danger of indoctrination. Less exposure = more danger of indoctrination. If this is too complex an equation, watch that "mother knows best" song from Disney's Tangled. You'll get the idea.
Home school parents are the political indoctrination factory of the American Conservative movement.
That 30 I gained on the ACT and, more importantly, what it said about my ability to stress focus in every college class turned into good grades and excellent opportunities with my English professors. But it was for naught. When those same professors would offer to write me recommendations for full bright scholarships, or give me career advice, or try to connect me with friends they had in the publishing industry, I didn't trust them and I didn't trust myself.
I probably didn't trust them because they weren't white, Christian, and conservative.
I probably didn't trust myself because Pleasure Was Bad. Good things were bad. My brain was all kinds of twisted in knots by homeschooling. It took a great deal of reading and writing to grow into knowing the world in which I live, and more importantly my duty to it.
I have spent the better part of the last fifteen years trying desperately to grow up.
For those with a short attention span, the TLDR is: I wish I could have been "indoctrinated about Trans Rights" if it came in a package deal that included a slow dance with a girl from California. Hell, I would have traded at least four points on the ACT for a crack at that.
Thanks for sharing your story, George. I actually shared a lot of your experience and regret how militant a cultural warrior I was in high school. But I was allowed to mingle with kids from other backgrounds, and that shaped me in positive ways over time.
Your last line is hilarious and also heartbreaking. In fact, you might say that I did sacrifice a 4.0 for similar reasons. My first and last high school relationship came during my freshman year. The breakup caused me to bomb my exams one quarter, and I resolved never to allow such a distraction again until I was fully employed and owned my own house. Of course, love caught up with me eventually in college, but that is another story.
Your more serious point about indoctrination is spot on. Typically the guilty dog barks first, and nearly everything that the parents you describe fear about public education is evident in what they practice privately. Accusations of indoctrination are, as they say in poker, a tell.
Your inability to feel grown up despite academic success is not nearly as concerning as small children being indoctrinated with radical gender ideology and other marxist political ideas and receiving next to no academic instruction.
In fact, it sounds like you may have received some indoctrination yourself and that’s led to some blind spots.
It’s hard to imagine a more natural, healthy development path than growing up in a tight knit, family-centered community. Until you go to college and learn that white people and Republicans are actually bad, I guess.
I suspect that we are talking more about personal life experiences, talking points, and polemics here than any kind of objective argument. Our stories are different, and I hope yours has a happy ending as well.
You certainly are. I’m talking about a generation of children being indoctrinated by government institutions with radical ideology that actively harms them and society at large. You’re saying that’s ok because your parents sheltered you too much out of love. These aren’t equivalent.
A real dilemma for sure, and you make some great points about the civic value of... being part of the system in contrast to home schooling. For one, maybe the stats will prove me wrong, but it's hard to imagine that really becoming all that popular. I mean, who has time to home school their kids? Is some of what gets counted as home schooling really just Covid remote school and/or school refusal?
The bigger thing is that it's hard for me to escape the conclusion (based entirely on my own experience as a public-school student, because I don't have kids) that the system kinda sucks, and that if I had kids of my own I would be doing my damndest not to home school them but to get them into an outdoor-oriented alternative school, and then to apprentice and to school abroad or off to sea—or something, anything, but sitting at a desk for however-many hours a day. No wonder we all spent most of our time trying to get high!
I'm all for civic and community participation, but not for trust in the institutions that have done so much to produce our current cultural dilemma, or, dare I say, dead end? So, yes, home school is mostly bonkers (that "marching" crowd you described), but I won't fight to send "my" kids to public school. I'd be fighting to send them elsewhere, where their contributions—as you so very well pointed out—would go towards building something better.
Cheers Josh for a thoughtful and well articulated piece, as always!
Thanks for your thoughts, Bowen. The WaPo article shows pretty plainly that the spike in homeschooling during COVID shows no sign of slowing, three years later. If more people are homeschooling than sending their kids to Catholic schools, that's a huge deal. But you're right -- not everyone has the time to do this, especially not single parents, which is why I frame it as a problem of the commons.
Yeah, I don't know what to do about the sitting-at-a-desk thing. There's a whole other essay there on whether schools are just training kids to be corporate drones, or whether there are broader horizons. I suppose the homeschool crowd is closer to your thinking in allowing more flexibility and possibly a trade route instead of college. My fear with that is there's no shared American experience and why not opt for alternative facts or no vaccines if you opt for an alternative school? Some of those effects are collective. And if we lose a reliable, but imperfect, public system, I think we lose one of our social equalizers. It truly is turning back the clock to the 19th, 18th, or 17th century. Those were periods with some freedoms that modernity took away, but they were also periods of social upheaval.
I, personally, would prefer to find ways to advocate for customization and independence within a public system rather than tossing it all out. But we live in a country where parents get to choose, and if we all choose to do our own thing, I guess we'll see what the outcomes are. There are plenty of bad outcomes right now, as you say.
I feel your central and very valuable point about a "shared American experience" -- that's the heart of your argument, for me, and that has a lot of gravitas. It's also a huge part of our economic geography, with such a large proportion of property taxes going to pay for our public schools.
If school had more diverse options and possibilities for young people I'd be much more of a supporter. My own experience there, for example, did include a remarkable program called Urban Pioneers, the vision of a singular man—Wayne Macdonald—who was able, for a time, to build and offer something different within the context of the public high school system right here in San Francisco, and that made a lasting difference in the lives of all the young people that participated in that program.
I celebrate his contribution in my piece about how It's Not Really a "Struggle" to Find Good Male Role Models →
I guess I don't mean to say toss it all out -- and again, what do I know, I don't have kids to worry about.
Honestly, my own despair at the lack of interesting and affordable school—and my own experience in urban public schools built like jails—was one of the many reasons that I didn't end up having kids of my own.
It feels like the civic institution of public school needs revolutionary redesign to have a hope of once again becoming a positive force in society.
"It feels like the civic institution of public school needs revolutionary redesign to have a hope of once again becoming a positive force in society." 💯
Public school is a positive force right now, even if it has some serious problems. But this really does depend on where you live. I've only raised my kids in two college towns, where the peer groups and resources are buoyant.
Mental health concerns and growing awareness of special needs (are there more children on the autism spectrum or just more diagnoses now?) and widening gaps between family environments (which do a lot to support or undermine learning) all complicate the picture. I've toyed with the idea of reinventing myself as a public school teacher. But there's a lot of downside to that, too.
Bravo Josh for the bravery in touching the third rail. As an educator and a parent you have a deep commitment to the system(s) through which our children are educated. I respect that. I was a public school kid and have done OK. That said, my small public school system in Clayton, MO, a suburb of St Louis, was an absolute anomaly in the area.
It is my personal opinion that much of the distrust in our institutions has happened in the last 5 years. The nonsense of the Covid response and the increasing displays of excessive and indiscreet activism have soured many parents and non-parents alike on the federal, state, and local governments’ ability to properly care for and teach our children.
I, like you, wish it weren’t so. But it is what it is. In today’s world, having choices to choose between is the key.
Thank you, Dee. Yes, the distrust has grown more acute, and rapidly, since 2020. The pandemic really did strain the public system and expose its weaknesses. I suspect that many schools are still recovering from that and may still be in survival mode.
Where I'd gently challenge you is on the notion that everyone can have choices. Typically if there isn't a shared investment (and shared risk), then those with the least privilege end up with the fewest choices. This may be a strained metaphor, but I think of public education as akin to the Community Supported Agriculture concept. You pay a farmer an annual subscription and receive a weekly box of produce in return. This gives the farmer financial security because you're sharing in the risk. If there's a drought or a hailstorm wipes out the pepper crop, everyone takes that hit together. If it's a banner year for potatoes, then you might end up getting more than you paid for, and the farmer will be glad to give it to you. By contrast, a farmers market is the epitome of choice. The farmer has to set up the stand, but you can choose whether to come or go, and if it's a bad year for potatoes, the farmer takes that hit alone. If it rains, and half the people come to market, tough titty for the farmer. But enough of those hits will convince the farmer that the market is just not worth the cost of production, packing everything up, and setting up the stand.
I think we have more resilience in shared meaning and shared risk and shared reward.
I agree that a shared investment and a shared risk is necessary. Don’t we have that already? All of us pay taxes that support public education--even those families that opt for private school or home schooling. So if public schools are failing, is that fault of the citizens who are required to support them with their dollars, or the fault of the administrators who decide how to spend that money? I know it’s a complicated issue but I wanted to reply directly to your comment about shared risk.
Additionally I was commenting that choice is good and necessary, but certainly not implying that all have an equal choice. Equality of outcome is impossible in most things including education. Equality of opportunity is the best we can try to create.
Good point, Dee -- but I interpret shared risk as a kind of shared stake in the quality of the enterprise. If our kids are in public schools, we still have skin in the game, we're absorbing the strengths and weaknesses of the system and are motivated to improve it however we can. If we're paying into something we're not using, that's not quite the same? I realize the frustration of paying into a system that isn't working, however.
I think if public schools are failing, it ought to be everyone's responsibility to pick them up, and not just financially. But that would be quite a separate essay!
Yes, it most certainly is an entirely new essay! I’ll leave that to you my recovering academic friend. I’ll try to pick one of the many other things that are FUBAR in our society to write about.🤷🏻♂️
Nov 14, 2023·edited Nov 14, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal
I agree with all of your points. It is an effort to break community and return to the 19th-17th Century. Who is pushing this effort to break community? I'd love to know but I have my suspicions. My husband has his office in a house where home schoolers once lived. The un-forwarded 3rd class mail delivered to the home after they moved out often featured politicians spreading the word about how terrible public schools are. One was Iowa's Senator Chuck Grassley. Pella recently had a library referendum and the fear tactics on the "censor" the library side were so bad that moms (I assume homeschool moms) were afraid to take their children to the public library because they thought the children would see porn on the shelves. The "censorship" referendum lost but the group had so much cash and influence that two of their "censoring" candidates won seats on our city council by running on fear tactics and in my opinion, slander.
Yeah, the library battles are unfortunate. I've read quite a bit about this, and I'm somewhat sympathetic to both sides. Some of the titles that I've seen reporting on really do seem to back people into binary positions, and a lot of it has less to do with freedom of speech than it does with what kids below the age of, say, 12 ought to be allowed to see without parental supervision. Those seem like legitimate concerns to me, and ignoring them really does erode public trust. Of course, censorship is not a reasonable answer, and I don't defend that. I just find it hard to feel like I'd go hold a picket sign on either side of that particular argument.
The titles were not all in the library and were in the adult section. And how many young kids go to the library without their parents to get them there? My take on it is that it was driven by scare tactics meant to undermine a place where the public is welcome. I always think of Jane Addams when I think of community spaces and like you, I can see the erosion of community spaces as being a return to the gilded age.
> It is an effort to break community and return to the 19th-17th Century.
There are homeschool co-ops
There are homeschool get-togethers
There are homeschool proms for Pete's sake.
It's literally never been easier to have community, unless you have a very different idea of community than most people.
The thing is, there doesn't exist a real American identity anymore, nor shared values, nor shared culture. It's been wiped away through a myriad of mechanisms. Trying to create a top-down culture to replace an organic community will fail, and is failing in our public school systems. So what we have are pockets of communities that still have that cohesion that are banding together. It's a great balkanization, and it's happening whether someone likes it or not.
Who is pushing the efforts to break community? Maybe it’s the people showing kids gay porn and hiding their psychological issues from their parents?
Maybe it’s the people teaching equity over equality and generally identitarian nonsense? Maybe it’s the ones shutting down the schools and local small business for years and ostracizing half the country who doesn’t want to inject experimental drugs into themselves?
I believe that is done as a part of school choice, the same programs that allow students to take their dollars and apply them to tuition at private and charter schools. The underlying reasoning is that it’s unfair to have parents forced to pay for underperforming schools via taxes and then have to pay out of pocket on top of that for an alternative school choice because the public schools are failing them. I think that such programs are good because it widens the opportunity for alternative education opportunities (not just homeschool). That said if as a homeschool parent you take that money I think it’s fair for the government to require an accurate accounting of it to show that it was used to further the child’s education.
The data I've seen on charter schools, which I believe are tuition free, is that they are no better or worse than public schools in the aggregate.
If parents want to pay for private school out of pocket, of course they should be free to do so, but it seems unfair to weaken the funding for those who do not have the option. As fro home schooling, again I support parents' right to choose to do so, but not to pay them.
Why should I have to pay for a service I’m not using? Sure, an educated populace is a public good, but are public school systems even attempting education anymore? The metrics only get worse and worse.
Not to mention the fact that public schools are usually explicitly political and there is no input from parents about the curriculum or policies.
Hell, how about representation? How many male teachers are there? How are boys doing in school, by the way? Any efforts to fix that?
If we want to argue that public schools build community then let’s make them actually build community.
Why should you have to pay taxes at all? Maybe you're not using Medicaid or Medicare, maybe you're not using the fire department, because you've never had a fire.
It is reasonable for me to pay for public goods, whether or not I personally use them. It is not reasonable for me to pay for government institutions to politically indoctrinate a generation of children while completely abdicating their stated duty.
There is no semblance of impartiality in the public school system. What’s happening is political indoctrination. The crazy leftists from Academia have gotten the keys to the car. That’s why people are homeschooling. Instead of chastising people for no subjecting their children to the lunacy of the school system, how about restore some sanity to the system.
It really depends on wether you think the dollars should be tied to the system or to the students. For a variety of reasons I would rather my tax dollars went to the students in my area than the school systems in my area and there is a significant difference. The US spends more than $16,000 per pupil in K-12 education. Do you think we are getting a valuable return on our investment? We spend the second most per student in the world but yet when it comes to educational achievement rankings we are generally middle of pack if not at the lower end of it.
Also while it’s possible that the various school systems are no different in aggregate it’s also possible that for specific individuals there can be a tremendous difference. Tying the dollars to students rather than to a system allows individual students to do what is right for them.
I believer if you disaggregate the performance of schools by zip code according to socioeconomic quintile, you find that what's dragging down performance are the poorest districts.
Money spent on education hasn't solved the problems with these schools. The overarching issue is familial poverty.
I doubt there's much intentional home-schooling going on in inner cities.
The issue is much deeper than familial poverty, there are cultural issues as well. It’s why immigrants who come to America from China, Nigeria, and India with next to nothing, typically in worse economic shape than many poor American families are in the Middle Class or higher within a couple of generations. I have never met a child whose family cared about their education regardless of economic status whose child wasn’t at grade level or above grade level unless there was some massive learning disability involved. However I grew up with lots of kids who weren’t particularly impoverished who didn’t take school seriously, who learned little, who performed poorly. I see the same pattern in my current community today. Had their parents pushed them to apply themselves or had they been in a more active learning environment perhaps they would have learned and achieved more. Indeed many of these kids despite doing abysmally on tests and barely passing went on to become very successful in the trades but even so most of them would have benefited from a more robust education in their early days.
I agree with this. It's what's happened in my hometown. And I recognize that by writing this, I'm trying to hold two potentially incompatible ideas in my mind at the same time: my belief in public education and my conviction that I wouldn't send my kids to the same school I attended (for all the contextual issues described above).
The stats for NYC might suggest otherwise. And I appreciate all your insights here, David.
A point I chose not to include in the main essay, but maybe should have, is that inner city schools are often paraded as examples of the failure of the public system. But in fact they tell a different tale. Urban schools weren't always inferior. A host of systemic factors, such as white flight, redlining, and eminent domain also impacted those public educational systems. So you might see failing urban schools now as bellwethers for other communities where patterns of flight are beginning to emerge.
Another factor that I omitted is that homeschooling just is not an option for single parents. I'll soon be sharing custody on the other side of a divorce, and kids who move between two households equitably can't be easily homeschooled, regardless of how flexible either parent might be. Any single parent working a 9-5 or holding multiple jobs depends on a quality public school system. And this is just as true in affluent communities as it is in low-income areas. I guess charters and private schools might be options for single parents with more means. It's not a point I've thought all the way through.
Dr. Tara -- excellent point about requiring some kind of accountability if public funds are used for homeschooling. Perhaps this has all eroded past repair, but vouchers were always a slippery slope because they started nibbling at the commons. At some point, if enough people divest from the public system, then it must either be scrapped or rebuilt. And the consequences of that will fall most heavily upon the least privileged, as they already are, as they always have.
Instead we drug everyone else down to the lowest common denominator. We spend $16,000 per child per year on education in this country, most of our classrooms are over capacity with not enough teachers. Twenty four is the average class size. Let’s say two thirds of the kids opt out. I’m going to round down to that leaves 7 kids in the classroom (because having a 0.2 kid is weird). Are you trying to tell me that you can’t effectively teach 7 kids with $112,000 at your disposal? The problem is that the public school system wastes tremendous amounts of money typically on things that bloat budgets without benefiting students or teachers. If you have seven kids per classroom you don’t have to waste money on fifteen different administrative positions. You don’t have to pour resources into a football stadium that gets used three maybe four months out of the year by a small percentage of the students. Your classroom can be a renovated modular space instead of a multimillion dollar building. You don’t need a full gymnasium for the one hour of PE a week they are giving a lot of these kids. Your student ratio is low enough you can learn more in less time and maybe we wouldn’t have to have kids spend eight hours a day in a classroom and they could have time to have part time jobs or enjoy private extracurricular sports outside of school. For the record I know that you can effectively run a public school with seven (or fewer) students per grade because our rural schools in my community are precisely that way. At some point we have to decide are public schools an education system or merely a daycare. At this point they appear to be daycares for children who are never helped to grow up and that is a terrible disadvantage for anyone, one that’s much harder to overcome than being poor.
The banning of books scares the hell out of me. What that will do to public school education, let alone the humanities in general up the line, horrifies me. Also restacked, Josh.
Thanks, Mary. I agree. What’s often lost in this fight is nuance. I think as long as parents have legal responsibility for their children, they deserve some input regarding what they are exposed to. I made similar judgments while choosing common texts for a first-year seminar. It shouldn’t have to be activism or censorship.
It is really odd Public School libraries ban Siege, The Turner Diaries, The Culture of Critique, etc. Heck, even Amazon bans them! It's hard to get an education without alternative viewpoints.
Agree about your premise. AI will take around half of jobs and so Humanities and the Fine Arts and maybe even spirituality will be come cool and necessary again to help people blossom into better humans and maybe humanity will evolve to a higher consciousness level. But Democracy and goverment bureaucracies are messy and usually decades behind where we need to be as far as education, energy, social policies and everything else. I see the rise of AI as a gift if and only if we tax the rich sufficiently to create a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for all citizens out of work. Many conservatives don't like this idea but it will be necessary to avoid chaos and a breakdown of society. I look forward to more time for family, community and my fine art pursuits but alas I may be close to death by the time it is implemented. C'est lavie! God bless this man made mess!
Thanks for reading, Christopher. I've struggled with the concept of UBI, but I can see the case for it if other public programs are removed. As your post suggests, schools represent the convergence of many interlocking factors, and even though I don't have a solution to the current ills of the public system, this thought experiment is more about the consequences if homeschooling continues its rise.
I homeschooled my kids until they were 11 yrs old, at which point they joined the mainstream system. This was always our plan once we got going, though we fell into homeschooling really, I hadn't planned it when they were born. In the UK, kids start school at 4 yrs old, and when that moment came it felt too young an age to be sending them off into the noise and trials of the playground. I'm glad we did it, they adjusted to mainstream pretty smoothly, and the benefits of their early years at home show in their friendships, their confidence, their lack of concern for age or gender when talking to someone, and in their emotional relationship to academic demands. I'd like to point out also, that homeschoolers come in many shapes and sizes, from those who do it as a rejection of the system, to those like me who try it out as a way of getting the best out of both systems. Having said that, it's refreshing to read an article in defence of school, flagging up all that is good. There is so much fury and disheartening disappointment in the school system here in the UK.
Thanks for sharing your story, Eleanor! I tried but probably failed to walk the tightrope of having feelings about this without implying judgment of others. I'm drawing from a positive experience as a student, myself, and very positive experiences for my kids. If my kids were suffering in a public system, I wouldn't rest until I eased their suffering.
I have no sense of what's gone wrong with UK schools. Critics of American schools say that we're just turning out corporate drones, or indoctrinating kids with political ideology, or falling short of acceptable academic achievement. What are the beefs where you live?
If this were a longer essay, I might have brought Bill McKibben into it. He has some fascinating thoughts on how local economies offer more durability, and I think his argument would also apply to schools. When the system grows too big, it's like a national economy -- a racehorse that accelerates rapidly but also pulls up lame easily. McKibben favors the metaphor of a workhorse that makes fewer rapid gains, but that doesn't get stuck very easily. I could see an argument for schools that didn't have all the bells and whistles, but that made steady gains. It's probably too complex a concept for a comment thread.
I think the main beef we have with the UK system is its structural foundation in empire building. It was designed to turn out workers of all classes, obedient and unquestioning. Equally, we have a two tier system, what we call Public (fee paying private schools) and State, which keeps the class system alive in all strata of our society. I'd like to see the best of what collective, co-ed education can offer, that is the wealth of meeting, connecting and discussing en mass, while getting rid of what's rotten; the two-tier system & the shut-up-and-listen atmosphere. Our educational institutions haven't really taken on board what it means to have information at the fingertips of every child, nor that critical thinking & the life skills of handling money, emotions, and relationships are crucial to a well rounded human being. I'd like to see changes in all areas, starting with better paid state teachers, smaller classes, and class time given to debate rather than parrot-learning. And I'd also like to see a revolution in the exam system, this crazy and destructive habit of testing that is being applied to younger and younger ages, making primary school kids feel already that they have failed. It's the measurement of "success" that drives me mad and which has caused an epidemic of debilitating emotional issues in our young people.
This is really interesting, Eleanor. I know you don't write journalism or op-eds, but I'd eagerly read one of your own essays on the subject!
I knew that about the class system in England, and the contrast between that and the public system that I experienced in America is part of what I'm trying to defend in this piece. Obviously Americans with privilege exercise that in different ways, including prep schools and tutoring and even cheating with college admissions. But the American myth is deeply grounded in class mobility, and I think public schools offer the best chance at that. Or that they once did.
But I am learning from the comments just how far my own experience and the experiences of my children in two college towns (with a high concentration of highly educated people and economic buoyancy, if not extreme wealth) is from the reality that many parents face. That's humbling. And I intend to reflect more on it in tomorrow's post.
I don't often use this turn of phrase anymore, but I can say a full-throated amen to this: "And I'd also like to see a revolution in the exam system, this crazy and destructive habit of testing that is being applied to younger and younger ages, making primary school kids feel already that they have failed." Ugh. I hated school until about 6th grade, and even failed several subjects in 4th grade. I didn't know why, and I thought it was my fault, but I think it was something like this testing conspiracy -- or the lack of meaningful challenges -- or a visceral rejection of the "why" that my teachers were peddling. Certainly not because I wasn't capable.
I’d like to write a critical essay on the subject, something of longer form than I’ve been practicing. Once the Recovery Diaries project is finished, I’ll set my mind to it. Thanks for the encouragement.
Presuming one believes in a public commons, a society of shared values, with institutions to build and uphold them -- and one doesn't have to, and surely they're tested now like never since the Civil War -- then the only course is to work to correct what you dislike. Yes, you can withdraw, but understand what you're doing when you do. You're dissolving the bonds. We can't just coexist on separate plots of a larger stretch of land. This isn't revolutionary America or 19th century Western homesteading. It's a world of near 8 billion people. It will never work that way again. Not successfully.
That's a pretty sweeping and reductive generalization of an entire social compact and project, but to the degree you think it true, what I advocated is working to change it or recognizing the social implications of a general withdrawal from uniting social institutions.
I have known many Christian families who homeschool for religious reasons and short-change their kids on academics, so I share many of your concerns. There absolutely are families that restrict the opportunities of their daughters in this manner. It happens. I can name names. But it's not universal by any means. I also know young women whose parents recognized that the social pressure of trying to deal with the boys' hormones and the girls' social machinations were taking up their daughter's every minute at the expense of academics. I am on-call to help with the math for two of them, if they get stuck. They're doing calculus in ninth and tenth grades, respectively, and are more confident. Girls often lose all confidence in adolescence, and that has a lot to do with schools that are toxic in various ways. The parents have to be committed to providing friendship and community and socialization in other ways, but if they are, it can be a very good option for some kids and some families (key word, of course, "some").
I also think you may underestimate how bad the schools are in some areas--how much it's purely political indoctrination, at the expense of academics. I personally know a 7 yr old whose second grade class gets read books about transgender issues so often that he spent weeks in tears, his parents having no idea what was wrong, until he finally confessed that he was sad because he doesn't want to be a lady when he grows up. He had gotten the idea from being read books about transition daily in school (yes daily, his parents were able to verify this as part of an investigation with the school in the course of trying to get the teacher to read books about other things) that it was part of growing up--everyone has to become the other sex when they get bigger. 3 of 22 students in his class are transitioning (so far). I have no laundry in my apartment so I pay a local 16 year old to do my laundry at his house. He tells me that about 25% of his class identifies as trans on some level, some making medical modifications and some not, and that it gets talked about in every class, nearly every day, but he doesn't mind because he can usually get a lot of his homework done while various teachers check to see if anyone's pronouns have changed since the day before. (To be fair it's Vermont, so cobalt blue and likely more extreme here than in many places, but still, Vermont kids deserve to learn math and science and other things besides pronouns, too.)
All that to say -- homeschooling isn't a monolith and it's a good choice for some kids and some families.
Thanks for reading, Holly. I think I've qualified my points carefully enough to acknowledge the concerns you raise. If my kids' experiences in public schools were less positive and reciprocal, I can't say that I would feel or choose differently. And I'm well aware that some school environments are so disruptive that very little meaningful learning happens.
That Vermont picture you paint is pretty disturbing. When gender transitions or name changes become rites of passage or social expectations, I think we're in dangerous territory. A friend of mine told me about his child's name change after graduating college, how he grieved the loss of a family name but did his best to adjust his own thinking and be supportive. But that landed differently when I learned that a large share of his child's friend group in college was doing the same.
I completely agree with your last sentence. If homeschooling is spiking in NYC, then clearly it's not just conservative religious families shuttling their children away. But I still feel that we might try a little harder to reclaim public education for the unifier that it could be.
Der Juden-Messianismus verbreitet seit fast zweitausend Jahren seine giftige Botschaft unter uns. Demokratische und kommunistische Universalismen sind neueren Datums, aber sie haben das alte jüdische Narrativ nur gestärkt. Das sind der dieselben Idealen.
Die transnationalen, transrassischen, transkulturellen Ideale, die diese Ideologien uns predigen (jenseits von Völkern, Rassen, Kulturen) und die tägliche Diät in unseren Schulen, in unseren Medien, in unserer Popkultur, bei unseren Universitäten und auf unseren Straßen sind, haben unser biosymbolische Identität und unser ethnischer Stolz auf ihren minimalen Ausdruck reduziert.
Judentum, Christentum und Islam sind Todeskulte, die ihren Ursprung im Nahen Osten haben und Europa und seinen Völkern völlig fremd sind.
Manchmal fragt man sich, warum die europäische Linke so gut mit Muslimen klarkommt. Warum stellt sich eine oft offen antireligiöse Bewegung auf die Seite einer erbitterten Religiosität, die sich scheinbar fast allem zu widersetzen scheint, wofür die Linke immer zu stehen behauptet? Ein Teil der Erklärung liegt in der Tatsache, dass Islam und Marxismus eine gemeinsame ideologische Wurzel haben: das Judentum.
Kein Land führt bei dieser Invasion sein eigenes Rennen, weil es alles eine politische Agenda ist, die von den Vereinten Nationen geführt und von den Juden und ihren Marionetten (Politikern) vorangetrieben wird. Die meisten Menschen wollen einfach nicht wissen oder verstehen, dass dies eine politische Agenda ist. Einige schaffen es jedoch zu verstehen, dass Politiker absichtlich daran arbeiten, Muslime zu importieren und die Menschen zu ersetzen, aber das war's auch schon, sie sind wie ein Computer, der nicht weitermachen kann, weil das Programm es nicht zulässt.
Don Rumsfeld hatte Recht mit der Bemerkung: “Europa hat sich um seine Achse verschoben,” die falsche Seite hat den Zweiten Weltkrieg gewonnen, und es wird von Tag zu Tag klarer . . . Was hat die NATO getan, um Europa zu verteidigen? Absolut gar nichts . . . Meine Feinde sind nicht in Moskau, Damaskus, Teheran, Riad oder irgendeinem ätherischen germanischen Schreckgespenst, sondern in Washington, Brüssel und Tel Aviv.
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/pardonne-mon-francais-va-te-faire
My daughter goes to public school, but I'll admit I have enough issues with how school is conducted that I've thought of opting out. My reasons don't have anything to do with politics, at least not directly. I would be much happier to participate in a school system that doesn't have kindergarteners in formal instruction 7 hours a day, minimal time for free play and outdoor play, and then sends then home with homework in K-2. The frequency of screen use is also an issue I have. I think most kids would be better off with these changes and advocate for them, but it's hard to get much movement on these topics at least in our school district.
As a private school teacher myself and parent myself, I concur. School days are too long for kids and the capitulation to constant screen use is disheartening.
Good luck!
Yes. My thoughts exactly. We are experimenting with homeschooling this year because the elementary school model feels a little sideways. My husband is a public school high school teacher. I desire deeply to contribute and benefit from our local public schools..but maybe we will wait until the long days and extra exposure to screens doesn’t seem as detrimental? Perhaps middle school? I’m not sure, I’d really love to see reform here, and I imagine there would be a lot of parent support.
I hear these concerns and share them. I still wonder if there is room for reform within the system? More integration of Montessori principles? Some private schools do a better job of this, which I realize isn't an option for everyone. I visited a Quaker boarding school in Iowa that held classes in the morning and then broke into groups in the afternoon for experiential learning: tending the school garden, caring for cows and sheep, learning food preservation techniques, and other domestic arts (including canoe making). But the catch there is that for that immersive experience kids have to live there...
More integration of Montessori principles would be fantastic. We live in the country, which is the main barrier to us going to a Montessori school, that and I agree with you, that there are so few places for genuine civic engagement anymore that it feels like a responsibility to fix the existing system rather than opt out. I work in healthcare and I think the reform challenges are somewhat similar between the two systems in that everyone knows the system is a mess, but it seems like there's not a great deal of agreement on what would make it not a mess, and there's really not the large scale (like state or national) level leadership to say, I am willing to stake my career on fixing this issue even if it pisses people off and I never get elected. To be honest, so much happened in both education and healthcare during COVID to show the cracks in the system, that I can't believe we as a society have been so eager to say, "Well, that sucked, let's pretend it never happened."
Was the school Scattergood friend's school? I used to live not too far from there, though it was before I had kids so I didn't really pay attention to what they were doing. That type of education sounds amazing and I think a similar experience could be created at a non-residential school too.
"so much happened in both education and healthcare during COVID to show the cracks in the system, that I can't believe we as a society have been so eager to say, "Well, that sucked, let's pretend it never happened." 💯
Yes, I was referring to Scattergood! I'm sure it has its own problems, but it seemed like a very vibrant place. I taught a creative writing class during my visit and found the students engaged. But it is a private school and so is not really scalable for the public system.
PROTOCOLS OF THE MEETINGS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION . . . Protocol X – Preparing for Power . . . (((SARS-CoV2)))
❝. . . utterly exhaust humanity with dissention, hatred, struggle, envy and even by the use of torture, by starvation, by the inoculation of diseases. by want, so that the “Goyim” see no other issue than to take refuge in our complete sovereignty in money and in all else.❞
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/protocol-x-preparing-for-power-sars
Au contraire . . . Pardonne mon français . . . Le judéo-messianisme répand parmi nous son message empoisonné depuis près de deux mille ans. Les universalismes démocratique et communiste sont plus récents, mais ils n’ont fait que renforcer le vieux récit juif. Ce sont les mêmes idéaux.
Les idéaux transnationaux, transraciaux, transsexuels, transculturels que ces idéologies nous prêchent (au-delà des peuples, des races, des cultures) et qui sont le subsistance quotidienne de nos écoles, dans nos médias, dans notre culture populaire, à nos universités, et sur nos rues, ont fini par réduire notre identité biosymbolique et notre fierté ethnique à leur expression minimale.
Le judaïsme, le christianisme, et l’islam sont des cultes de mort originaires du Moyen-Orient et totalement étrangers à l’Europe et à ses peuples.
On se demande parfois pourquoi la gauche européenne s’entend si bien avec les musulmans. Pourquoi un mouvement souvent ouvertement antireligieux prend-il le parti d’une religiosité farouche qui semble s’opposer à presque tout ce que la gauche a toujours prétendu défendre ? Une partie de l’explication réside dans le fait que l’Islam et le marxisme ont une racine idéologique commune: le judaïsme.
Don Rumsfeld avait raison lorsqu’il disait: «L’Europe s’est décalé sur son axe», c’est le mauvais côté qui a gagné la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et cela devient chaque jour plus clair . . . Qu’a fait l’OTAN pour défendre l’Europe? Absolument rien . . . Mes ennemis ne sont pas à Moscou, à Damas, à Téhéran, à Riyad ou dans quelque croque-mitaine teutonique éthéré, mes ennemis sont à Washington, Bruxelles et Tel Aviv.
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/pardonne-mon-francais-va-te-faire
It’s great that millions of children have parents who don’t make them stay in broken school systems. Public school didn’t fit me, and it doesn’t fit my son. We’re not religious. I just care about my son’s education. I asked the local principal where his daughters go to school. It’s a private school in Durham. That tells you all you need to know.
Good point, Jonathan. And I hear you -- our first priority as parents is our own children.
Private schools offer some of the belonging and social connection that seems absent from homeschooling (or at least from the examples I know best from my own life). But private schools are pretty homogenous demographically, and this is what concerns me about divesting from public education -- we end up sorting ourselves into groups that look more epochs with rampant inequality.
This is what I'm trying to struggle with in this essay, and I'm curious about your take on it. Do we as parents have any responsibility to others' kids? Ideally the public system would reflect our care for others' children and their education, alongside our own. That's what I feel fortunate to have experienced: the knowledge that my kids enrich the schools they attend and that they are enriched in return.
It seems to me the underlying presumption of this viewpoint is that the system of public education is good, but there are varying degrees of flaws within it. If that is the case then everything this author said is spot on. However if the system itself is fundamentally flawed, and has always been fundamentally flawed then the picture is very different. I think this is the reality of the situation.
For example the author seems very concerned that kids might miss out on a college education because that’s a method of economic mobility. That might be true if you’re a minority of some type who is going to be able to pay for their college education with scholarships. However more and more a college education has become a form of debt slavery and it’s something that neither political party is interested in changing substantially. When I was growing up in the 90s and 00s the standard mantra was that if in high school you get good grades (check 4.0) work hard (check) and stay out of trouble (check) then scholarships would be able to pay for most if not all of your degree. If you get a useful degree while following the aforementioned steps and you don’t make stupid financial decisions then that was the road to future financial success. What millions of other Americans (more than 40 million) and I found out the hard way is that’s not true anymore. Hard work and good grades don’t matter when scholarships and financial aide packages are based on other factors like minority status, residency status, and unrealistic monetary calculations about family contribution. Crushing student debt has negated the value of a college education. So as someone who fell into that trap I tell my children every chance I get to go to trade school.
About half my cousins went to college about half went to trade schools and those who went to trade school are more financially stable than those who got degrees (even though all the degrees were in good fields where jobs were plentiful). Of my family who are college educated and financially stable that’s primarily due to the spouse’s contributions and not due to their degree, those spouses went to trade school. There’s a massive shortage of tradesmen and women and with a growing world population those trades will grow with the increase in demand. So I don’t think fewer kids going to university is a bad thing, especially given the pathetic nonsense taught in the university system today.
I think that abandoning public school in order to homeschool is generally a mistake because I think it’s your civic duty to change the system to one that benefits everyone instead of just “saving” your kid. That said, I am lucky in that my school district is small and generally made up with people of a similar values system to my own. Even so, there are certain redlines that if crossed will mean pulling my kids out ASAP.
Excellent point about debt. Totally agree. My own opportunities owe to an excellent public high school and affordable college in the early 90s. I never borrowed a dime in graduate school and was debt free by age 23. But that story is not possible for young people today.
Here's where I respectfully disagree -- the failure of public universities to remain true to their missions, especially land grant universities, does not prove that universities were bogus all along. Public universities were, in fact, engines of mobility when they were affordable. I think that's still a worthy goal to aim at.
However, I cannot argue with the practical exigencies that you describe. One of my cousins is a former Marine, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and he worked his way up from oil roughneck through a series of certifications that now allows him a generous income and flexible schedule. He's a thoughtful person, and we have many meaningful conversations. But he also has a strong foundation from the public school that we both attended.
In the eras before public education, when basic literacy and a trade were all that working people aspired to, the church was the locus of meaning. For much of the twentieth century, I believe public schools and public universities offered a more democratic forum for the examined life -- one that was not explicitly religious. I don't see belief or cultural values as incidental to this discussion. The periods before public schools were rife with religious schisms, violence, persecution, humiliation in the stocks, and more. That's not a Golden Age we're talking about, even if people are successful in their trades. There has to be some kind of shared meaning for a community to hold together. I fear that the erosion of public education is also the erosion of that shared meaning.
For what it’s worth I didn’t mean that the university system was always bogus. I think the public K-12 system was flawed from its inception and that cultural decay corrupted the universities.
Public education never provided that shared meaning, it was always religion that provided it, it was just reflected in the education. Individuals might exist without religion but societies don’t, collective groups of people don’t. In the Soviet Union the religion was communism which was reflected in their schools, in modern America it’s woke progressive ideology with a very loose humanist basis. People thought they could take God and religion out of schools, what happened is God was replaced by the gods of culture.
Say what you want about the past but in the modern age we killed 300,000 Iraqi civilians over a lie and nobody cared and nobody still cares and the public education system certainly shared a role in that. You think the stocks was bad? Try being a reformed convict. At least you got out of the stocks and after a small amount of time the physical evidence was gone. If things were really bad you could move to the next town or to a big city and start over. Now no matter where you go every job application you fill out will ask about your criminal record and most people don’t really care how serious the crime was or if you’ve been reformed. We have all the same problems we did, we’ve just upgraded the technology and told ourselves it’s more civilized that way.
Many American cities have higher crime rates than third world countries. The religious schisms are now between the supporters of Ukraine and Russia, between Israel and Palestine, between BLM and the Proud Boys, they are both the left and the right eating themselves alive and tearing each other apart.
I am not saying that the idea of public education isn’t good or that public schools trying to pass on shared meaning isn’t good. The problem is how our schools were structured from the beginning and that they were based off an education system structured to create good soldiers and tweaked to produce good workers. We need a system structured to produce good citizens.
Yes to this: "The problem is how our schools were structured from the beginning and that they were based off an education system structured to create good soldiers and tweaked to produce good workers. We need a system structured to produce good citizens."
Except I think that schools once produced better citizens. I don't think we need to invent public education for citizenship de nouveau.
They were better citizens but it doesn’t appear they were good enough citizens to prevent this from happening. We don’t have to completely go on our own, there are different school systems and philosophies in use worldwide and some very effective systems and philosophies being used in private schools that could be used to rehabilitate the public sector.
We also have to keep an eye on the future. Technology offers such amazing opportunities, I recently saw a science class on zoom or Skype or whatever with an astronaut on the space station. What an incredible learning opportunity! That is so much more valuable than simply reading about it in some magazine or school textbook. On the other hand overuse of technology is a problem. Many schools are ditching text books altogether in favor of laptops and tablets and while I’m sure it decreases the number of young children with back injuries it worries me. I think reading from a physical paper book is good and important for a variety of reasons, it isn’t something to be nonchalantly pushed aside. As a parent I try to limit my child’s screen time but how can I do that when all the homework is screen based? It’s easy enough for me to have the kids do homework at the kitchen table where I can know their screens are nowhere near, but when they are on the tablet or laptop it’s much harder to see what exactly they are doing. There’s also the kind of access to things that are not valuable educational opportunities that are actually harmful that are enabled by tablets and computers. I know that there’s a wide variety of protections and controls available but I also know that my four year old is a veritable hacker so I doubt those programs are lasting long on the products used by older kids. (I’m convinced that the next time the government needs to hack into something they should just take it to the local preschool and promise juice boxes and goldfish for everyone when it gets done. Guaranteed to be accomplished before nap time.) So any system has to be able to adjust to the realities of the times, increasing technology offerings, a decreased availability of unstructured play time outside of school, how to accommodate students with parents who aren’t involved and might need help with the basics of living while not wasting the time of kids who had parents that actually parented. What are the necessary foundational morals and what is the necessary skill set to create a valuable and engaged citizen? What do we do with people who are not capable of that level of achievement? How do we best discover and nurture the capabilities of children to prepare them not to work the same factory job for forty years but to change fields every 5-10 years as AI and technology collide with our economy? How do we decide which subjects are most important as the collective human knowledge base gets ever larger and never smaller? I don’t see how and prior version of our current system is up to this task.
You can’t change the system when the system is actively hiding what it’s doing from parents and views any dissent from the official dictates as “bigotry” and “right wing extremism”.
In some cases that’s true, but in most it just requires added effort and coordination and the willingness to be called a bigot and not back down. In most of the country school boards control the schools and in most of the country those boards are voted upon positions. If you want to know what’s going on in your kids school and life you’re going to have to do more than just ask “so how was school” while you are multitasking it’s going to take effort and it’s going to take paying attention to what your kid is saying and doing. I bet if most parents paid any attention at all to their child’s social media consumption they would have a very good idea of what was going on at their schools.
I very much disagree with your last paragraph. No parent should have an obligation to torture and abuse their own kid for the sake of helping a broken social institution. Especially since the problems with our public school system are so numerous and deeply embedded that there is no better hope for reform than simply not participating. A switch to universal ESAs, which we're already seeing some states do, is by far our best hope for the future.
The thing about making blanket statements about the “public school system” is that the problems with the system are as varied as the schools are. I agree that no parent should torture their kid to try and change the system. However I see parents pulling their kids from small town public schools whose issues are very fixable because they saw some moron teacher on TikTok was grooming kids in some big city a thousand miles away. If your kid is being targeted or having problems that’s a different story. However I see a lot of parents pulling their kids preemptively because they see something they don’t like in a school a thousand miles away. The problem with pulling your kid instead of fixing the system is the other 23 kids in your kids class are still getting brainwashed and they are going to outvote your kid. Sometimes fighting to save the system isn’t an option, but I see a lot of parents pull their kids from a school that’s fixable because they saw something on the internet that happened at a school in a big city a thousand miles away.
Interesting stats. I think the reasons ppl choose to homeschool are as varied as families are. Many parents are concerned that schools in most progressive states/cities are too focused on indoctrination and not so much as excellence and academics. In our state, homeschooled kids are able to join school groups, play on school sports teams and be involved in all extracurricular activities. Most home schooled kids out perform their in school peers. They test better on the SAT’s and other college entrance exams. I’ve heard such exams have been abandoned as vestiges of white supremacy yet at least half the kids receiving honors at my youngest child’s HS graduation ceremony were children of color.
Homeschooling has positives and negatives but until our educational system regains teaching kids and properly equipping them to move on successfully in life, the trend will continue.
You layout good food for thought though and it’s surely an important topic so thanks for addressing it so eloquently.
Thanks for commenting, Maureen. It's clear that some students test better and hit other markers of academic success more quickly while being homeschooled. However, as George suggests below, there are other factors worth weighing, such as belonging and identity. It sounds like homeschooled kids in your area are able to skim the cream with extracurriculars without contributing to their academic cohort. Every parent weighs these choices carefully, I realize. But it's possible to get high test scores and still be quite culturally or historically ignorant. Really a lot of what I'm struggling with in this essay is a question of trust. If people don't trust the school, then they don't really trust other families in their community, and this distrust manifests in a host of other ways.
Where I completely agree with you is the importance of some academic standard for gauging preparedness and aptitude at the college level. Abandoning the SAT or ACT makes people feel good but creates a host of other problems. Are you really doing a student a favor by admitting them and taking their tuition for a year when it might have been clear from test scores that they'd be unlikely to persist? I once served on an enrollment committee at my former employer where one senior leader blurted out, "We don't want to attract smarter students!" Her reasoning seemed to be that lower-performing students got less financial aid and padded the coffers more, even if they didn't make it all four years. I found that to be a repugnant position and said so.
I also remember a Zoom meeting during COVID when a well-meaning committee proposed abandoning test scores for admissions to our school. I'll never forget the pained expressions on my colleagues' faces in Mathematics, Chemistry, and Physics. They knew all too well that those tests were reliable indicators of success in their fields, and that really all we were doing was enabling an illusion of broader opportunity. But they couldn't say so without fear of being shamed, and so they didn't and the measure passed.
There is no perfect measure of aptitude or intelligence. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to acquire valuable data about student preparedness and success. As Thomas Chatterton Williams and others have pointed out, standardized tests have often made enormous differences for gifted young people from low-income backgrounds. Taking that one advantage away has quashed some of those bright lights.
The author says that his children went to public school - past tense. I don’t know how far in the past that was, but he might not be fully aware of how bad things have gotten over the last few years.
My kids also have gone to public schools for many years. Four years ago, my oldest daughter started high school, and it destroyed her. I would give anything to be able to go back in time and homeschool her. She was a super-smart kid, always in the gifted program, got good grades. Very creative, constantly making up worlds and characters and stories. She did karate and played the violin and was in the school play and tried out for basketball. She read books constantly. She was friendly and talkative and always had a smile, and while she didn’t always fit in with her peers she had a certain confidence that she was going to do things her way and not conform.
Now, that kid is gone, replaced by a sullen, downtrodden young adult using a boy’s name and pronouns. She barely passed any classes in high school and only graduated due to superhuman efforts on my husband’s part to find an online math class she could pass at the last minute. She’s depressed, on medication (a badge of honor for her). She walks around with her head down, refusing to make eye contact, speaking in a weird forced low voice. She is taking a couple of classes at community collage but isn’t really taking steps toward her future. All the hopes and expectations I ever had for a bright future for her are gone. She’s completely brainwashed with anti-capitalist, anti-white, anti-“cishet”, anti-police propaganda that made her believe that she was a terrible person for being a white girl from a middle class family and she was not allowed to speak unless she was a disadvantaged minority. She’s self-diagnosed with autism, ADHD, and dissociative identity disorder.
All of this happened during the first two months of high school, so fast I didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. (Of course the school celebrated her transition to a male name, but encouraged her to keep it a secret at home.) We moved her to a different school but it was too late. The psychological damage was done. She is a shadow of the person she used to be. I don’t know if we’ll ever get her back.
We live in a relatively well-off area with top rated public schools in a red state. If it’s this bad here, I can’t even imagine how bad it is in other places.
How painful for everyone, Dee. My children still do go to public schools. All I can say is that I hope I am given a chance to support them if they have questions like these. All the best to you and your family.
Thanks. This is not a wholesale condemnation of public schools. In fact my younger daughter still goes to one, although not the same one that destroyed her sister. But I completely understand how toxic these environments can be, and I think people who don’t think their kids are able to navigate that successfully are completely justified in deciding to homeschool. I wish I would have been that wise. I thought my kids were too smart and healthy to get caught up in anything like that.
Historically, children were educated at home. Locking them in little prisons to be indoctrinated has lowered educational achievement, destroyed creativity, and independent thinking, it creates a dependence on peers and weakens family bonds. The least capable parents will produce better outcomes on the whole than the best institutions.
Walking into a modern school feels exactly like walking into a prison, the same companies design both. Often there are metal detectors and armed guards at the entrance, too. The perfect place to educate strong independent thinkers.
For the folks in the comments: Maureen, Holly, David.
I think I'll share my personal story. I was home schooled K-12. I got a 30 on the ACT and had college completely paid for including room and board. I was also severely socially hampered in the manner that Joshua describes.
I'll paint the picture. My entire social circle consisted of my family and my church. "My church" = around a dozen conservative white families in Alabama. When I was growing up, the Bugbear of the public classroom wasn't trans-rights and Black lives matter. For my family, it was abortion, Darwinian evolution, Marxism, and "homosexuality." These were the things that made my dad fear and shudder in the presence of the local public school.
By contrast, as a kid, I was taught explicitly that my body was wicked. That Pleasure Was Bad. That romance was dangerous and to be seen with narrowed eyes. That Republicans were the good guys. That the free market is just.
The idea that parents like mine avoided public schooling because it was "politically indoctrinating their kids" makes me scratch my head. Might not conservative parents perform their own brand of lobotomies?
For me it is a very simple math problem: more exposure to more people and ways of life = less danger of indoctrination. Less exposure = more danger of indoctrination. If this is too complex an equation, watch that "mother knows best" song from Disney's Tangled. You'll get the idea.
Home school parents are the political indoctrination factory of the American Conservative movement.
That 30 I gained on the ACT and, more importantly, what it said about my ability to stress focus in every college class turned into good grades and excellent opportunities with my English professors. But it was for naught. When those same professors would offer to write me recommendations for full bright scholarships, or give me career advice, or try to connect me with friends they had in the publishing industry, I didn't trust them and I didn't trust myself.
I probably didn't trust them because they weren't white, Christian, and conservative.
I probably didn't trust myself because Pleasure Was Bad. Good things were bad. My brain was all kinds of twisted in knots by homeschooling. It took a great deal of reading and writing to grow into knowing the world in which I live, and more importantly my duty to it.
I have spent the better part of the last fifteen years trying desperately to grow up.
For those with a short attention span, the TLDR is: I wish I could have been "indoctrinated about Trans Rights" if it came in a package deal that included a slow dance with a girl from California. Hell, I would have traded at least four points on the ACT for a crack at that.
Thanks for sharing your story, George. I actually shared a lot of your experience and regret how militant a cultural warrior I was in high school. But I was allowed to mingle with kids from other backgrounds, and that shaped me in positive ways over time.
Your last line is hilarious and also heartbreaking. In fact, you might say that I did sacrifice a 4.0 for similar reasons. My first and last high school relationship came during my freshman year. The breakup caused me to bomb my exams one quarter, and I resolved never to allow such a distraction again until I was fully employed and owned my own house. Of course, love caught up with me eventually in college, but that is another story.
Your more serious point about indoctrination is spot on. Typically the guilty dog barks first, and nearly everything that the parents you describe fear about public education is evident in what they practice privately. Accusations of indoctrination are, as they say in poker, a tell.
Your inability to feel grown up despite academic success is not nearly as concerning as small children being indoctrinated with radical gender ideology and other marxist political ideas and receiving next to no academic instruction.
In fact, it sounds like you may have received some indoctrination yourself and that’s led to some blind spots.
It’s hard to imagine a more natural, healthy development path than growing up in a tight knit, family-centered community. Until you go to college and learn that white people and Republicans are actually bad, I guess.
I suspect that we are talking more about personal life experiences, talking points, and polemics here than any kind of objective argument. Our stories are different, and I hope yours has a happy ending as well.
Wish you the best.
You certainly are. I’m talking about a generation of children being indoctrinated by government institutions with radical ideology that actively harms them and society at large. You’re saying that’s ok because your parents sheltered you too much out of love. These aren’t equivalent.
A real dilemma for sure, and you make some great points about the civic value of... being part of the system in contrast to home schooling. For one, maybe the stats will prove me wrong, but it's hard to imagine that really becoming all that popular. I mean, who has time to home school their kids? Is some of what gets counted as home schooling really just Covid remote school and/or school refusal?
The bigger thing is that it's hard for me to escape the conclusion (based entirely on my own experience as a public-school student, because I don't have kids) that the system kinda sucks, and that if I had kids of my own I would be doing my damndest not to home school them but to get them into an outdoor-oriented alternative school, and then to apprentice and to school abroad or off to sea—or something, anything, but sitting at a desk for however-many hours a day. No wonder we all spent most of our time trying to get high!
I'm all for civic and community participation, but not for trust in the institutions that have done so much to produce our current cultural dilemma, or, dare I say, dead end? So, yes, home school is mostly bonkers (that "marching" crowd you described), but I won't fight to send "my" kids to public school. I'd be fighting to send them elsewhere, where their contributions—as you so very well pointed out—would go towards building something better.
Cheers Josh for a thoughtful and well articulated piece, as always!
Thanks for your thoughts, Bowen. The WaPo article shows pretty plainly that the spike in homeschooling during COVID shows no sign of slowing, three years later. If more people are homeschooling than sending their kids to Catholic schools, that's a huge deal. But you're right -- not everyone has the time to do this, especially not single parents, which is why I frame it as a problem of the commons.
Yeah, I don't know what to do about the sitting-at-a-desk thing. There's a whole other essay there on whether schools are just training kids to be corporate drones, or whether there are broader horizons. I suppose the homeschool crowd is closer to your thinking in allowing more flexibility and possibly a trade route instead of college. My fear with that is there's no shared American experience and why not opt for alternative facts or no vaccines if you opt for an alternative school? Some of those effects are collective. And if we lose a reliable, but imperfect, public system, I think we lose one of our social equalizers. It truly is turning back the clock to the 19th, 18th, or 17th century. Those were periods with some freedoms that modernity took away, but they were also periods of social upheaval.
I, personally, would prefer to find ways to advocate for customization and independence within a public system rather than tossing it all out. But we live in a country where parents get to choose, and if we all choose to do our own thing, I guess we'll see what the outcomes are. There are plenty of bad outcomes right now, as you say.
Cheers Josh.
I feel your central and very valuable point about a "shared American experience" -- that's the heart of your argument, for me, and that has a lot of gravitas. It's also a huge part of our economic geography, with such a large proportion of property taxes going to pay for our public schools.
If school had more diverse options and possibilities for young people I'd be much more of a supporter. My own experience there, for example, did include a remarkable program called Urban Pioneers, the vision of a singular man—Wayne Macdonald—who was able, for a time, to build and offer something different within the context of the public high school system right here in San Francisco, and that made a lasting difference in the lives of all the young people that participated in that program.
I celebrate his contribution in my piece about how It's Not Really a "Struggle" to Find Good Male Role Models →
https://bowendwelle.substack.com/p/there-is-no-struggle-to-find-good
I guess I don't mean to say toss it all out -- and again, what do I know, I don't have kids to worry about.
Honestly, my own despair at the lack of interesting and affordable school—and my own experience in urban public schools built like jails—was one of the many reasons that I didn't end up having kids of my own.
It feels like the civic institution of public school needs revolutionary redesign to have a hope of once again becoming a positive force in society.
"It feels like the civic institution of public school needs revolutionary redesign to have a hope of once again becoming a positive force in society." 💯
Public school is a positive force right now, even if it has some serious problems. But this really does depend on where you live. I've only raised my kids in two college towns, where the peer groups and resources are buoyant.
Mental health concerns and growing awareness of special needs (are there more children on the autism spectrum or just more diagnoses now?) and widening gaps between family environments (which do a lot to support or undermine learning) all complicate the picture. I've toyed with the idea of reinventing myself as a public school teacher. But there's a lot of downside to that, too.
Bravo Josh for the bravery in touching the third rail. As an educator and a parent you have a deep commitment to the system(s) through which our children are educated. I respect that. I was a public school kid and have done OK. That said, my small public school system in Clayton, MO, a suburb of St Louis, was an absolute anomaly in the area.
It is my personal opinion that much of the distrust in our institutions has happened in the last 5 years. The nonsense of the Covid response and the increasing displays of excessive and indiscreet activism have soured many parents and non-parents alike on the federal, state, and local governments’ ability to properly care for and teach our children.
I, like you, wish it weren’t so. But it is what it is. In today’s world, having choices to choose between is the key.
Thank you, Dee. Yes, the distrust has grown more acute, and rapidly, since 2020. The pandemic really did strain the public system and expose its weaknesses. I suspect that many schools are still recovering from that and may still be in survival mode.
Where I'd gently challenge you is on the notion that everyone can have choices. Typically if there isn't a shared investment (and shared risk), then those with the least privilege end up with the fewest choices. This may be a strained metaphor, but I think of public education as akin to the Community Supported Agriculture concept. You pay a farmer an annual subscription and receive a weekly box of produce in return. This gives the farmer financial security because you're sharing in the risk. If there's a drought or a hailstorm wipes out the pepper crop, everyone takes that hit together. If it's a banner year for potatoes, then you might end up getting more than you paid for, and the farmer will be glad to give it to you. By contrast, a farmers market is the epitome of choice. The farmer has to set up the stand, but you can choose whether to come or go, and if it's a bad year for potatoes, the farmer takes that hit alone. If it rains, and half the people come to market, tough titty for the farmer. But enough of those hits will convince the farmer that the market is just not worth the cost of production, packing everything up, and setting up the stand.
I think we have more resilience in shared meaning and shared risk and shared reward.
I agree that a shared investment and a shared risk is necessary. Don’t we have that already? All of us pay taxes that support public education--even those families that opt for private school or home schooling. So if public schools are failing, is that fault of the citizens who are required to support them with their dollars, or the fault of the administrators who decide how to spend that money? I know it’s a complicated issue but I wanted to reply directly to your comment about shared risk.
Additionally I was commenting that choice is good and necessary, but certainly not implying that all have an equal choice. Equality of outcome is impossible in most things including education. Equality of opportunity is the best we can try to create.
Good point, Dee -- but I interpret shared risk as a kind of shared stake in the quality of the enterprise. If our kids are in public schools, we still have skin in the game, we're absorbing the strengths and weaknesses of the system and are motivated to improve it however we can. If we're paying into something we're not using, that's not quite the same? I realize the frustration of paying into a system that isn't working, however.
I think if public schools are failing, it ought to be everyone's responsibility to pick them up, and not just financially. But that would be quite a separate essay!
And there is the safety issue.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jonathan-lewis-las-vegas-killed_n_6553a086e4b031d2b4b0461b
Yes, it most certainly is an entirely new essay! I’ll leave that to you my recovering academic friend. I’ll try to pick one of the many other things that are FUBAR in our society to write about.🤷🏻♂️
I agree with all of your points. It is an effort to break community and return to the 19th-17th Century. Who is pushing this effort to break community? I'd love to know but I have my suspicions. My husband has his office in a house where home schoolers once lived. The un-forwarded 3rd class mail delivered to the home after they moved out often featured politicians spreading the word about how terrible public schools are. One was Iowa's Senator Chuck Grassley. Pella recently had a library referendum and the fear tactics on the "censor" the library side were so bad that moms (I assume homeschool moms) were afraid to take their children to the public library because they thought the children would see porn on the shelves. The "censorship" referendum lost but the group had so much cash and influence that two of their "censoring" candidates won seats on our city council by running on fear tactics and in my opinion, slander.
Yeah, the library battles are unfortunate. I've read quite a bit about this, and I'm somewhat sympathetic to both sides. Some of the titles that I've seen reporting on really do seem to back people into binary positions, and a lot of it has less to do with freedom of speech than it does with what kids below the age of, say, 12 ought to be allowed to see without parental supervision. Those seem like legitimate concerns to me, and ignoring them really does erode public trust. Of course, censorship is not a reasonable answer, and I don't defend that. I just find it hard to feel like I'd go hold a picket sign on either side of that particular argument.
The titles were not all in the library and were in the adult section. And how many young kids go to the library without their parents to get them there? My take on it is that it was driven by scare tactics meant to undermine a place where the public is welcome. I always think of Jane Addams when I think of community spaces and like you, I can see the erosion of community spaces as being a return to the gilded age.
They don't. This was a public library issue.
> It is an effort to break community and return to the 19th-17th Century.
There are homeschool co-ops
There are homeschool get-togethers
There are homeschool proms for Pete's sake.
It's literally never been easier to have community, unless you have a very different idea of community than most people.
The thing is, there doesn't exist a real American identity anymore, nor shared values, nor shared culture. It's been wiped away through a myriad of mechanisms. Trying to create a top-down culture to replace an organic community will fail, and is failing in our public school systems. So what we have are pockets of communities that still have that cohesion that are banding together. It's a great balkanization, and it's happening whether someone likes it or not.
Who is pushing the efforts to break community? Maybe it’s the people showing kids gay porn and hiding their psychological issues from their parents?
Maybe it’s the people teaching equity over equality and generally identitarian nonsense? Maybe it’s the ones shutting down the schools and local small business for years and ostracizing half the country who doesn’t want to inject experimental drugs into themselves?
🤡
This is an important topic. Thanks for addressing it.
Public schools are the most important institutions of local governments. For states to offer money to bypass that institution seems bizarre to me.
I'm going to go the article you cited; I'm interested to see of there's any reliable demographic data about who is home-schooling.
I believe that is done as a part of school choice, the same programs that allow students to take their dollars and apply them to tuition at private and charter schools. The underlying reasoning is that it’s unfair to have parents forced to pay for underperforming schools via taxes and then have to pay out of pocket on top of that for an alternative school choice because the public schools are failing them. I think that such programs are good because it widens the opportunity for alternative education opportunities (not just homeschool). That said if as a homeschool parent you take that money I think it’s fair for the government to require an accurate accounting of it to show that it was used to further the child’s education.
The data I've seen on charter schools, which I believe are tuition free, is that they are no better or worse than public schools in the aggregate.
If parents want to pay for private school out of pocket, of course they should be free to do so, but it seems unfair to weaken the funding for those who do not have the option. As fro home schooling, again I support parents' right to choose to do so, but not to pay them.
Why should I have to pay for a service I’m not using? Sure, an educated populace is a public good, but are public school systems even attempting education anymore? The metrics only get worse and worse.
Not to mention the fact that public schools are usually explicitly political and there is no input from parents about the curriculum or policies.
Hell, how about representation? How many male teachers are there? How are boys doing in school, by the way? Any efforts to fix that?
If we want to argue that public schools build community then let’s make them actually build community.
Why should you have to pay taxes at all? Maybe you're not using Medicaid or Medicare, maybe you're not using the fire department, because you've never had a fire.
It is reasonable for me to pay for public goods, whether or not I personally use them. It is not reasonable for me to pay for government institutions to politically indoctrinate a generation of children while completely abdicating their stated duty.
There is no semblance of impartiality in the public school system. What’s happening is political indoctrination. The crazy leftists from Academia have gotten the keys to the car. That’s why people are homeschooling. Instead of chastising people for no subjecting their children to the lunacy of the school system, how about restore some sanity to the system.
It really depends on wether you think the dollars should be tied to the system or to the students. For a variety of reasons I would rather my tax dollars went to the students in my area than the school systems in my area and there is a significant difference. The US spends more than $16,000 per pupil in K-12 education. Do you think we are getting a valuable return on our investment? We spend the second most per student in the world but yet when it comes to educational achievement rankings we are generally middle of pack if not at the lower end of it.
Also while it’s possible that the various school systems are no different in aggregate it’s also possible that for specific individuals there can be a tremendous difference. Tying the dollars to students rather than to a system allows individual students to do what is right for them.
I believer if you disaggregate the performance of schools by zip code according to socioeconomic quintile, you find that what's dragging down performance are the poorest districts.
Money spent on education hasn't solved the problems with these schools. The overarching issue is familial poverty.
I doubt there's much intentional home-schooling going on in inner cities.
The issue is much deeper than familial poverty, there are cultural issues as well. It’s why immigrants who come to America from China, Nigeria, and India with next to nothing, typically in worse economic shape than many poor American families are in the Middle Class or higher within a couple of generations. I have never met a child whose family cared about their education regardless of economic status whose child wasn’t at grade level or above grade level unless there was some massive learning disability involved. However I grew up with lots of kids who weren’t particularly impoverished who didn’t take school seriously, who learned little, who performed poorly. I see the same pattern in my current community today. Had their parents pushed them to apply themselves or had they been in a more active learning environment perhaps they would have learned and achieved more. Indeed many of these kids despite doing abysmally on tests and barely passing went on to become very successful in the trades but even so most of them would have benefited from a more robust education in their early days.
It’s a multifaceted problem.
I agree with this. It's what's happened in my hometown. And I recognize that by writing this, I'm trying to hold two potentially incompatible ideas in my mind at the same time: my belief in public education and my conviction that I wouldn't send my kids to the same school I attended (for all the contextual issues described above).
The stats for NYC might suggest otherwise. And I appreciate all your insights here, David.
A point I chose not to include in the main essay, but maybe should have, is that inner city schools are often paraded as examples of the failure of the public system. But in fact they tell a different tale. Urban schools weren't always inferior. A host of systemic factors, such as white flight, redlining, and eminent domain also impacted those public educational systems. So you might see failing urban schools now as bellwethers for other communities where patterns of flight are beginning to emerge.
Another factor that I omitted is that homeschooling just is not an option for single parents. I'll soon be sharing custody on the other side of a divorce, and kids who move between two households equitably can't be easily homeschooled, regardless of how flexible either parent might be. Any single parent working a 9-5 or holding multiple jobs depends on a quality public school system. And this is just as true in affluent communities as it is in low-income areas. I guess charters and private schools might be options for single parents with more means. It's not a point I've thought all the way through.
Dr. Tara -- excellent point about requiring some kind of accountability if public funds are used for homeschooling. Perhaps this has all eroded past repair, but vouchers were always a slippery slope because they started nibbling at the commons. At some point, if enough people divest from the public system, then it must either be scrapped or rebuilt. And the consequences of that will fall most heavily upon the least privileged, as they already are, as they always have.
Instead we drug everyone else down to the lowest common denominator. We spend $16,000 per child per year on education in this country, most of our classrooms are over capacity with not enough teachers. Twenty four is the average class size. Let’s say two thirds of the kids opt out. I’m going to round down to that leaves 7 kids in the classroom (because having a 0.2 kid is weird). Are you trying to tell me that you can’t effectively teach 7 kids with $112,000 at your disposal? The problem is that the public school system wastes tremendous amounts of money typically on things that bloat budgets without benefiting students or teachers. If you have seven kids per classroom you don’t have to waste money on fifteen different administrative positions. You don’t have to pour resources into a football stadium that gets used three maybe four months out of the year by a small percentage of the students. Your classroom can be a renovated modular space instead of a multimillion dollar building. You don’t need a full gymnasium for the one hour of PE a week they are giving a lot of these kids. Your student ratio is low enough you can learn more in less time and maybe we wouldn’t have to have kids spend eight hours a day in a classroom and they could have time to have part time jobs or enjoy private extracurricular sports outside of school. For the record I know that you can effectively run a public school with seven (or fewer) students per grade because our rural schools in my community are precisely that way. At some point we have to decide are public schools an education system or merely a daycare. At this point they appear to be daycares for children who are never helped to grow up and that is a terrible disadvantage for anyone, one that’s much harder to overcome than being poor.
The banning of books scares the hell out of me. What that will do to public school education, let alone the humanities in general up the line, horrifies me. Also restacked, Josh.
Thanks, Mary. I agree. What’s often lost in this fight is nuance. I think as long as parents have legal responsibility for their children, they deserve some input regarding what they are exposed to. I made similar judgments while choosing common texts for a first-year seminar. It shouldn’t have to be activism or censorship.
It is really odd Public School libraries ban Siege, The Turner Diaries, The Culture of Critique, etc. Heck, even Amazon bans them! It's hard to get an education without alternative viewpoints.
Agree about your premise. AI will take around half of jobs and so Humanities and the Fine Arts and maybe even spirituality will be come cool and necessary again to help people blossom into better humans and maybe humanity will evolve to a higher consciousness level. But Democracy and goverment bureaucracies are messy and usually decades behind where we need to be as far as education, energy, social policies and everything else. I see the rise of AI as a gift if and only if we tax the rich sufficiently to create a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for all citizens out of work. Many conservatives don't like this idea but it will be necessary to avoid chaos and a breakdown of society. I look forward to more time for family, community and my fine art pursuits but alas I may be close to death by the time it is implemented. C'est lavie! God bless this man made mess!
Thanks for reading, Christopher. I've struggled with the concept of UBI, but I can see the case for it if other public programs are removed. As your post suggests, schools represent the convergence of many interlocking factors, and even though I don't have a solution to the current ills of the public system, this thought experiment is more about the consequences if homeschooling continues its rise.
I homeschooled my kids until they were 11 yrs old, at which point they joined the mainstream system. This was always our plan once we got going, though we fell into homeschooling really, I hadn't planned it when they were born. In the UK, kids start school at 4 yrs old, and when that moment came it felt too young an age to be sending them off into the noise and trials of the playground. I'm glad we did it, they adjusted to mainstream pretty smoothly, and the benefits of their early years at home show in their friendships, their confidence, their lack of concern for age or gender when talking to someone, and in their emotional relationship to academic demands. I'd like to point out also, that homeschoolers come in many shapes and sizes, from those who do it as a rejection of the system, to those like me who try it out as a way of getting the best out of both systems. Having said that, it's refreshing to read an article in defence of school, flagging up all that is good. There is so much fury and disheartening disappointment in the school system here in the UK.
Thanks for sharing your story, Eleanor! I tried but probably failed to walk the tightrope of having feelings about this without implying judgment of others. I'm drawing from a positive experience as a student, myself, and very positive experiences for my kids. If my kids were suffering in a public system, I wouldn't rest until I eased their suffering.
I have no sense of what's gone wrong with UK schools. Critics of American schools say that we're just turning out corporate drones, or indoctrinating kids with political ideology, or falling short of acceptable academic achievement. What are the beefs where you live?
If this were a longer essay, I might have brought Bill McKibben into it. He has some fascinating thoughts on how local economies offer more durability, and I think his argument would also apply to schools. When the system grows too big, it's like a national economy -- a racehorse that accelerates rapidly but also pulls up lame easily. McKibben favors the metaphor of a workhorse that makes fewer rapid gains, but that doesn't get stuck very easily. I could see an argument for schools that didn't have all the bells and whistles, but that made steady gains. It's probably too complex a concept for a comment thread.
I think the main beef we have with the UK system is its structural foundation in empire building. It was designed to turn out workers of all classes, obedient and unquestioning. Equally, we have a two tier system, what we call Public (fee paying private schools) and State, which keeps the class system alive in all strata of our society. I'd like to see the best of what collective, co-ed education can offer, that is the wealth of meeting, connecting and discussing en mass, while getting rid of what's rotten; the two-tier system & the shut-up-and-listen atmosphere. Our educational institutions haven't really taken on board what it means to have information at the fingertips of every child, nor that critical thinking & the life skills of handling money, emotions, and relationships are crucial to a well rounded human being. I'd like to see changes in all areas, starting with better paid state teachers, smaller classes, and class time given to debate rather than parrot-learning. And I'd also like to see a revolution in the exam system, this crazy and destructive habit of testing that is being applied to younger and younger ages, making primary school kids feel already that they have failed. It's the measurement of "success" that drives me mad and which has caused an epidemic of debilitating emotional issues in our young people.
This is really interesting, Eleanor. I know you don't write journalism or op-eds, but I'd eagerly read one of your own essays on the subject!
I knew that about the class system in England, and the contrast between that and the public system that I experienced in America is part of what I'm trying to defend in this piece. Obviously Americans with privilege exercise that in different ways, including prep schools and tutoring and even cheating with college admissions. But the American myth is deeply grounded in class mobility, and I think public schools offer the best chance at that. Or that they once did.
But I am learning from the comments just how far my own experience and the experiences of my children in two college towns (with a high concentration of highly educated people and economic buoyancy, if not extreme wealth) is from the reality that many parents face. That's humbling. And I intend to reflect more on it in tomorrow's post.
I don't often use this turn of phrase anymore, but I can say a full-throated amen to this: "And I'd also like to see a revolution in the exam system, this crazy and destructive habit of testing that is being applied to younger and younger ages, making primary school kids feel already that they have failed." Ugh. I hated school until about 6th grade, and even failed several subjects in 4th grade. I didn't know why, and I thought it was my fault, but I think it was something like this testing conspiracy -- or the lack of meaningful challenges -- or a visceral rejection of the "why" that my teachers were peddling. Certainly not because I wasn't capable.
I’d like to write a critical essay on the subject, something of longer form than I’ve been practicing. Once the Recovery Diaries project is finished, I’ll set my mind to it. Thanks for the encouragement.
Presuming one believes in a public commons, a society of shared values, with institutions to build and uphold them -- and one doesn't have to, and surely they're tested now like never since the Civil War -- then the only course is to work to correct what you dislike. Yes, you can withdraw, but understand what you're doing when you do. You're dissolving the bonds. We can't just coexist on separate plots of a larger stretch of land. This isn't revolutionary America or 19th century Western homesteading. It's a world of near 8 billion people. It will never work that way again. Not successfully.
That's a pretty sweeping and reductive generalization of an entire social compact and project, but to the degree you think it true, what I advocated is working to change it or recognizing the social implications of a general withdrawal from uniting social institutions.
I see. Gotcha.