It’s scary to think that if you don’t send your kids to a classroom, there won’t be thirty other kids telling your kid all about what’s available in the world. It’s scary to think it’s your responsibility now. But the truth is, it’s not that big of a responsibility.
The most useful product of test scores is that they give us a way to compare students. So while few people want to learn exactly the same thing as the person sitting next to them, we force students to learn the same thing as the person sitting next to them anyway, so we can test them on […]
I’ve climbed the corporate ladder and I’ve supported my family for years as a professional writer. So I’m going to tell you—with total certainty—that however you’re teaching your kid to write, it’s the wrong way.
I spent a lot of time reading about curriculum options before I decided to toss out all curriculum and just teach my kids what they want to learn. At this point, my kids have learned reading and typing via their video games. And I’m pretty sure they’ve learned a lot more, they just don’t need […]
When it comes to how happy you are, most of it you cannot control: 70% is what you’re born with. It’s a setpoint, sort of like your weight. You can diet, but you tend to go back to your usual weight sooner or later. It’s the same outcome even with trauma. If you lose an […]
The educator John Holt said, “It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.”
The people who argue against homeschooling focus on an argument that requires them to ignore obvious education trends. What we end up having is a discussion about homeschooling on a national level that assumes the readers are idiots.
If your kids have been in school for years, they start to seem naturally dense and unproductive. The more kids conform to what school demands, the more dense and unproductive – stupid – the kids look. So when you consider taking them out of school, you worry that your kids are dense and unproductive and […]
It’s amazing to me that parents who are willing to be academic iconoclasts for homeschooling are suddenly the most conservative people in the world when it comes to college: everyone’s going. Like, the way to prove homeschooling works is your kid goes to college.
At first when you take kids out of school you get scared that you won’t be able to teach them what they need. After a while, you realize they were learning nothing that they needed in school anyway, so how can you go wrong?