Public education is a complete mess in the US. A deep, structural, crisis kind of mess. Anyone who does not see this is totally out to lunch. Fortunately there are a lot of very smart, very well funded people working on that issue. In the meantime, I don’t want my kids to be part of […]
During the industrial age, when parents moved from farms to factories, it became more cost-effective to put kids in school than put them to work. So parents bought into the idea of state-run school. At that point, school became the most expensive babysitting operation on the planet. In the pre-industrialized world, only the kids with a governess […]
My friend Melissa was homeschooled. She loved horses so her parents gave her some schoolwork-type stuff and let the nanny take her to the barn and she hung out with the trainer all day helping take care of horses and doing some homework in between. Melissa did very well in the horse world. She always […]
I think the purpose of schooling is to prepare kids for making good decisions about their adult lives, including what their work will be and what they should spend their time and attention on. Childhood is 18 years. Adulthood is 60 more, at least. Preparing for adulthood is really really difficult, even if your parents […]
The biggest reason that there’s a huge gap between the education of rich kids and poor kids is the summer. The first summer I lived on the farm, Time magazine published a cover article on the topic which I studied closely. The second summer, it’s clear to me that kids in our town do not […]
This is a guest post by Lisa Nielsen. She is in charge of technology and teacher training for the New York City public schools, and she is the author of the book Teaching Generation Text. None of the opinions in this post reflect the views, opinions, or endorsement of her employer. I’ve been a public […]
While cleaning out my youngest son’s clothing drawers, I found a shirt he got last year in kindergarten. On the front it says, “I love school.” I put the shirt in the throw-out pile. When I asked my son what he thinks about staying home with me instead of going to school, I expected him […]
What if all the parents who are telling me to homeschool are actually more uninspired teachers than the uninspired schools they are supposedly rejecting? Bruno Bettleheim told millions of parents how to raise their kids all while he himself was a child abuser. There is no watchdog when it comes to homeschoolers. There is only […]
Melissa took my six-year-old to Texas with her. She is there for good, but he’s there for a week. I was thinking this would be a good method of homeschooling—sending my kid to go visit other people, and see how they live. After all, it is not lost on me that last time we went […]
When I go to the city, and I tell people we live in a very rural part of Wisconsin, on a farm. People say, “Oh, are you homeschooling?” It happens so often that I almost feel like homeschooling is a logical result of living on a farm.