Homeschool. Homeschool! Homeschool!!

There are many good reasons to homeschool your children, but one is far and away the best reason to do so.

I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable.¹

— John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down

The above epigraph is from a man who taught in the New York public school system for 30 years and also won New York State Teacher of the Year for 1991. I’ll be reviewing two of his books (Dumbing Us Down and Weapons of Mass Instruction) in the near future.

There are many reasons to pull your children out of public school, Gatto gives many in his books, but the most important and best one may surprise you.

Probably you have seen parents reading books with explicit sexual content at school board meetings. Books that their children have access to.  Sometimes the school boards shut down the parents…I guess because it’s inappropriate to read about intimate sexual acts to grown adults, but okay to read them to kids? Maybe they’re just embarrassed…but not embarrassed enough, apparently? Maybe they really don’t know what the students are reading, what they’re being taught? Who knows?

Recently I saw a mom on Twitter / X castigating her local school for the videos 5th graders are watching in health class about masturbation, genders, homosexuality, etc. She’s going to be able to sign a form so her kid in Ohio will not have to attend health class. But as she said, her child is curious and will probably hear from other kids. How can she stop that?

Well, she’s got a plan. Her answer is to run for the school board and then she will get in there to fix everything. It may take a long time to fix it all. Not everyone will agree with her. The state may not agree with her. There may be problems.

I wonder how long that will take and what she’ll do if she can’t fix it?

“Sorry, Johnny, you’re just going to have to stick it out until Mrs. Jones gets on the school board too. Then we’ll fix it!”
“Okay, Mommy, but you should call me JoAnne now.”

The school system cannot be fixed fast enough. I am amazed at the number of parents who leave their children in a system they know is broken. They’re sacrificing their kids while they try to fix a system that will not be fixed anytime soon—if at all.

The same thing happened with masks. Many, many parents complained that schools required their children to wear masks with one parent saying “my kid can’t breathe.”² They went to board meetings, they wrote about it on social media, they appeared on the local news and YouTube, they attempted to get on school boards, but the one certain way to take care of it most of them never did: pull their children out of school. Parents acted like they had no power over the situation. They did and do.

But if the boat is irreversibly sinking, you don’t have a problem, you have a disaster. A disaster is a situation that cannot be reversed; the only thing you can do about a disaster is try to escape it. The appropriate response to a disaster is not to fiddle with it, but to get out of it, to survive.³

Public education is a disaster, it sunk a long time ago. I know it wouldn’t be easy for many parents to pull their children out of school, but these are their children, more important than jobs, lifestyle or status.

A broken educational system, however, is not the most important reason to homeschool.

I asked ChatGPT why parents choose to homeschool. Here’s some of what it said:

• Customized Learning

• Higher Academic Standards

• For Children with Special Needs

• Concerns about Bullying or Peer Pressure

• School Violence or Safety Concerns

• Religious Instruction

These are all good reasons, but still not the best reason.

I will never forget what my wife said when she decided to homeschool our son. It was her decision because she would be doing most of it. We had always just kind of thought we’d send our son to school. We both went to public elementary school and then on to private Christian schools, so sending our son to school didn’t seem like a big deal.

But as we got closer to it, my wife essentially said, “What the hell? He’s really starting to get fun and now I’m going to send him off so someone else can spend six to eight hours a day with him five days a week? No way!”

And she didn’t just bring public education to the kitchen table with worksheets and textbooks. She continued reading to him, all kinds of books on all kinds of topics. My son, highly dyslexic, couldn’t read these books on his own, but he could easily and readily understand them. In a public school he most likely would have been shuffled into a remedial reading program where they would have bored the hell into him.

Like many homeschooling parents we had decided to send him to high school, a good charter school, but after seeing his love of learning nearly killed after only one semester in that environment, he finished his education at home.

I helped homeschool our son too. I handled literature and spent many a glorious afternoon reading great literature to him, an experience I will never forget. And neither will he.

And that right there is the best reason to homeschool: spending quality and quantity time with your children.

You’ll never regret it.

Notes

1. Gatto, John Taylor, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada. 2017 (first edition 1992)

2. Transcriber B, "Mike Reed Begs the Dare County Board of Education to remove the Masks: 'My kid can't breathe'", Source

3. Smith, Frank, The Book of Learning and Forgetting, Teachers College Press, New York, NY, 1998. p. 69.