Homeschool wins again

Not everyone can homeschool. Not everyone wants to homeschool. That’s perfectly fine. But everyone — at least all liberty loving conservative and libertarian folks — should celebrate that it is becoming more and more popular. According to a new report in Education News, homeschooling is growing at a rate seven times faster than public school enrollment. It still accounts for a small minority, but the minority is gaining in size, and that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.

The only true way to reform government education is to starve it to death. Education, being one of the most important aspects of society, should be entirely privatized. Government education can not exist in a free country. Here’s the thing: Government education is government education. It’s education controlled by, run by, and in service to the government. It will never be anything but that and it never has been anything but that. Compulsory State-run education was DESIGNED to create a more obedient populace. The Prussians innovated the first mandatory government school system, and they did this in order to ensure a submissive and subservient class of serfs and soldiers. Every country that has followed has done so for the same reason. Every country. In fact, only a brainwashed serf would ever believe that the government has a natural right and obligation to control the passing of knowledge and information to every child for the first two decades of their lives. That’s actually a downright horrific concept when you look at it objectively. I’m always shocked by the self identified conservatives who recoil in horror at the notion of the government controlling health care, yet they will breathlessly defend the government’s right to control education.

Yesterday someone told me that homeschooling is bad because parents pass “propaganda” on to their kids. God help us, we now live in a society that considers parents — instead of politicians — to be the propagandists. Freaking insanity. I don’t know what else to call it. That said, one of the definitions of “propaganda” is “principles and doctrines propagated by an organization, institution, etc.” In that sense, yes, you’re damn right, I will be propagandizing my children. Propaganda, by this definition, is an inexorable and unavoidable part of education. So the question isn’t IF your kids will get propaganda, it’s WHO will they get it from — their family, or the State. I’ll take the family every time. But that’s just because I’m not a Socialist stooge.

The other thing about home schooling is that, by every single measurable standard, it is a far superior form of education. That’s not my opinion, that’s a fact. It also costs about 600 bucks a year for one child to receive an education at home, as opposed to approximately 100 grand a year for one kid to receive an education in a government building. The only weapon the anti-freedom, State loving, homeschool haters have left in their arsenal is some nonsense about how kids need to be “socialized.” Of course, it’s simply a laughable and plainly false assertion that public schooled kids are better adjusted and more emotionally mature than anyone. Honestly, I wouldn’t put public school students in a “socialization” contest against a group of rabid spider monkeys, much less a group of kids who spent their childhood being raised by their parents, rather than by a bureaucracy. By the way, you can’t very well scream about the “epidemic” of vicious and psychologically devastating bullying in schools, and then in the next breath tell me all about the wonderful social skills it fosters. Some will then counter that being berated, belittled, cut down, insulted and ostracized can somehow, in the long run, help a kid develop into a mature adult. This argument is not only wrong — it’s dangerously stupid.

Some will say that the public school system has failed. They are wrong. I mean, yes it has failed to educate children with truth, and it has failed to make kids into critical thinkers who hunger for knowledge, and it has failed to instill a love of learning, and it has failed to create a population of literate, articulate, well read adults, but it never set out to do those things. It set out to create a citizenry that relies on the government for everything. In that goal, they have succeeded. Oh, have they succeeded.