Recently, I was listening to the Jeff Kuhner Show, which airs on WRKO AM 68 Monday to Friday, 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM. He was interviewing his wife, Grace Vuoto, who calls in every Wednesday for her weekly commentary.
Grace, “who puts liberals in their place,” as Jeff is fond of saying, was making an excellent case against several proposed bills in Massachusetts that would make school children little more than human pin cushions for Big Pharma ending religious exceptions to those opposing vaccinations and allowing minors to consent to receive vaccinations without parental approval.
When Jeff referred to homeschooling, if the bills passed, as a solution, Grace emphatically said that it would only be a “temporary solution” and said something to the effect that we-conservatives should not abandon the government schools.
Many conservatives like Grace think that government schools are salvageable. I have to respectfully disagree.
While we should attempt to influence the government schools by running for local school committees, showing up at school committee meetings to voice our objections, doing what we can to promote a semblance of academic excellence, and openly opposing the agenda of the Leftist change agents in the government schools, let’s not deceive ourselves. The Left has had a near monopoly in our government schools for close to one hundred years. From the removal of intensive phonetics and replacing it with the literacy-crippling “look-say” method, to the teaching of evolution as fact, to the removal of school prayer, to sex education, to the administering of psychotropic drugs, to the introduction of Outcome Based Education and Common Core, to the teaching of a general hatred of the United States via Howard Zinn’s error-ridden A People’s History of the United States, to the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory, to the promotion of the Alphabet Mafia’s perverted agenda, children are at risk mentally, morally, physically, and spiritually. Sam Blumenfeld documented all of this in his book Crimes of the Educators, co-authored by Alex Newman (A link to a free PDF version: http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/Books/Crimes%20of%20the%20Educators.pdf
We went from the most highly literate nation in the world to a nation of illiterates and semi-illiterates who do not possess basic reading and math skills while harboring a seething hatred of our country, its history, and its Constitution. I think it is safe to say that those that are rioting, looting, burning, and tearing down statues are not products of the homeschool community.
With all due respect to Grace, whom I greatly admire, homeschooling is both a viable and vital option. She isn’t alone; however, as a regular viewer of Newsmax and, up until recently, Fox News, I have never seen one guest representing a member of the homeschool organization. I have to admit that we in the homeschool community don’t do the best job when it comes to promoting our mission, but that will have to end if we expect to maintain a free nation.
There are homeschool organizations, both national and state-based. Some of them are religious, like the Massachusetts Homeschool Organization of Parent Educators (MASS HOPE) https://masshope.org/, Homeschoolers of Maine, and Catholics United for Home Education NH. Others offer support for black homeschoolers, like National Black Home Educators https://www.nbhe.net/.
There are annual homeschool conventions, including Mass HOPE which is held on the last weekend of April in Sturbridge, MA, and The Homeschoolers of Maine, held in Augusta in May. These conventions are where veteran homeschoolers and new homeschoolers alike can learn about the legal issues concerning homeschoolers, how to begin homeschooling, how to find local homeschool support groups, and where attendees can find curricula that meet their needs.
Vendors include ABEKA, Bob Jones University, and Liberty University, which offer fully accredited k-12 homeschool programs, while other supplemental programs like Demme Learning (Math) and New Life Fine Arts (Drama), and of course, Camp Constitution. Also included among the vendors are homeschoolers that have their own businesses.
There are homeschool support groups in communities all over the United States where homeschool parents and their children get together on a regular basis for classes, listen to guest instructors, take field trips, learn to dance, play sports, and hold graduation ceremonies. Contrary to the myth that homeschooled children are sheltered, there is plenty of interaction with other homeschooled students as well as adults. Indeed, it has been my experience that homeschooled children interact with adults far better than their government school counterparts.
I will mention a few which I recommend with info from their websites:
Freedom Project Academy:
Freedom Project Academy offers a fully accredited, Classical education for Kindergarten through High School. FPA is rooted firmly in the Judeo-Christian values as promoted in the Constitution by our Founding Fathers, who strove to guarantee the preservation of our God-given liberties. Our live classes are delivered online through interactive classrooms to students in all 50 states and a dozen foreign countries, serving missionary and military families overseas.
Freedom Project Partnership teams up with churches and private schools to stream Judeo-Christian classes into brick-and-mortar classrooms across the country. This allows for the rapid expansion of faith-based schools across the nation as the Freedom Project provides all class instruction, assignments, tests, and grading needed to help schools stay on budget. What better way to restore American values than to bring the worlds of faith and education together again?
Ron Paul Academy:
A student who goes through this curriculum, kindergarten through high school, will have a mastery of the foundations of liberty. There is no other curriculum on the Web to match it.
It does not assign printed textbooks. This saves families a lot of money. Textbooks cost a great deal of money. Almost all of the materials are free: toner and paper only. Only when the materials are copyrighted and time-sensitive — modern business and modern literature — do parents pay for books.
The curriculum is mostly self-taught. If a student gets stuck, he can get help from other students in the course Communities. Students serve as tutors for each other. They learn by teaching, which is a great way to master any new field.
This curriculum teaches students how to write. The teachers in the social sciences and humanities at the high school level have Ph.D. degrees. They are both successful writers. They are both successful businessmen. They will teach your children how to write effectively and fast.
Students start writing in the fourth grade. They do not stop until they finish their final courses. I doubt that they will ever stop.
Every student is asked to set up at least one website. Their weekly papers must be posted on their sites. This is crucial for self-education: public visibility. Students can see what the competition is doing. Most students hate this aspect of the curriculum, but it forces them to do their best with their writing assignments. Parents have an obligation to see to it that their children post their weekly papers. This is the #1 educational task for parents.
The curriculum centers around weekly essays. Parents should read them. If they want to grade them, that’s fine. If they don’t, that’s also fine. But parents had better insist that their children post URL links to their posted weekly essays. These links must be posted on the course forums.
No student who gets through this curriculum will ever need to be nagged to get through college, graduate school, or a career. This curriculum teaches self-discipline. This is a crucial personal habit. It is mostly internal. It develops after years of working in an environment that requires self-discipline.
For students who hustle, they will enter college as juniors. They will quiz out of their first two years of college for about $2,500 total (today’s money, of course). They will get into the workforce as college graduates two years before their peers do.
The man who teaches the public speaking course in grade 9 and the history and literature courses for grades 6 through 8 graduated from an accredited college on his 18th birthday. He paid for his own college education by working part-time in his own home business. It cost him under $12,000. It can be done. I recommend it.
If you are a parent, this should get your attention. I think students should also be motivated. (I am assuming that students want to get out of school fast.) https://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com
Liberty University Online Academy:
Have you always dreamed of sending your child to private school but felt like you didn’t have a flexible and affordable option? At Liberty University Online Academy (LUOA), you can provide your student with the best of homeschool, private school, and Bible-based education all rolled into one!
Our high-quality K-12 curriculum can be completed from the comfort of your home — so you can work schooling around your life, not the other way around. Additionally, we offer a vast array of resources that are designed to help your student succeed — and to make your job as a homeschooling parent a little easier.
Partner with us and give your student the tools they need to succeed! https://www.liberty.edu/lp/online-academy
Abeka:
You want methods and materials that work. That’s what you’ll find with Abeka—a comprehensive, quality curriculum and materials written from a Christian perspective. Now more than ever, each child needs a strong foundation in both academics and character.
We’re here to help homeschooling families, and Christian schools of all sizes give their students the knowledge and skills they need.
For over forty years, schools and homeschooling families have trusted Abeka to provide materials using the traditional approach proven successful throughout education’s history. Professionally illustrated textbooks and teaching aids, hands-on activities, challenging exercises, and our Spiral Learning approach with purposeful repetition and reinforcement of concepts from subject to subject give you all the tools you need to make learning interesting and memorable.
You can choose Abeka with confidence; each subject’s content comes from the work of skilled, dedicated scholars who have conducted primary research. See your students achieve the academic excellence and moral character that leave them equipped for life, just like over one million children developing into lifelong learners with Abeka. https://www.abeka.com
The Samuel Blumenfeld Archive:
While not an accredited entity, I recommend the Samuel Blumenfeld Archive hosted by Camp Constitution http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/main.htm. It contains the works of the late homeschool pioneer Samuel Blumenfeld, who was a dear friend and mentor of mine. It offers, among other things, a free online phonics reading course with all 128 lessons available in audio and video, a cursive writing course, and a basic arithmetic course. It also contains most of the books, articles, and newsletters authored by Sam as well as dozens of Sam’s lectures in audio and video.
It is my earnest prayer that conservative media, both local and national, help promote and support the flourishing homeschool movement.
