Americans for Prosperity (AFP) had a thing the other night at Abel Ebeneezer in Merrimack. It’s a few minutes from where I live, and I love their beer, so it was game on the moment the invite hit my inbox. I always meet a few people at these things I haven’t seen in a while, and it was a great topic.
There is legislation to protect home-educated kids and their parents. A handful of folks were on hand to talk that up and offer thoughts and insight on the issues around it. Good discussion, and I always learn a thing or two, like how states can actually take kids from parents who home educate on the basis of educational neglect.
Take the kids from the parent or parents AND stick them in a public school that can’t teach children to do math or read at grade level. In some schools, around the country, they graduate kids who never learned to do math, read, or write at all. Not functionally.
It’s actually laugh-out-loud funny, and it was said out loud that many more parents who send their kids to public schools, based on those standards of interpretation, are guilty of educational neglect. Government-centered education has been an abysmal failure, and while the irony is tragic, the true blame belongs to the system and its advocates.
Home education and its various hybrids dominate our history. Packing your kids off to a state mismanaged idea-factory doing business as a learning environment is a relatively short-lived experiment that has long since gone off the rails. Getting back to it has been a battle against the entrenched special interests who profit from that and a collectivist consciousness that paints that historical norm as absurd.
All while that system commits educational neglect at great cost, culturally, academically, and financially.
It was bad enough when the system turned into a laundromat for unions and their partisan political activism. The one-sided propagandizing. The progressive issues advocacy in the classroom. The domestic terror-like fear campaigns aimed at parents or school board members who tried to redirect the priorities of the grift. Budgets that break the backs of municipalities and residents who can no longer afford homes they already own. They had to use public schools to create a mental health crisis that they then used as an excuse to expand their reach.
Naturally, this invited the opportunity to blow the budget a bit more to address the problem they had created. As if a school system that takes absurd sums of money to not teach children could be trusted with treating a mental health crisis in children that it created.
Educational neglect and indoctrination take on a whole new meaning.
How about a wall with a glass case that shows off all the mass shooters your institution shepherded into their mass-casualty suicidal fantasy. Kids who you encouraged to adopt personal pronouns, dress as the opposite sex, and not just despise their own body but believe that you and they were gods who could and should defy nature itself.
You took the secular-humanist obsession with self-deification to a whole new level. We can remake you in our image. Broken. Angry. Incapable of healthy relationships, and often neutered for good measure (too damn many of you people around anyway). Hey, it worked with the minority community, why not get preemptive with the kids of those racist colonialists of European descent?
Reading at grade level. Well, you know, we need more money for staff to address that while the home education mom has their ten-year-old reading past what used to pass for college-level comprehension a few hours a day, while remote working from home. Not gender dysphoria. No climate cult nonsense or anti-ICE protests.
The well-informed, patriotic, intellectually agile next generation will rise from the oldest form of education in our history. Home educators. And if we’re honest, most of them don’t want anything from a state or a system that wrecked not just learning but continues to damage successive generations of kids while wasting obscene amounts of other people’s money.
The legislation I mentioned, and I forgot the number, would invert the system. Instead of home educators having to dance to the tune of the failed state experiment, the state would have to do all the heavy lifting to bring any case against a parent who knew their kids’ best shot was to learn at home.
It’s a great next step, one that ought to be followed with legislation that holds school boards, administrators, and districts accountable for educational neglect. It’s their term, and wouldn’t you know – they are most guilty of it, along with fiscal fraud, deception, and the great bait and switch.
And whatever you do, do not give public schools any more money.
