Why we homeschool

Are you that parent that is fighting your inner desire for a homeschool life with the belief you need your homeschoolers to stay on track with larger institutions? How about the biggest worry I hear, "I just know my child needs to stay connected socially in order to thrive..." does that sound familiar? Worried about fitting to the mold of college while desiring the freedom and beauty that homeschool can offer? Perhaps you caught the vision of sparking interests in your child, but you are worried they need to go do a regular college experience in order to thrive financially. As a homeschool mom of four kids, I have been through the fears of not measuring and cutting and pasting the exact mold that public school offers in our own home, feeling like I wasn't keeping up enough to public school standards. This was the homeschool version of myself four years ago. The new me, sees the world totally different. A new paradigm, one that was freeing, lifting, and adventurous. It became exciting to homeschool, and it became easier than public school. That is the part people don't get. Hopefully today's classroom helps you if you have seeds inside you that often try and plant in your heart around homeschool. What if I told you there is a secret to living a higher lifestyle of joy, while staying on target in a beautiful and simple way?! Would you want to keep reading? First, some history:

You may see the memes of John D. Rockefeller trying to force everyone to become "factory workers" and funding the General Education Board, claiming he controlled the change to public school and medical school the way it is today. In Dorado, Puerto Rico, Rockefeller put all the rocks outside the beach that my family often plays in, so since he created the fun waterpools we swim in, I thought I would actually learn the truth. The truth is, he did cause future repercussions due to policy that he influenced, but he may have unintentionally influenced it to become the way it is today. I am not here convince you he was trying to control population because I don’t know what he was thinking, nor do I have any proof. He did fund education heavily, and he did focus his money towards teacher training, school administration, standardization, and rural and southern schools, but the claim that he created public school to control kids is not something I know or not. Homeschool lovers are correct to believe that private wealth quietly shaped public systems. But perhaps he did not intend for us to have to design life-long debt systems for expensive medical schools. My brother just finished medical school and he is 400,000 in debt. Yes, he will get a great salary to pay it off, but it is crazy that inflation is running away with our debts to make numbers this high. Rockefeller did not create "Big Pharma" himself as we know it, but he did influence it, and whether he saw the future turning out this way or not we can’t say. You see, he lived in the Industrial Revolution. Factories needed punctual workers, obedience to authority, basic literacy and number skills, and repetition and routine. The economy of his day operated around factories. Farmers were becoming factory workers. This makes the ecosystem more dependent on specialization. Public statements show he believed education should produce orderly, reliable citizens, prepared for industrial and clerical work. Yes, this does align with "factory-style" schooling with bells, age-based grades, and sitting still. It is true that Rockefeller and his factory-owning peers feared labor uprisings, poverty-driven unrest, and immigration-related chaos. Education was seen as a way to instill shared values, reduce rebellion, and create social predictability, but many people believed this back then. I don’t know if Rockefeller actually believed he was helping society or if he was trying to manipulate it, but if you talk to the average American, they would say public education is their saving-grace. Homeschool is not for everyone. Most people work the "factory-style" schedules and they need their kids in organized safe schools. They need help getting their kids opportunities they don't have time to give. But yes, his efforts did make elite training schools more expensive, and they did weed out small home-grown schools, rural or women-run. It did make medical training harder to access for low-income students. Rockefeller did not profit financially from public schools though, so I don’t know if he is the villain that social media is painting him to be or not. The government accepted his money because public education was underfunded and his foundations had expert administrators, and States wanted modern schooling. So is it the government that desired "Big Pharma" to come about or Rockefeller? I will leave it up to you to debate. But his donations were considered philanthropic and they did cause problems in the future, even if they were unintentional. For all we know, he is going down in history unfairly, however, his efforts did push government motives to control the people. He maybe had no idea that his funding of the Flexner Report, which recommended the closing of weak schools, and required expensive labs with an emphasis on biomedical science, would in fact, cause medical school to be insanely expensive, years later. This dramatically raised the cost of becoming a doctor — but perhaps that was a side effect, not an explicit goal. Many lost their small medical businesses in Rockefeller’s day after all these changes came to be. Medical schools were required to build expensive laboratories, hire full-time faculty, lengthen training, and require college prerequisites. This increased costs, but we do not know if that was a byproduct or the stated aim of Rockefeller. Public schools had been around long before Rockefeller came along. If anything, the beginning of public school, could be seen as the beginning of "lets control the people." Have you ever studied why the government wanted public schools to be set up the way they are originally? When Utah and the Southern states were adopted into the federal government and public schools were started, the government was very interested in the economies of those states, and the taxes they could produce. There are some that saw the beginnings of Socialism the minute government controlled schools. But I am not here to tell you what I believe because I don’t fully know. I just know that the current public school systems are packed with educational culture that doesn’t align with my values. From a homeschool-mom perspective, policy raised the bar but it also shut the door on ordinary people. This critique is fair and widely acknowledged. It can be true that the government policy and private funding caused both good and bad at the same time.

In the hands of the wrong people, and the wrong leadership, schools could now produce a culture of kids learning the values that the leadership desires them to learn. I am not here to say who or where the wrong leadership is or could be causing this and in what schools it could be happening, but it is true that central leadership controlling schools can lead to centralized educational requirements that may not align with your values. This is one reason one may want to homeschool. But aside from even wanting good values in schools, the other problem in our day, is that we are not running factories like they were in Rockefellers day. Yes there are factories around, Mercedez, for example, has a whole culture of workers in certain states of America who work in their factories. But we live in the day of robots! We live in the day of artificial intelligence. We live in a day of spell check, and grammarly, and photo math, and social media, and a whole plethora of modern tech that is changing the demands of industry. Educational requirements may need to be revised, it can the standardized schools even keep up with what current jobs will need to be? It turns out, robots can do hard jobs!

My good friend sold cloud-based tech to a company called Vivint. He explained that ten years ago, he would have had an engineering team, months to work on deadlines, and hundreds of thousands of funding to create the digital products he was designing for smart-home automation systems. He just said the other day to my husband, that he could do now what it took then, 25 dollars plus AI and a day or less. He told us that most of his neighbors could be unemployed in a day because of what AI could do better in their jobs. This does not need to scare you! There is always hope for a brighter future when you apply a little faith, hope, charity, and creativity. Because you and your kids are human, they have access to creativity that no robot can match. We all just have to relearn, and our society has to relearn, what is smart in our day.

Jensen Huang is the Co-founder, President, and CEO of NVIDIA Corporation, one of the world’s leading semiconductor and AI chip companies. Listen to what he says the definition of smart will be:

"I know what people are thinking. "The definition of smart is someone who is intelligent that can solve problems, technical." But I find that is a commodity, and we are about to prove that artifical intelligence is able to handle that part the easiest. Everybody thought software programming was the ultimate smart profession. Look at the first thing that AI solved...software programming. And so it turns out that the defintion of smart is very different than what most people thing. I think the long-term defintion of smart, and my personal definition is someone who sits at that intersection of being technnically astute but human...with empathy, and having the ability to infer the unspoken around the corners, the unknowables, people who can see around corners are truly truly smart, and their value is incredible. To be able to preempt problems before they show up, just because you feel the vibe, and the vibe came from a combination of data, analysis, first principle, life experience, wisdom, sensing other people... that vibe, I think, is smart. That is going to be the future definition of smart...and that person might actually score horribly on the SAT."

So maybe you have seeds of homeschool planting in your heart for multiple reasons...and your biggest hang up is that you or your kids want the social of public school. There are so many stirring thoughts these days around why people homeschool. Covid sure was a catalyst for it. And it either really made people hate homeschool, or love it! Want to know what made people hate it? They were still trying to follow the larger institutional requirements that they were being told to do at home now. Now mom and dad are principles and educational officers. That would make anyone hate homeschool. THAT IS NOT HOW I HOMESCHOOL! Want to know what made people love homeschool after Covid? It was a new paradigm shift.

If you are replicating the school model while homeschooling, you are missing out on all the potential; you should not just be getting rid of the building, you should be getting rid of the educational philosophy too. -Hannah Frankman

Did you know that the Constitution of the United States of America was invented by men who sat around tables studying the Bible? Not educational philosophies, but histories and patterns that God was showing them. Like the owner of Nvidia explains that smart people will be the ones who see around corners, who see the vibes, who have life wisdom, and a little tech savvy. Want to know the best place to learn "teach savvy" and "inner wisdom" in the same environment? Home! On parent-protected, monitored tech, depending on the age of the kid. We have spent the last six years learning the ins and outs of managing tech in a homeschool family culture. We think we have the answers for many of it and I can coach anyone that is interested. Discover some modern reasons for why people homeschool:

• we have spellcheck, why are we waisting time on spelling tests

• we have robots, they can code for us, and make cars

• parents work from home more, want more time for family travel

• there are better ways to learn history than just a teacher talking

• a focused moment on Youtube can teach more than a distracting class

• we can publish art in seconds and self-publish our books

• governments sometimes push agendas in public schools

• more freedom to read books at home of your own choice

• kids spend too much time on social media during school

• AI created a need for thinkers and creators, not memorizers

• school requirements need an update, & often are based off the industrial age

• kids are wanting more time in nature because there is so much tech

• online resources make learning core subjects possible in 2 hours or less

• better food at home, and you can work on your couch

• you have an elite athlete in the fam who wants time efficiency for sports

• you want to travel more, you want your schedule to be your own

• you don't want to be controlled by the schedule of larger institutions

• your teen wants to create a business, or work on modern skills

• the list goes on and on...

Homeschool actually found me! It was almost like it was part of my destiny. I will start from the beginning. Seven years ago, my cousin brought a microschool idea to Utah. I loved what I was hearing, as I had many frustrations with public school. The concept had Elon Musk vibes in the background. Very forward thinking ideas, coupled with modern tech. As a techy, I loved how he explained we can do core online in less than two hours.

University of Texas : We mean it. We are alarmed by the rising tide of illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s universities. We are motivated to reverse this trend, for the good of society. We know there are students, teachers, and citizens who still believe in the core purpose of higher education: the pursuit of truth. That’s why we are building UATX. At each stage of the launch of our university—from hiring staff to building the curriculum to admitting students and hiring faculty—we ask ourselves, “Are we serving the pursuit of truth?”

define iliberism and relativists (relativists being what university of texas is)

from their blog founder A message from President Carlos Carvalho: America’s elite institutions have failed us because our universities failed them first—and every year we wait, the damage compounds.

Just 18% of Americans under 35 say they’re “extremely proud” to be American—down from 85% a decade ago. Only 31% of young people say religion is “very important” to them. Fewer than a third say having children matters. Marriage, even less. Meanwhile, 62% of young Americans view socialism favorably, and a third hold positive views of communism—ideologies responsible for 100 million deaths.

These numbers point to a generation increasingly untethered from the principles, faith, and civic commitments that built this country.

At UATX, we believe a collapse of academic standards had a lot to do with this. When institutions stop demanding rigor—when they refuse to distinguish between serious scholarship and activism dressed up as scholarship—they stop forming responsible citizens. When you gut the core curriculum, graduates never wrestle with the ideas that shaped Western civilization. When you inflate grades, you reward students for low standards and laziness, rather than inspiring them to be great. And when young people are never challenged to understand their country or its principles, why would they defend them?

Our

universities have become infected by a harmful lie — that all ideas are equally valid, that truth is merely

a social construct, that one culture's wisdom is as good as another's superstition. This relativism gives

rise to illiberalism.

Merit is out of fashion, and universities that once championed colorblind equality now practice obvious

racial discrimination under the banner of diversity.

Political conformity and self-censorship are the norm. Conservative faculty comprise less than 5% of

professors.

During COVID, we watched our best institutions abandon scientific reasoning in favor of political theater.

After October 7th, we saw them struggle to condemn obvious evil.

Students now face harassment for their most cherished beliefs—swastikas painted on Jewish students'

dorm walls, American flags stolen and defaced,

"Glory to our martyrs" banners hung in libraries.

America suffers as a result. When our elite institutions fail to produce actual elites — people of character,

wisdom, and competence — our entire society pays the price.

I emphasize this madness because the University of Austin was born in response to it. If universities were

serving students and our nation well, we would not be here today.

UATX is a return to American principles — and a place to prepare citizens for democratic life.

It also exists to liberate minds from lazy conformity. Our students engage with the great books and the

great minds to wrestle with the timeless questions every human must face: What is justice? What gives

life meaning? What makes us human?

We do this not to confirm opinions but to challenge them.

We are creating an environment where Christians can examine and practice their faith without mockery,

where Jews can learn without harassment, and where students and faculty are not censored.