The Branson

To save America, we must remember who she is: Liberty, self-taught.

This is the final strategy in my Kind, Not Nice Playbook for parents dealing with activist teachers. I hope you enjoy it. Please Note: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. If you receive it via email, the links will be stripped out of this and following posts. If you want to use my links — which I would appreciate — please open the web version of this essay.

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In multiple interviews, I’ve heard billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson tell what is clearly a consequential story from his childhood. He relates that while on the way to visit his grandmother at her home in Devon, he was misbehaving in the backseat of his mother’s car. Branson’s mother pulled over, turned to him and said, “Right — you make your own way there,” and booted him out of the car. He was 7 years old and grandma’s was miles away. He made it to her house just fine.

Eight years later, frustrated by dyslexia and disgusted with what he considered a pointless curriculum, Branson dropped out of his elite boarding school, Stowe. His headmaster said he’d either “go to prison” or “become a millionaire.” As we all know, Branson didn’t end up in prison.

You’re thinking, That’s all well and good, DT, but my kid is no Richard Branson.

To which I’ll shoot back: “If your kid spends most of his day in public school or on a device, how would you know that?”

One of my personal heroes, master teacher John Taylor Gatto in his book Weapons of Mass Instruction had this to say about all our children: “I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”

He was right about all of it. I know because I’ve had the great pleasure of becoming acquainted with roughly 6000 young adults over 22 years of teaching. While not every one was a genius at English or History or Economics, they all had a special little fire burning inside them, one that, if they only had the time, they could build to blinding brilliance.

And know what I’ve also learned over those 22 years: mass public schooling does everything it can to extinguish that fire.

Now, Branson’s a Brit, but he recognized early what most only see in the rear-view mirror late: the enormous opportunity cost of mass public schooling.

School teaches the opposite of human greatness, of liberty, and of Americanism. At best, it gives a young American the barest skills to perform well enough to secure a place in a cubicle taking orders from somebody else, generally someone who got that position thanks to the Peter Principle.

We used to call a life spent in a box prison. The prison is now kinder and gentler; there’s no end to the content you can get in your cell. And if you unfortunately realize the truth, that you’re a rat in a cage, there’s a cold mixed drink or a little pill that can soothe your existential dread, at least temporarily.

But you’re an adult. They’re children. They don’t have the same options you do. Most of them only have one legal one, mandated by the state.

Compulsory public mass schooling is the problem. I’ve detailed this multiple times, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here but you really need look no further than the table below of mental health Emergency Room visits for children ages 5-17 by month of the year.

Do you see the rise right around mid-August when the kids go back to school? See how ER visits peak on September 28th, 5-6 weeks into the school year, when the kids realize they’re locked back into the same old pointless exercise in conformity and compliance, run by people who demonstrably don’t give a damn about them individually and most certainly don’t teach them much or teach it well? Notice how it drops off when kids get to be with their families full-time at Thanksgiving, at Christmas, at Spring Break, and at the end of the school year?

Why is school so awful that mental health emergencies in kids coincide strongly with the school calendar?

The work is pointless. In all too many classes, the work is geared toward the lower-middle, locking out the struggling and boring the proficient and advanced. To keep everybody in line, grades are used as a coercive measure to achieve compliance, not as a measure of achievement. Throw in grading for equity and you get final marks based on work that is copied, papers that are never graded, and tests that can be retaken until a kid gets the mark she wants, one most teachers are all too happy to provide to keep administrators out of their hair. In other words, about a third of your child’s day is utterly, totally pointless, the very definition of prison.

Boredom is the rule. Add in the additional complication of unrestricted internet time in schools with 1:1 device policies or those who fail to police cell phone usage during class. Your kid can spend her entire day on YouTube anyway, influenced by friends and algorithms to consume certain programming without your knowledge or consent and with no way for you to know what she’s seen. Schools claim to be preparing 21st Century Citizens; in reality they’re giving the kids a digital pacifier so the teacher can get paperwork done at her desk. More importantly, your child is being trained that work doesn’t matter while still being required to finish it. The purpose of human life, doing something productive to ensure her survival and the survival of her band? School totally undermines that by teaching your child her work can be thrown in a trash bin at the end of the year.

Basic human rights are violated. Your child can’t move about freely, even to go to the restroom. Freedom of speech is effectively squashed. Freedom of belief is too; your ideas better not stray too far from the teacher’s or your grade is at risk. On top of that, the State empowers unelected bureaucrats to make curricular and pedagogical decisions which actively undermine American principles like equality under the law. It is in your face now. From telling your kid that he is an oppressor or permanently a member of the oppressed, to affirming a gender transition at school in secret, to allowing boys to play on girls’ sports teams, and violating the one private space in high school — the bathroom stall — by letting anyone and everyone use whichever restroom they like, to, most dangerously but least opined: ceding your parental authority to young teachers who believe they are The Anointed and have the moral authority to suborn your family’s beliefs and replace it with theirs — for Justice(TM) .

Students aren’t safe. Bullying can’t be stopped. Restorative justice teaches perps there are no real consequences and victims that they have no recourse, so reporting abuse is not only a waste of time, it paints an even bigger target on the victim’s back. Fights happen with frequency during passing periods and at lunch. (Sometimes, as

Libs of TikTok

will attest, they occur in the classroom under the direct supervision of the teacher.) The EASIEST place for a kid to get drugs is on a public high school campus. A 2004 Federal study determined that students have a 1 in 10 chance of being sexually abused at school; you think that’s any better in 2023?

Here’s the thing, mom and dad: your son and your daughter need you, not some green 23-year-old know-nothing activist with a paint-by-number Master’s degree in education who graduated (with Honors!) from the same soulless system that built the chart above. Teachers and administrators and counselors are usually the people who thrived in that system and willingly returned to it as a career. Frankly, those people terrify me.

I’m much more comfortable with idiots such as myself who believed the lie that you should follow your dreams into college (FWIW, follow your dreams, just stay out of debt unless the endpoint pays very well), opted for a soft major only to wonder, “Crap. What am I gonna do with an English degree?”, and ended up teaching because the job pays well and you only work 185 days a year.

The problem with nitwits like myself is that the system grants us tenure after two years and regularly gives us raises regardless of our performance, totally removing any incentive to improve our classroom practice. When you’re not accountable for performance you — quelle surprise — fail to perform.

How do you, parents, address any of this? Well, you have four options:

1. Remain in public school and fight like hell. This is the least effective option. As my sister-in-arms Deb Fillman at

   The Reason We Learn
   explains here, whatever you want for your child can only be partially delivered by a public school, if that, and means that what someone else wants will NOT be delivered because mass (read: collective) schooling is a zero sum game. The K12 apparat will only respond to your desires to the extent that you make their individual lives miserable. In so doing, you will almost certainly also make your child’s life miserable and, most definitely, your own, unless you’re a trial attorney — then you might enjoy battling a sclerotic, bureaucratized system of unaccountable dullards. But please know, these blockheads are certified experts in wasting your time. That’s all they do all day to kids; expect it to happen to you too. A handful of the most determined stay-at-home FAPE moms are the only ones I know who get what they want — generally by invoking lawsuits, and it’s still not enough for their kids. On top of fighting the entrenched K12 bureaucracy, you’ll have to engage in systematic deprogramming of your child at home and locate and bridge the gaping holes in his education in your oodles of free time in the evenings. If you can do all this, expect to send him to community college; kids who buck prevailing ideology are often pushed back into line by punitive grading. Either that, or expect your kid to have to live a double-life at school, hiding his beliefs, his thoughts, his background, i.e., his identity to please his teachers to keep that GPA up. This kind of dishonesty also works to the state’s advantage. Once you send your kid off to college, he is primed to accept what the Ivory Tower cultists push onto him now that he’s outside your tempering influence.

2. Find a high-rigor public charter school. Classical charters are popping up across the country. The problem is, so many people are desperate to get out of their local public schools you have to win the lottery to secure a place in one. Additionally, I must report the phrase “he who pays the piper calls the tune” is true for alternatives to conventional public schools. If the state Department of Education licenses the charter school, expect a lot of the trash you ran from to be present in your new school. No matter how much the administrators and teachers there hate it, if the state provides money to the school, the school MUST meet state requirements for Social Emotional Learning, Comprehensive Sex Ed, Liberated Ethnic Studies, Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (AKA ineffective behavior and academic interventions), and standardized testing.

3. Enroll in a private school. Your best bets here are religious classical schools. If they don’t take state money, they are not beholden to the state. They can have high standards for academics and behavior. They will also likely have much smaller class sizes, which means more attention for your child. However, the exodus of aware parents from public schools means demand for and, therefore, tuition at private schools are rising. They still deliver a better education for far less money than the state pays per child, but now you’re paying full freight. This option is worth the sacrifice, but not every family has enough money to make it happen. Additionally, not all private schools are created equal. Many schools, including religious ones, have bought into Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. This shouldn’t surprise you if you know private school teachers and administrators are usually trained in the same university credential programs that produce public school employees.

4. Homeschool. You can do this, despite your own schooling training you to believe you aren’t capable. Start by reading with your child. When you’re ready, you can move to an inexpensive curriculum that teaches your child to teach himself, like this one from Robinson Curriculum or my favorite from Ron Paul. You can go really hard with an online homeschool classical curriculum from Ambleside or you can piece lessons together as your child shows interest in various topics and ideas like

   Hippy Mom PhD🕊️❤️
   does with verve and joy. You don’t have to spend all day torturing yourself with worksheets; when I homeschooled my three children, we were done with everything in a few hours, which freed up our time to cook, go for walks, play hockey, read even more, write (just for fun), go to the beach, and just get into all kinds of good trouble, generally. Make no mistake: YOU are uniquely positioned as your child’s first, best teacher. No one will love him more and no one has more skin in the game.

Having said that, if you can’t get into a high-rigor charter, can’t afford a private school, and the idea of homeschooling is overwhelming, let me make the case for an intermediate step that can partially safeguard your children from the fallout of modern Progressive mass schooling.

Do what Richard Branson’s mom (and Branson himself) did: let your child go on an adventure.

Your kid doesn’t even have to leave the living room, although I recommend she do that as often as possible. No, you don’t have to kick her out of the car halfway to grandma’s house, but you do need to let her mind roam free over the places and events of the past, imagining what it would have been like to be with them or even in their shoes.

To get her on the road, read children’s classics together.

Books saved me. They made me. Depending on why you’re reading this essay, that may not be a ringing endorsement. Nevertheless, it’s no small thing that in the face of what I now consider benign parental neglect, The Velveteen Rabbit taught me about purpose, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankwiler taught me to love beautiful human-created work I’d never seen and a family I rarely did, Matilda taught me not all adults should be trusted, and Pollyanna taught me to find the best in bad situations — a skill I’ve relearned and that is of inordinate personal value to me now. And my students would be going absolutely nowhere fast if I, a teacher of literature and history, didn’t know Greek, Roman, Celtic and Norse mythology, the stories of the Torah and the New Testament, and American folktales from peoples of the first nations, European settlers, black Americans, and immigrants.

Your child might learn the same things I did. Maybe she’ll learn other things entirely. But she will learn. And so will you.

In fighting for your child to take her place in Western civilization, you fight for every kid. When she understands who her predecessors are and the stern stuff they were made of, she’ll see her heritage is not the result of borders defined by immutable physical characteristics, but from billions of individual judgments of what is good and true and beautiful, choices that drove Western civilization inexorably forward.

Knowing these will allow your child to take her education and reclaim her American birthright.

And now, the list. May you use it to venture far and wide, fearlessly.

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If you’ve made it this far and don’t have the desire to curse me and my posterity, please hit the like button. This makes my posts more visible to other parents who don’t understand how much worse things have become since they left school. The system actively robs American children of their full potential in order to serve mediocre adults and maintain power in the hands where it currently rests. Only parents can reverse this trend; American authoritarianism is born in its “free” public schools.