The Most Important Project of Your Life
I get it: you don't want to be a teacher, but could you be a project manager?
Home is where thou art
— Emily Dickinson
Your child’s education requires your direct participation, but you don’t have to be her primary teacher in every subject: you need to project manage her education. You have a unique opportunity to curate the best possible outcome for your children. You do not need all of the same skills I need to wrangle classes of thirty adolescents.
Look, I’d love to tell you we can fix the schools with *this one simple trick* so everyone’s kids could remain safely and usefully and productively warehoused daily. But there is no trick; there are only trade-offs. Schools are hide-bound, sclerotic. I’d venture to say most parents are not satisfied with their local school, but have little power to effect change that will occur in time to help their child.
When it comes to schools, I’m overtly political in this way: the action I think would be most effective to change America’s public schools is one individuals must take. More parents will have to disintermediate the state from their child’s education by removing their kids from the local public school. The education bureaucracy at the District, State and Federal levels stonewalls or ignores parents; to them, we’re dependent peons and they believe we are too ignorant to do what they do, even on a much smaller scale.
But we have all the resources we need at our fingertips now. And you guys reading this have me and I will not leave this earth without doing for as many parents as I can what I do in the classroom: teach you that you are capable of effective, ethical American citizenship. (For my Canadians — your heritage of individual grit is as rich as ours. Removing kids from school is possible there too, though the legalities are different. Hopefully, any Canadian homeschoolers who follow me here can advise you accurately.)
Removing your kid from State-run schools is a twofer: you avoid all the pitfalls I’ve documented that harm your child’s long-term success, as well as the abuse that citizen journalists cover daily on social media. In the plus column, you are lby faar more likely to be able to truly individualize instruction for your child. Try as we might, a teacher will never know a child even 1% as well as you do. You will also retain primary control of instruction in the values, mores, and ethics important to your family—whatever those may be.
I also realize that not everyone believes they can make enough sacrifices to homeschool. What I plan to do here is offer you tools you can use at home to increase your child’s learning and knowledge retention overall. The purpose of this is two-fold. First, your child needs the foundational knowledge that will help her develop the discernment necessary to question adults who attempt to teach her things your family does not support. Secondly, it will help you keep lines of communication open that help you spy out trouble she may not see coming down the road and allow you to front-run it.
If you leave your child in school, you’re gambling that the culture war salvos aimed at the most malleable members of society in their most rebellious developmental period and repeated over six years of middle and high school won’t affect your child. You might be safe making that gamble because she may not be learning a damn thing in school (especially if your school has a 1:1 device policy and practices project-based learning), rendering any insanity pushed by her teachers moot outside its entertainment value.
Your son may have learned he’s free to ignore his teacher when she puts on the “caring teacher voice” to “talk to the kids” about a “newsworthy event” as long as he’s not disruptive. If the school has a loose cell phone policy, he’ll be able to keep himself otherwise occupied when the teacher gets on her soapbox. In the classes without a teacher crusader, your kid will likely spend his day doing projects or using PhotoMath and/or Gauth or following the Google Docs File-Make-A-Copy Protocol to minimize his workload while maintaining his GPA. In other words, he will be learning he doesn’t have to work hard to get a reward, which is literally the antithesis of the lesson nearly every American parent tries to inculcate in their child at home.
If that’s the case, I urge you to think about whether it makes sense to send your child in every day. Is the possible benefit worth the probable costs? It used to be for families where parents couldn’t supervise their child, but now with 1:1 iPad/chromebook/laptop policies sweeping the nation, 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. The only thing that’s left of high value, to my mind, is the minimal time that kids spend with friends, maybe 5 minutes at passing period and 30 at lunch. That, though, may also be negated by loose cell phone policies; it’s not uncommon to walk by a lunch table filled with kids, all of whom are looking down at their phones instead of talking to each other. Additionally, some of the friends your child makes at school may not be positive additions to his life, but you won’t know that if the friendships are mostly phone-based.
Then the question becomes is the school safe when the kids are outside the classroom? (Sometimes, as Libs of TikTok will attest, that’s questionable even under the direct supervision of the teacher.) My answer: probably not. Given what I’ve watched happen as a result of federal and state regulation of schools, no site is. Bullying can’t be stopped. Restorative justice teaches perps that there are no real consequences and teaches victims they have no recourse, so reporting anything is not only a waste of time, it paints an even bigger target on their back. Fights happen with frequency. The EASIEST place for a kid to get drugs is on a public high school campus. Back in 2004, a Federal study determined that students have a 1 in 10 chance of being sexually abused at school; you think that’s any better in 2025 or is it a better bet that the lax supervision of hundreds of thousands of teachers plus the addition of social media has intensified this issue?
All this headline-making stuff is scary, but let’s say your kid is not afraid for her physical safety and doesn’t experience fear about how she’ll be treated by her peers or teachers at school. She gets good grades and seems to be content at school — at least she’s not complaining much about it.
I just want you to weigh one thing.
At the end of my career teaching in conventional public schools, what most bothered me was how little my students seemed to have gotten from six daily hours of instruction. I go into brutal detail as to why the underlying incentive structures common in all public schools prevent learning in the following articles:
the newest and likely most pernicious threat, Artificial Intelligence, Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.
I want to leave you with this question: If you could get your kid in front of the deepest content experts and knew the methods to help her comprehend, process, and remember what those great men and women could teach her, wouldn’t that be a better use of the incredible gift of the hard work and sacrifice that allows your children to go from age 5-18 with school their only major responsibility?
The good news is you have way more options than you used to if you want to protect her from the peculiar institution of modern K12 schools and actually want her to know stuff and learn how to do things.
I often need to be reminded that "the hard is what makes it great.” Beyond the initial pain of sacrifice, there is often deep and abiding satisfaction. The hard things, the ones we fear we are not capable of, are the ones most worth doing.
Over the next several weeks, I’ll be posting what I think are the most useful and manageable methods you can use at home to support your child’s education. I’m hoping to help you pair your ability to curate a curriculum true to your family’s goals for education while holding your children accountable for learning it using meaningful, neurological-development-appropriate methods.
Right now, my plan is to write on the following topics:
Finding your anchor for the teaching of literature and history;
How learning happens and how best to facilitate that using note-taking methods that support knowledge retention so kids don’t just cram-and-forget;
Recitation of poetry and rhetoric, and
the big baddie everyone gets the heebie-jeebies over: teaching writing.
I hope these pieces will be useful to your family.
If you appreciate this and believe that my essays, podcasts and lesson plans will be useful to American families recovering control of their child’s education (even if they can’t fully control their schooling) please consider subscribing to support my work or buying me a coffee and contributing what you can. If you can’t afford to help, know that I intend to provide the most important posts to support you in teaching your own children free of charge.
Libs of Tik Toc.... I dunno, they seem pretty fricking stupid.....
Yes!!