Welcome out of the cave, my friend. It's colder out here, but the stars are just beautiful.

As Epictetus said, and Plato knew, "Only the educated are free." It's time to free our kids and our families, America. I'll do my best to help.

You can feel it in your bones, can’t you mom? You talk to your child after school and ask him specific, open-ended questions about what he learned that day, hoping for a conversation, hoping to hear excitement in his voice. Usually though, he tells you very little. You look through the assignments he brings home and see a lot of worksheets.  A LOT of worksheets.  When you hear from the teacher, if you’re unlucky enough to do so, her news is almost always behavior-related. Reports on your child’s progress are rare and, generally, not very informative. 

The worst part is you remember when your son was three he was so excited to learn about everything.  He asked you why grass is green, how caterpillars turned into butterflies, and what happened when plants died. He loved singing the ABC song so much you’d hear snippets of it from the bathroom. He constantly begged you to read to him. 

And then he went to school, and it all started to change. 

He changed.

Recess became the only noteworthy topic of conversation most days. Learning became less cool and often went unmentioned. Good days were not dependent on how much he did or how interesting the work was, but about not having been disciplined by the teacher and how much screen time he was able to get — although he quickly recognized based on the look on your face that you weren’t very excited about all the YouTube shorts and Google games he accessed at school and stopped sharing them with you. All the observant, analytical questions he used to ask dwindled.

If you’re a teacher, you can feel it too, can’t you? You watch them every day. You used to love your job, but it’s harder to love it when the kids don’t love school. They don’t love what they’re doing. They certainly don’t love worksheets. They might love you, but you can tell that some of them, even at this age, resent you. You’re forced to keep their curious, agile minds on one topic, right up until the timer sounds — though this is getting harder as classes get bigger, students show less ability to focus on a task, parents become less supportive, and administration shifts the responsibility (and all blame) to you.

You’re getting emails from parents about the amount of homework you send home. They want adjustments but expect less practice to still result in an A on tests. You’d like to cut back, but your curriculum and your grade-level team have committed to teach certain things this year, and since you certainly don’t have enough time in class, even though you have roughly six hours a day to work with the kids, you feel you must assign homework. You tell yourself it’s good for reinforcement. You tell yourself they’ll benefit from the extra practice.  But you have so little time to grade and give honest, appropriate, immediate feedback, that you can't accurately measure just how much those hours of homework are really helping, if at all. You know that the kids with educated, committed parents do better in your class and tend to be great students.  But in the back of your mind, you wonder, “Do those kids need me at all?”  Meanwhile, for your at-risk kids—the kids whose parents don’t speak English, are addicts, are in and out of jail, or work so much they don’t have time to support their kids—there’s not enough time in the world to give all of them what they need, assuming you could diagnose what that was and had the capacity to give it.  

You’re starting to wonder why the school doesn’t just organize kids by ability level so that instead of trying to differentiate instruction to challenge the bright kids and support the struggling, they are all lumped together and it’s your job to manage your time to get through to every single one of them and ensure growth across the spectrum of your students’ ability levels. 

In fact, the more you think about it, the more problems you see.  You look around, and tentatively try to bring up some of this stuff, carefully, even tangentially, but you don’t like the way your teacher colleagues look at you when you do. You’re afraid to be labeled bitter, a burnout. Your closest friends urge you to memorize the Serenity Prayer and leave school as soon as the bell rings, telling you to clear your conscience of all the student issues you can’t fix in a 180-day school year.  You don’t dare bring any of your misgivings up to administration. At best, your concerns would fall on deaf ears, though your principal might offer some gentle words of condolence on your loss of faith; at worst, they’d find your lack of faith disturbing, brand you a trouble-maker, and assign you those duties and classes that go to those administration is not interested in keeping on-site.  And they’ll do it all with a smile while collecting a comfortable six-figure salary for their complicity in keeping things running just as they are.

The public schooling system isn’t broken. It does exactly what it’s meant to do: it schools children. The big problem is parents have little to no control over what the schooling of their children entails. Moreover, public schooling is NOT education. Yes, some places have marginally better outcomes, but I’m here to invite you to think about the What-ifs and the Whys of a real education.

What if schools were not age-segregated ghettos, but places where kids of all ages came together to solve problems in which they had a personal interest? What if teachers stopped handing out worksheets, and allowed kids to investigate what mattered to them individually, while providing a foundation of literacy, numeracy, and the necessary knowledge of their culture (history, stories, mythology, etc.) to facilitate deeper learning across time periods, cultures and disciplines? What if students were allowed to work in comfortable chairs, outside in the grass, or late in the afternoon? What if the day’s schedule was flexible enough to adjust for off-site hands-on learning, physical practice, and socialization with people of varied ages and backgrounds? What if the pacing of instruction could be infinitely adjusted to meet the student where she is? 

What if?

Why not?

You know, deep in your secret heart, there’s only one way that this is possible. There’d have to be a 1:1 teacher-student ratio, no bells, no curriculum maps. A deep relationship between teacher and student would make the student’s success the primary motivation of the teacher.

Your concerns, mom and teacher, father and coach, are completely justified. I’m going to show you why you’re right to be worried, and hopefully, very soon, I’ll be able to offer you the help that will make you confident enough to know that with just a few resources, you can rear your children instead of allowing a faceless state bureaucracy to raise them.

And for the teachers out there reading this out of spite or because you need to know you’re not the only one who sees this even if you feel powerless to change it, I invite you to consider my arguments. Even if you disagree with my conclusions and think I’m a crackpot, I invite you to compete with me to offer families support aligned with your beliefs — there’s room for us all here.

We only have one life. Rearing children well has more lasting value — and is more satisfying — than anything else we’re likely to do on this earth. Consider embracing that fully by reclaiming the responsibility of educating your children. 

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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 schools have become since they graduated. The public school system actively robs American children of their full potential in order to maintain power in the hands where it currently rests. Only parents can reverse this trend; American authoritarianism is born in its “free” public schools.