This article was originally published by Kerry McDonald at The Foundation for Economic Education.
The numbers are startling. More parents are pulling their children out of school for homeschooling this fall, prompted in large part by school mask policies and ongoing virus concerns.
The homeschooling rate in the US doubled in 2020, and tripled from its pre-pandemic level, as parents sought other options when confronted with prolonged school closures.
But I think most of us thought that this fall would be different. With schools set to reopen for full-time, in-person learning, it was reasonable to expect homeschooling numbers to drop slightly—even if mask mandates and related policies might keep them more elevated than they otherwise would have been.
Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Homeschooling numbers in some parts of the country are through the roof. In Texas, for example, where the homeschooling rate tripled last year, interest in homeschooling this year is higher than ever before. According to the Texas Home School Coalition (THSC), the 4,699 calls and emails they received during the week of August 9th alone was five times the volume they received in record-setting weeks in 2020. Overall, their correspondence levels this year have far exceeded their highest 2020 numbers.
“2020 set records for the number of families interested in homeschooling. 2021 is now crushing those records,” THSC President Tim Lambert said in a recent statement. “We are literally inundated with calls and emails from thousands upon thousands of families asking how they can begin homeschooling this fall. Families know that in homeschooling they can find a form of education that is flexible and stable at the same time and it comes with a community of families who are ready to help.”
A similar pattern is emerging in Virginia. Homeschooling grew by 48 percent in that state last year and this year looks to be exceeding that increase.
Yvonne Bunn of the Home Educators Association of Virginia told her local CBS affiliate WTVR last week that she expects homeschooling numbers this year to surpass last year’s record highs. Some of this, Bunn speculates, is due to network effects. As more families choose the homeschooling option, it becomes a more widespread practice with additional resources and community support. This, in turn, prompts other families to seriously consider homeschooling.
“I think parents have been waiting to see what’s going to happen with the government schools,” said Bunn. “Are they going to require masks? Are they going to require COVID vaccines?”
According to the US Census Bureau, black homeschoolers experienced the largest surge in homeschooling last year. The number of black homeschoolers grew five-fold between the spring and fall of 2020, and black students are now over-represented in the homeschooling population compared to the overall K-12 public school population. A recent article in Slate suggests that many of these new homeschoolers are choosing to stick with homeschooling.
According to the article: “The COVID crisis forced many American families to keep children at home for school during much of the past year. That was especially true for Black Americans, who saw the most dramatic rise in a home-based learning experience of any racial group, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But even as many kids are returning to brick-and-mortar classrooms, a growing number of Black families have decided to continue teaching their kids at home.”
The Census Bureau data indicates that over 11 percent of US school-age children are currently homeschooling. The question now is not how much that figure will fall in 2021, but how high could it go?
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This mistake was funded by property taxes.
Let’s hope that the vast majority of these parents who have decided to homeschool their children are White Americans and that they make double-doggoned sure that they include teaching their white children to take pride in the unequaled achievements of White Europeans both here in America and around the world in every other historical White European nation.
This is one of the biggest mistakes that White parents have ever made. First, they failed to scrutinize the materials and textbooks that their children brought home from school and therefore were blind to the anti-White brainwashing that their children were being subjected to until rather recently, when the White race hating Marxists over-played their hand by this ‘Critical Race Theory’ brainwashing baloney. And, the second part of the biggest mistake – was that White parents did not offer any positive pro-White messages and provide their children with statistics and evidence that countered the anti-White brainwashing agenda of the Marxists.
I think what White families should do is to hire pro-White teachers as independent contractors and pool their resources and create a network of home schoolers. Build an old-fashioned, privately owned school houses and place them on private property in your local communities and then let the public education system continue to deteriorate and collapse under it’s own increasing dysfunctional trajectory.
Agreed with all your major points, except the “vast majority of these parents […] are White Americans” part. I think it’s fantastic that many more Blacks are breaking out of the mental prisons in which they’ve been controlled like livestock for generations.
By homeschooling their children, they will [as with White families] strengthen their family ties and be able to instill their cultural conservatism and religiously-based morality in their children. Public [government] schools have been instilling in Black children the mindset that they are oppressed; that they should rely on taxpayer subsidies (“assistance”) and that their family ties are a hindrance, to be embarrassed about, or worse. They have been encouraged to think of religion and family in communist-defined terms, and to seek nurturing and support from government sources.
Homeschooling requires some level of self-reliance, and reinforces the spiritual and practical value of family relationships. Homeschooling encourages young learners to ask questions which challenge the status quo, and to become resourceful enough to find answers on their own. That many more Black families are choosing this path, and exercising their INDIVIDUAL rights, is really good news for the USA, for those families, and for non-Black families as well.
If you love your children, don’t put them in public school.
Homeschooling is an option for some and private school is an option for others who can’t homeschool, but don’t put them in public school.
I know many home schooled kids and they are ALL SMARTER than the average “FACTORY” schooled kids.
This shows the school system dumbed down kids many years ago and most of the kids are bored with no challenge they took the classes away for the brilliant kids and dumbed down America, juts more signs of libtards in charge.
Anyone, performing any constructive labor, whatsoever, would have been in a position to teach their own kids some marketable job skill. Does public school literally bring you up to that level?
You should ideally be able to support a family at reproductive maturity, or the system is basically guaranteeing illegitimacy.
DS – So very true, excellent take in your comment. There appears to be a direct correlation of the diminishing value of the dollar and the illegitimate birth rate. The legitimate birth rate is nose diving in the US already, wait until the economy goes into crisis, and it will. We’ll see only the huge illegitimate birth rates, which will only compound the social problems of an economy on its knees. Unlike the the Great Depression there won’t be massive resources to dole out. The well is dry now, what happens when entitlements fail to materialize in a crisis. I think we all know that answer.
They haven’t taught us enough knowledge to survive at subsistence level, using resources beneath our noses. Think of your evening routine, off work — dinner, shower, pajamas, and bed. Can you?
Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum:
“The ESMC’s unequivocal promotion of five Aztec gods and the Yoruba religion through repetitive chanting and affirmation of their symbolic principles constitutes an unlawful government preference toward a particular religious practice,” president of CFER Frank Xu said in the press release. “This public endorsement of the Aztec and Yoruba religions fundamentally erodes equal education rights and irresponsibly glorifies anthropomorphic, male deities whose religious rituals involved gruesome human sacrifice and human dismemberment. Alarmingly, this is only the tip of the iceberg with the ESMC being California’s trojan horse of CRT!”
Great to see K-12 homeschooling increase.
Now there needs to be a movement to keep the kids from these universities.
Smart parents would do best to pay a local electrician or plumber or carpenter et al $5K – 10K a year to train their kid in a skill that he/she could use to actually support themselves then to pay $10-40K a year to be brainwashed in college and not be able to get a decent job when they get out.
It is best if you can start homeschooling at the first grade level. That way, you are going through all of the grades again yourself. If you teach three children, then you will have gone through all the grades three times. Stick to the basics for the first eight grades. Teach only reading, writing and arithmetic. My mother taught school for fifty years starting in the 1930s and she knew that this is all that kids needed to know. I had an aunt that was born after the civil war and she only had an eighth grade education and could do algebra problems. High school is for teaching advanced subjects such as physics, chemistry, and calculus. And you need the basics first to do that. Start in first grade teaching the basics of geometry then in a few years the abstract algebra will all make sense. Drawing circles, cutting them out and folding them in half to make straight lines. Then folding them again to make right angles. Have all the geometric shapes to show how truncated cones make eclipses etc. Teach cursive, calligraphy, and shorthand. See international journal of fusion energy abstract algebra banned a mathematical curriculum for creating citizens by Jonathan Tennenbaum. My wife homeschooled and when the kids were only 16 years old they had to go to community college because they were beyond what we could teach.
Home schooling is what white and Asian people do when they can’t afford private school but want to get their children as far away as possible from the disruptive black kids.
Make no mistake this goes up every time the balance in the school system is tipped to too many disruptive, badly behaved low IQ blacks. In fact, it even happens with blacks. Smart ones get pulled out of the public schools and sent to private school by their wealthy black parents.
The Chinese use AI to study where they should live so that the black population never gets past 5 to 10 percent; after that the place goes to hell very quickly.
The main failure of public education was not being grounded in the Bill of Rights, so that at least people would have a shared value system to overcome perosnal differences and tolerate diversity.
(I mean real diversity, not the politicized, ideological sense of the word.)
Home schooling may have mixed results in creating a new generation of well-socialized, STEM-capable human beings that can work together as a nation.