I like your insight a great deal. To think we are forever trapped with lazy and overpaid teachers is folly. One aspect that will be an issue will be the two major camps of homeschoolers. Anecdotally, I find there are those families whose kids are super bright or parents very educated who pour themselves into the homeschooling experience. Then there are those who do minimal work and simply do so in order to avoid behavioral problems their kids might have at school or to satisfy some neurotic need to protect/control. I believe the former group will be in great demand in the marketplace, but there will need to be an objective measure to differentiate the kids who went through a rigorous program and those whose parents were largely checked out and letting them just do Khan Academy on their own.
Homeschooling, as with any form of schooling, is about relationships, which is why anyone who writes about it gets so many varying and emotionally charged responses. Some will say homeschooling was the best thing to ever happen to them; another will comment that her fundamentalist parents ruined her life. What they are talking about is not the homeschooling but their families. There are probably people who read my piece and unsubscribed in anger at my criticism of public schools, their experience at which they enjoyed and found productive. But again, its not really the school they remember, its the relationships they had there with teachers and peers. My ideas all center around the fundamental need to build those relationships and to create a collective relationship to the Classics and to the community.
I completely agree. If the relationship (trust, respect, positive regard, etc.) is not there, then any type of instruction will falter. I find that parents despite their faults truly do have the longest term investment and most likely strong relationship with their children. Homeschooling is an excellent form to tap into that love and to bond even closer. My main concern would just be thinking how to confirm the efficacy of the homeschooling once the kids pursue employment. Of course the SAT or ACT could serve in that capacity. It’s also an intriguing suggestion to think if someone without a college degree could explain the homeschooling situation and simply submit an official SAT or ACT report to the employer in lieu of a college diploma. That would help confirm the academic capabilities without a four year stint in the propaganda machine of “higher” “education.” I really like your writing on this subject and am glad you don’t let any haters dissuade you from maintaining your message.
I think you might like, if you haven’t read them already, the works of James Tooley from the UK and Andrew Coulson from the US. They both write about the history of private education and how it was co-opted and largely subverted by the conversion to “normal schools” and public schools. Tooley’s short CATO piece “Private Education is Good for the Poor” here on https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/tooley.pdf and Coulson’s “Marketplace Education: Unknown History” really lit a fire for me in terms of the possibilities!
Of the homeschool families I know, one family has no business homeschooling and one other is too stubborn to get help for a child with a clear reading disability.
Mind you, with all the homeschool families I know, these are good stats, and even the kids of the parents who are loving but lousy homeschool parents are doing passibly, only slightly weaker than they would probably be in a standard school.
Aug 22, 2023·edited Aug 22, 2023Liked by Librarian of Celaeno
Covid did a number on private schools too. One Catholic school close to me saw rapid increases in enrollment from rich liberals who wanted to get away from the nonsense public school Covid policies (that they voted for). Unfortunately, many stayed and used their clout to get a couple of solid teachers fired for wrongthink. In retaliation, the principal resigned and and the Catholic parents who actually want their kids to hae a Catholic education left en masse for an adjacent Catholic school.
Contrast this to a Catholic college I know who had a student who did not take the material seriously and got herself pregnant. She was dismissed from the school along with the father, and the girl's family, who wanted to send another kid to the college was essentially blacklisted. This might sound harsh, as it seems the girl is just the screwup in the family and the rest are fine, but the college is doing what it has to to maintain its moral identity, and that requires hard choices.
Covid affected private schools in more varying ways than it did public schools, mostly because the responses and populations involved were so different. At my school half the parents blew up the headmaster's phone calling him a tyrant for masking everyone and the other half called him a monster for not mandating vaccines. The end result was that we lost half our students.
Yes. I think the best response I heard came from a headmaster at a Christian school who explained to an exasperated parent that his role was to be a fair Shepard and to help guide the flocks under his oversight. He did not allow for inflammatory statements like “child abuse” on either side. Through an open dialogue, we were able to bring up elements of our state law that would enable kids not to wear masks so long as parents signed off on it as a medical exemption (without even needing a physician proof). It was the first time I saw true leadership from a leader in education during the pandemic.
Sad, but it makes sense. Private school parents also seem more tentative about complaining about bad teachers nowadays. Perhaps the families realize how much they want the private school experience (and risk lockdowns or other shenanigans from public schools), so they are concerned about rocking the boat. However, the result is a gradual decline in standards and teacher effort.
Librarian writes: I would point out that where even the oldest and largest universities now stand was once a howling wilderness; there was nothing inevitable about their inception, and nothing is promised regarding their persistence. They exist because men of vision willed them into being, and were preserved by men of culture who revered their past and cared for the future.
Th earliest universities were founded to train lawyers and administrators for the Church (and later the state) in in the late 11th through 13th centuries. Even Harvard was founded to train church personnel.
Education has always been, in part, about producing the professionals needed to staff the society of the time. Put highly intelligent and learned people (to serve as instructors) in one place and scholarship, research, experimentation etc. will also happen.
As a recent new reader, I have not yet caught up on the earlier pieces of this series, but this is very relevant to me as a new, first time father on the cusp of turning 50. I very much planned my life around not having children, in large part because I did not think it was a good idea to bring a child into this world (thus putting me in that category of “knows better than to want others to follow after him (which I suspect is a major reason for the decline in birthrates”).
Anyhow, I decided that I liked being with my partner more than I liked not having a child, and now she and I are figuring out the best way to plan for our daughter’s education. We both had a parent who was a public school teacher. I went to private Christian school through grade 5, and then was purposely placed in public school for 6-8 grades in order to gain the broader socialization my parents felt I would need in high school and beyond.
That’s where we’re at now - trying to find a balance between what we see as a “good” education, which will be either homeschooling (which is daunting in itself) or some sort of private school, and the need for building relationships and gaining social exposure to a broad set of people. I would definitely invest in such a model as proposed here. I don’t really desire to homeschool but as perhaps the least bad alternative to public schools - hopefully I will be able to find something like you propose at the earliest levels of education.
That's a great example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. I especially like the post-apocalyptic nod with 'Appleseed.' I think the future looks very much like that, community groups creating educational structures outside the public system. My piece focuses on how rightists might approach this, within a context of Western Civilization, but obviously any immigrant from any place with a culture that values family and education is also going to hate what the Cathedral offers, its stultifying homogenization and mediocrity.
Interestingly, within China itself there has been a great revival of Confucian education in the last twenty years or so. Ideas that would have gotten one beaten and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution are now pushed by the CCP itself. If China and Russia come out of the war in Ukraine with increased power and presence on the world stage, as I believe they will, I suspect that a spillover effect will be an increased spread of traditionalism among Western peoples as a reaction.
I've read somewhere - don't know how accurate it is - that China censors all the vacuous, narcissistic nonsense on TikTok for its own teens and is more than happy to be exporting it all to teens in the West. How Orwellian is that!
You read correctly. They understand what it does, and what it does to America, as they do with the similar product Fentanyl. Much as Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids near an iPad.
I like your insight a great deal. To think we are forever trapped with lazy and overpaid teachers is folly. One aspect that will be an issue will be the two major camps of homeschoolers. Anecdotally, I find there are those families whose kids are super bright or parents very educated who pour themselves into the homeschooling experience. Then there are those who do minimal work and simply do so in order to avoid behavioral problems their kids might have at school or to satisfy some neurotic need to protect/control. I believe the former group will be in great demand in the marketplace, but there will need to be an objective measure to differentiate the kids who went through a rigorous program and those whose parents were largely checked out and letting them just do Khan Academy on their own.
Homeschooling, as with any form of schooling, is about relationships, which is why anyone who writes about it gets so many varying and emotionally charged responses. Some will say homeschooling was the best thing to ever happen to them; another will comment that her fundamentalist parents ruined her life. What they are talking about is not the homeschooling but their families. There are probably people who read my piece and unsubscribed in anger at my criticism of public schools, their experience at which they enjoyed and found productive. But again, its not really the school they remember, its the relationships they had there with teachers and peers. My ideas all center around the fundamental need to build those relationships and to create a collective relationship to the Classics and to the community.
I completely agree. If the relationship (trust, respect, positive regard, etc.) is not there, then any type of instruction will falter. I find that parents despite their faults truly do have the longest term investment and most likely strong relationship with their children. Homeschooling is an excellent form to tap into that love and to bond even closer. My main concern would just be thinking how to confirm the efficacy of the homeschooling once the kids pursue employment. Of course the SAT or ACT could serve in that capacity. It’s also an intriguing suggestion to think if someone without a college degree could explain the homeschooling situation and simply submit an official SAT or ACT report to the employer in lieu of a college diploma. That would help confirm the academic capabilities without a four year stint in the propaganda machine of “higher” “education.” I really like your writing on this subject and am glad you don’t let any haters dissuade you from maintaining your message.
I think you might like, if you haven’t read them already, the works of James Tooley from the UK and Andrew Coulson from the US. They both write about the history of private education and how it was co-opted and largely subverted by the conversion to “normal schools” and public schools. Tooley’s short CATO piece “Private Education is Good for the Poor” here on https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/tooley.pdf and Coulson’s “Marketplace Education: Unknown History” really lit a fire for me in terms of the possibilities!
Of the homeschool families I know, one family has no business homeschooling and one other is too stubborn to get help for a child with a clear reading disability.
Mind you, with all the homeschool families I know, these are good stats, and even the kids of the parents who are loving but lousy homeschool parents are doing passibly, only slightly weaker than they would probably be in a standard school.
Covid did a number on private schools too. One Catholic school close to me saw rapid increases in enrollment from rich liberals who wanted to get away from the nonsense public school Covid policies (that they voted for). Unfortunately, many stayed and used their clout to get a couple of solid teachers fired for wrongthink. In retaliation, the principal resigned and and the Catholic parents who actually want their kids to hae a Catholic education left en masse for an adjacent Catholic school.
Contrast this to a Catholic college I know who had a student who did not take the material seriously and got herself pregnant. She was dismissed from the school along with the father, and the girl's family, who wanted to send another kid to the college was essentially blacklisted. This might sound harsh, as it seems the girl is just the screwup in the family and the rest are fine, but the college is doing what it has to to maintain its moral identity, and that requires hard choices.
Covid affected private schools in more varying ways than it did public schools, mostly because the responses and populations involved were so different. At my school half the parents blew up the headmaster's phone calling him a tyrant for masking everyone and the other half called him a monster for not mandating vaccines. The end result was that we lost half our students.
Yes. I think the best response I heard came from a headmaster at a Christian school who explained to an exasperated parent that his role was to be a fair Shepard and to help guide the flocks under his oversight. He did not allow for inflammatory statements like “child abuse” on either side. Through an open dialogue, we were able to bring up elements of our state law that would enable kids not to wear masks so long as parents signed off on it as a medical exemption (without even needing a physician proof). It was the first time I saw true leadership from a leader in education during the pandemic.
Sad, but it makes sense. Private school parents also seem more tentative about complaining about bad teachers nowadays. Perhaps the families realize how much they want the private school experience (and risk lockdowns or other shenanigans from public schools), so they are concerned about rocking the boat. However, the result is a gradual decline in standards and teacher effort.
Librarian writes: I would point out that where even the oldest and largest universities now stand was once a howling wilderness; there was nothing inevitable about their inception, and nothing is promised regarding their persistence. They exist because men of vision willed them into being, and were preserved by men of culture who revered their past and cared for the future.
Th earliest universities were founded to train lawyers and administrators for the Church (and later the state) in in the late 11th through 13th centuries. Even Harvard was founded to train church personnel.
Education has always been, in part, about producing the professionals needed to staff the society of the time. Put highly intelligent and learned people (to serve as instructors) in one place and scholarship, research, experimentation etc. will also happen.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/rise-of-civilization-part-i
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/rise-of-civilization-part-2
As a recent new reader, I have not yet caught up on the earlier pieces of this series, but this is very relevant to me as a new, first time father on the cusp of turning 50. I very much planned my life around not having children, in large part because I did not think it was a good idea to bring a child into this world (thus putting me in that category of “knows better than to want others to follow after him (which I suspect is a major reason for the decline in birthrates”).
Anyhow, I decided that I liked being with my partner more than I liked not having a child, and now she and I are figuring out the best way to plan for our daughter’s education. We both had a parent who was a public school teacher. I went to private Christian school through grade 5, and then was purposely placed in public school for 6-8 grades in order to gain the broader socialization my parents felt I would need in high school and beyond.
That’s where we’re at now - trying to find a balance between what we see as a “good” education, which will be either homeschooling (which is daunting in itself) or some sort of private school, and the need for building relationships and gaining social exposure to a broad set of people. I would definitely invest in such a model as proposed here. I don’t really desire to homeschool but as perhaps the least bad alternative to public schools - hopefully I will be able to find something like you propose at the earliest levels of education.
Thank you for the article.
Ah, Ficino schools are excellent!
"To those who would call this impossible,"
I think it is inevitable.
This article - published today - would seem pertinent here: https://www.city-journal.org/article/chinese-parents-forge-their-own-path-in-the-u-s
That's a great example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. I especially like the post-apocalyptic nod with 'Appleseed.' I think the future looks very much like that, community groups creating educational structures outside the public system. My piece focuses on how rightists might approach this, within a context of Western Civilization, but obviously any immigrant from any place with a culture that values family and education is also going to hate what the Cathedral offers, its stultifying homogenization and mediocrity.
Interestingly, within China itself there has been a great revival of Confucian education in the last twenty years or so. Ideas that would have gotten one beaten and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution are now pushed by the CCP itself. If China and Russia come out of the war in Ukraine with increased power and presence on the world stage, as I believe they will, I suspect that a spillover effect will be an increased spread of traditionalism among Western peoples as a reaction.
https://www.ft.com/content/a5bd3212-d75a-11e8-a854-33d6f82e62f8
I've read somewhere - don't know how accurate it is - that China censors all the vacuous, narcissistic nonsense on TikTok for its own teens and is more than happy to be exporting it all to teens in the West. How Orwellian is that!
You read correctly. They understand what it does, and what it does to America, as they do with the similar product Fentanyl. Much as Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids near an iPad.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-tiktok-douyin-teens-privacy/
Superb--one of the best articles I've read on Substack (I mean it).
I am very grateful for your kind notice. If you are inclined, please share it around.