The Great Option of Homeschooling: To see just how bad public schools are, walk the halls of Lakota

Just to let you know how bad it is, the pictures included here were taken in one of the 22 schools within my school district of Lakota.  As you’ll see, it’s all about Critical Race Theory, all the time with them.  So much so I would consider them a danger to any child.  I would never in a million years send any kid of mine to a public school these days.  If you want to know what’s wrong with public schools, take a walk through the halls of Lakota in Cincinnati, Ohio, and you’ll get a good idea.  I never thought they were any good, but now, they are just horrendous.  Ironically, just as revealing as those pictures were, I had the chance to meet up with some old friends at the Annie Oakley Wild West Show I’ve been involved in for over a few decades.  They have a swarm of kids I’ve watched grow up, and now they are all bloomed.  I only see them once a year, so it has been fascinating watching them grow, and I can only say that they are such intelligent and fully developed kids.  They are super nice kids, very gifted, socially extremely confident.  They don’t have that beat-down look on their faces that most children have these days, 22 and under.  Taking those kids out of the cesspool of public education has been great for them. The results show after looking at those pictures from the walls of Lakota schools, which is reflective of all public schools all over the country, it’s easy to see why parents are upset.  They have a right to be. But at least there is a silver lining I’ve known about but haven’t had much exposure to.  Like the kids I mentioned who have homeschooled their entire lives, more and more parents are taking advantage of that option.  My kids are a few of them, and they were over this week showing me the learning material they have for starting this school year, and I have to say, I was very impressed. 

I remember what it was like; as I told in the story above, public schools have been garbage for decades.  They weren’t very good when I was in school.  They were terrible when my kids were going to school, so much so that we homeschooled for one of their years, and in their last two years, they finished their courses online and graduated at home.  Both of my children graduated early and spent time in Europe learning about the world while their classmates from Lakota were still trying to get a date for the prom.  And as for today, I would say, if you love your children at all, do not send them to the garbage heap that is public school for the life of you.  It’s no accident at Lakota and many other schools that they have started All Day Kindergarten because that is all that government schools are to parents, a free babysitting service ran by radical progressive activists paid for by the taxpayers.  That is why they are also pushing pre-school options because parents have kids, but they need to get back to work.  So they drop their kids off at these government schools to raise because they need the free babysitting, then wonder 12 years later why their kids are all screwed up as young adults.  Well, it doesn’t have to be that way, and my kids love their kids, so they’ve been looking for options, and what they brought me to show me was some of the most wonderful homeschooling material I’ve ever seen.  There was a time when my wife and I homeschooled our kids because the public school at the time, Mason, wanted to teach sex education in the 4^th grade by putting a condom on a cucumber.  Well, these were my kids; they were little and were never going to have an opportunity to need to learn to put a condom on a penis.  My kids were going to be little and learning as much as they could as long as I could fight off the evils of the world to let their childhoods be as good as possible.  The school freaked out when my wife and I wouldn’t sign the permission slip, and a fight ensued that got quite bad.  It resulted in us pulling our kids from school and homeschooling for a year, which at that time was one of the hardest things we had ever done.

It wasn’t the education that was hard; it was the social stigma.  I never cared, but it mattered to my wife.  We were in our 30s at the time, and we did not have the support of our parents.  For our parents and society in general, public school was about dances, school jackets, and class rings.  They were the kind of people who went to their class reunions at five and 10-year intervals.  The friends they made in public school lasted a lifetime.  It was like the movie Grease, the school was about friends and memories, and they hated that we were robbing our children of those great things.

Only, school had changed since their days, and they had no idea what was going on.  When the Department of Education was put in place by teacher union lobbying in 1979, I was in the 2^nd or 3^rd grade at the time.  I was able to watch firsthand how that old view of public education changed into a radical political cesspool controlled by labor unions and their leftist desires.  I hated school more and more each year I was there; it was stifling to creativity and involved too much group think.   By the time my kids went to school, it was worse.  Not in the first few years, but by the time they were trying to push off sex education to 4^th graders, it had gotten out of control.  Most of the kids were going home to empty houses from the school’s logic, and the kids were having sex until the parents got home from their jobs.  But that wasn’t fair to the kids who went home to a loving parent or two and had good lives at home.  Those kids didn’t need to be destroyed by such education methods of social rendering at the expense of innocence.  So the only real option was to homeschool them, but back then, when my kids were of that age, there wasn’t great social support. 

Now that has changed, my kids will teach all their kids at home, and all their Instagram friends think it’s great.  Of course, they have parental support from us, but more than that, most of their friends are saying now that they wish they could afford to teach their kids at home instead of sending them to these terrible public schools.  The branding of public schools has gone south over the years.  Most adults who have kids wish they made enough money to either send their kids to private schools or take advantage of the tremendous network of homeschool resources available now.  They feel the same way the rest of us think about public schools, except they don’t have the option of staying home because they have jobs to teach their kids at home.  My kids have built their life around the matter, and I’m proud of them, even more so now that I’ve seen what kind of resources my grandchildren will have to work with. I’ve seen the results of homeschooled children.  Every kid in America should have such a chance at a good education.  But they just aren’t going to get it at these misrun government schools as they are today.  If you love your kid, you will not send them to any of them.  Because if there is anything genuinely equal in this world, it’s that public schools are all equally bad.  If the government runs them, they are terrible for your kid, and you should do everything you can to avoid those places at all costs.      

Rich Hoffman