God Bless Homeschoolers: Times have changed, and more people are turning away from the terrible public schools to save their children

I thought it was a waste of time when I went to public schools. I hated most of it. None of the relationships I formed in those school years meant anything to me. I always viewed public school as a massive social experiment, even in the early years, and thought of going there the same as going to prison. You weren’t allowed to think about what you wanted or do what you wanted, which always seemed wrong to me. So I never have been enthusiastic about public schools, and over the years, I have written millions and millions of words about why John Dewy was wrong about forming it from the beginning. I didn’t feel any different when my own kids went to public school. There was a time when my wife was very supportive, one of my kids was in the fourth grade, and the other was in third. My wife volunteered in everything that she could in both of those classrooms. She was one of the “moms” that the school treated almost like a teaching staff member. Everyone knew her, and she was beloved by all the kids. Well, in that fourth-grade class, the school had sent home a permission slip for teaching my daughter about sex by putting on a condom onto a plastic dildo, and of course, we said no. What followed was a complete mess; the school was so angry with us that the full force of their wrath was brought down on us. No longer was my wife welcome in the school. We got mad and fought back. It turned into a significant event in that the police union got involved, and it ended up in the mayor’s office. We ended up pulling our kids out of school for a year until we moved to a different district and started all over again somewhere else. 

That year of teaching our kids at home was one of the hardest in our entire 30-plus-year marriage. We had no family support for it, and the community was entirely against it. We lost all our friends over it, and even 20 years later, we never repaired those relationships. I was alright with the social castigation, but it was very difficult for my wife. It was just a year of homeschooling, but it cost her a lot because of the social pressure we experienced. That’s why it surprised me that both of my kids pulled their kids out of public school during the Covid pandemic, a government-made viral outbreak that they wanted to control through government-taught education. Because my education always involved elements of life outside of public school, and I had never accepted public education as a form of education that was of any value, it was easy for me to see what a stupid set-up it was with the whole Covid thing. My kids have now been homeschooling their kids for a lot longer than my wife, and I had. But they had a much different experience just over 20 years later. Instead of everyone telling them in society how wrong they were, they were getting admiration from their peers. Most people they interact with expressed a desire to do the same thing for their kids if they could afford to, which most can’t. And there are large homeschooling conventions now that didn’t exist in the 90s. The support system is much better than it used to be, which can be seen in some of the pictures in this article, as my kids just went to a large homeschooling convention in Cincinnati. 

Attitudes have changed a lot about public education. It’s certainly not that anybody hates education, quite the opposite. What is evident at an event like the Ohio Homeschool Convention is that people have learned not to accept the bad product that public school is. The concept that kids can learn what they need to in life by a government school is ridiculous and ill-conceived. Many people never thought to accept the question of it because they had no choice in the matter. Most everyone has to go to public schools, so they had to justify the terrible product because to admit otherwise would be personally harmful to their intellects. That was why we had such a violent experience when my wife and I did it. But despite what is projected from the media culture about public schools, attitudes have changed dramatically. Even people who I would think would be all into the public school experience with cheerleading and pom poms are telling my kids how much they admire them for putting their kids first and taking responsibility for their educations themselves. My kids take my grandchildren’s education very seriously, and I’m very proud of them. In my house, we read books, lots of them, education never stops, no matter if you are 7 or 70. I have smart kids, and they are helping my grandchildren unlock the treasures of their own brains, and it’s a beautiful thing to look at. They have chosen not to surrender their kids over to some scum bag government employee covered in tattoos and body piercings who don’t even know what sex they are. And my grandchildren aren’t even thinking about sex in school under the third and fourth grades. When my grandkids come home, there is a parent in the house to greet them, as they always should be. Turn your kids over to a daycare or a public school, then don’t complain when they turn out to be messed up adults. Those babysitting services are not replacements for a parent’s love, as Dewey and the government fully intended to destroy.

So like a lot of things that have come out of Covid, the media seemed surprised that public school enrollment is down as pandemic restrictions have been eased. Parents have seen enough, and those who can are not sending their kids back to those palaces of mental enslavement. What the political left never factored into their calculations about “the new normal” was that it wasn’t going to be the complete obedience that Klaus Schwab talks about in his books on a complete socialist takeover of all things in the world. Instead, the smart people not yet suckered into enslavement were never again going to trust the government, health officials, or a public school system to do anything with their kids. A lot of parents are going to change the way they do things. The violence toward my wife and me mentioned was their attempt to keep dissidents from escaping their control, and they tried everything to punish us, which was a horrible idea. A lot of unnecessary pain resulted, which could have been averted. But instead of getting more control over that period, they have essentially lost it all. People do not feel privileged to have a public school system like they used to even ten years ago. Now, it’s just a necessary evil because they are too busy to do the job themselves or don’t feel they know enough to teach their own kids. But with every teacher who comes on television and talks about gender neutrality and represents themselves as progressive disasters, there will be more parents who want to homeschool their children to keep them out of that government-designed disaster. And to my eyes, with the long game under consideration, that just might save America rather than destroy it, as Dewey always intended. 

Rich Hoffman