Homeschooling

Quote from Adolph Hitler:
“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.”

It's been said that "the philosophy of the classroom in this generation will be the philosophy of life in the next generation." Our earliest founding fathers understood this. That's why, after building homes and churches, they established educational institutions like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Dartmouth. Today, most Christians have adopted the false premise that facts are neutral. They believe it doesn't matter who teaches math, science, and history, because facts are facts. The humanists took advantage of this type of thinking by gradually shaping and controlling education in terms of materialist assumptions.

Whoever Controls the Schools Rules the World shows how education can be used as a vehicle for social change from Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler to secular humanism and radical Islam. Our worldview oponents understand that education is where the war of ideas is fought. If Christians are serious about securing the future for our children, they must understand the nature of the war we are fighting.
http://shop.wnd.com/store/item.asp?ITEM_ID=2042

In the same manner as homosexuals developed a detailed strategy (which they even published in a book and widely disseminated the plan to homosexual activists) to indoctrinate our youth, legislators and media and thereby change the future worldview (http://www.article8.org/docs/gay_strategies/after_the_ball.htm), and which was very successful in even getting "hate" laws (laws against certain thoughts and feelings) passed under which pastors are currently being arrested for preaching that homosexuality is against the Bible, the government and NEA have developed a detailed strategy for the state's indoctrination of your children, exposing them to pornography and forcing them to sign agreements not to tell you, encouraging them to inform on you and your upbringing of them, etc. which, you might be surprised to learn, has very little to do with reading, writing and arithmetic (http://www.learn-usa.com, http://www.newswithviews.com/public_schools/public_schoolsa.htm) Very few people, particularly vulnerable children, are aware of how much they've been skillfully manipulated and shaped by the homosexual activists to meet their agenda.

The upbringing that the children of today are given will determine what kind of world the future brings. Please, for your children's sake and the sake of the world's future, consider homeschooling your children, teaching them not only the basics, but morals, values and some religion -- even if we think they might want to think about choosing another when they're old enough -- ANY religion is better than none, and is many times better when given from a young age. Don't make the mistake of saying, "I'll wait until they're adults and they can decide then if they want to choose a religion" because by then most of the opportunity to introduce morals and values will have passed.

Other Quotes from Adolph Hitler:
“It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge.”
“How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.”
“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”
“All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.”
“Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”

Your article “Lack of oversight for home-schooled alarms educator” indicated that because homeschooling is not supervised by government bureaucrats, homeschooled children are not being well educated. The statement from public school teacher Nancy Head that “nobody ever checks up on these kids” makes it appear that homeschool parents need to be held accountable to the state.

However, this is not what evidence has shown. A national study performed by Dr. Brian Ray, “Is Government Regulation Necessary for High Achievement?” compared and contrasted the performance of homeschooled children throughout the country according to the amount of government regulations. The study shows that the academic performance of homeschooled children in states such as New York, with much regulation, is the same as homeschooled children in states like Missouri, which have little regulation. In other words, more government rules and accountability does not make better students.

There is nothing “broke” with the academic performance of Michigan homeschoolers, and there is, therefore, no need to fix it. National studies have shown that Michigan homeschool students, on the average, score above average on standardized achievement tests. The bottom line is that homeschooling works. [To view a summary of national homeschool achievement click here.]

Furthermore, the United States Supreme Court has recognized that the average parent acts in the best interest of their children. After working for the Home School Legal Defense Association for 23 years, I have found that homeschool parents want their children to not only succeed academically, but in every way. Michigan’s compulsory attendance statute regarding homeschooling both protects the fundamental rights of parents to direct the education of their children as guaranteed through the Fourteenth Amendment, and also upholds the understanding that we need to trust parents more than the government oversight.

Homeschooling has not always been free in Michigan. Thousands of families in the 1980’s and 1990’s felt the oppression from the state when they were hounded as criminals by local school districts and the State Department of Education simply because they chose to homeschool. Many families were taken to court. During those years, HSLDA represented thousands of homeschool families, whose right to home school was being challenged by the state. Fortunately for the innocent homeschool families in Michigan, the state supreme court, in our case People v. DeJonge, 501 N.W.2d 127, (Mich. 1993), ruled in favor of the homeschool families and found the teacher certification requirement an unconstitutional violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

A few years later, the legislature saw the importance of protecting parents’ rights in the area of education and enacted MCLA § 380.01. “It is the natural, fundamental right of parents and legal guardians to determine and direct the care, teaching, and education of their children.” This reaffirmed the basic fundamental right of all parents, including homeschool parents, to have the right to choose the form of education that they deem best for their children.

There is no need to question the need for accountability for homeschool parents to state bureaucracy. Homeschooling has a proven track record of working best when it is left alone by the government.

Home Schooling: The Right Choice : An Academic, Historical, Practical, and Legal Perspective
by Christopher J. Klicka

The Heart of Homeschooling: Teaching & Living What Really Matters (Paperback)
by Christopher J. Klicka

As parents begin to see the reality (as opposed to the rhetoric) of education reform —

The classroom focus on environmentalism and other perceived social issues (homosexuality, feminism, etc);

The changing of the purpose of education from producing an intelligent body of individuals to producing a workforce;

… they are looking to other means of educating their children. Because private schools already have long waiting lists, parents are more and more turning to home schools as a means to educate their children. In that endeavor, most parents are looking for sources of textbooks, articles, and information on how to create and run a home school. The following links are to help parents seeking to establish a home school for their children.

If visitors to this page have a favorite source of information, articles about, websites on, or textbook sources for home schools that they would like to share with others, please email the web address to me.

Note: If you are opening this page from another section of this website, please click here to bring up the Home School web page where the correlating links can be found.

NOTICE: The links on this webpage are provided for the benefit of those seeking information on home schools and is not necessarily an endorsement of all the material provided on the website. Visitors are encouraged to use discernment.

One of the "alternatives" parents have been encouraged to pursue, in circumventing the un-education being used in the government (aka, public) schools and the cost of private education, is homeschooling.

Homeschooling, up until the advent of Horace Mann and compulsory education, was how many parents educated their children. John Quincy Adams, son of John and Abigail Adams and sixth president of the

United States

, was homeschooled. He graduated Harvard College at the age of 20 and entered the study of law.

An added advantage, in homeschooling, is that the child is educated according to the world view of the parents, whatever that world view is. This was the intent of our Founding Fathers and conforms with the First Amendment prohibiting the government from establishing a state religion or interfering in the free exercise of religion.

Since the advent of Goals 2000 (aka, systems education) funded by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 -- also known as the Improving America's Schools Act in the Clinton Administration and the No Child Left Behind act in the Bush Jr. Administration -- the rise in the number of parents homeschooling their children has created a problem for the system. It is apparent that those implementing systems education never anticipated the number of parents who would turn to homeschooling as an alternative to the government un-education and the cost of private education.

As such, there is a movement afoot to pull homeschoolers back into the system. This is being done by offering homeschoolers incentives such as computers, money for curriculum, testing, supervision and assistance in weak areas ... this type of thing.

One "incentive" that has reached across the nation is William Bennett's K12® Virtual Academy program. Many will remember William Bennett as Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration. Bennett was/is also a contractor in one of the original nine design teams funded by the New American Schools Development Corporation to oversee the transformation of American education to systems education. Bennett's design team was called the Modern Red Schoolhouse. For all his talk of virtues, Bennett is an avid supporter of systems education. The K12® Education for a Lifetime website www.k12.com states very clearly that the curriculums offered are standards-based, a term synonymous with outcome-based and performance-based education (aka, systems education).

Many homeschool parents are buying into Bennett's K12® Virtual Academy program under the assumption that it is free from government control. That is an assumption they should not make. The K12® Virtual Academy program receives from the state coffers full-time equivalent (FTE) money as though the child were sitting in a classroom in a government school. This means that if the parent joins Bennett's K12® Virtual Academy program, the child is no longer considered to be homeschooled but is enrolled in a government school.

Indications are that parents are not being told this before they join the K12® Virtual Academy program. There has been at least one instance in which parents came by this knowledge when the local school district called their home and requested their children's immunization records. Having joined the K12® Virtual Academy program, the local school district was able to include their children in its FTE count for state apportionment monies. As their children were now considered enrolled in the government school, the government school was required to ensure the children's immunization records were current in accordance with federal law, but there is a far more sinister side of all this, one that is not being spoken of except in whispers and certainly not publicly.

As way of explanation, in the 2003 Legislative Session, a House Bill 1658 was introduced by a supposedly conservative Republican, Gigi Talcott. The bill tied the ability of teenagers to obtain a driver's license to passing the Washington Assessment of Student Learning -- the infamous WASL. (see Washington State Ties Assessment to Driver License.) Protest ensued when the bill became public knowledge and Talcott withdrew it.

But what Talcott proposed has been the intent all along. Remember that under systems education, “all” really does mean all. The system must include everyone. To that end, homeschoolers must be drawn back into the system. This is to be accomplished in one of two ways: 1) offer the homeschoolers incentives (carrots) sufficient enough to encourage them back into the system whether they know they are back in the system or not; 2) force the homeschoolers back into the system.

The first is being accomplished via such means as Bennett's K12® Virtual Academy program. The second will be accomplished by laws such as HB1658 introduced by Talcott in Washington state. Undoubtedly, the bill will be back either as a bill unto itself or as an amendment to another bill.

Following is how the second "option" works, in effect. In order for the child to obtain the CIM -- the Certificate of Initial Mastery or Certificate of Mastery -- the child must demonstrated proficiency of the new basics: team work, critical thinking, problem solving, communications, adapting to change, and understanding whole systems (WTECB, 1994). The new basics are defined by the exit outcomes established at the state level -- the state "academic" standards -- and benchmarked to varying grade levels. The tool used to demonstrate proficiency is the state assessment. The result of demonstrating proficiency is receiving the CIM at or about the age of 16. (Note: for the purposes here, generic terms are used, such as state 'academic' standards and state assessment as these instruments, although reading much the same in every state and being for the same purpose in every state, are called something different.)

It has been the intent, from the outset, that the child who does not have the CIM will not be able to 1) obtain a driver license; 2) go on to higher education; or 3) get a job. This will affect students in homeschools as well as private schools that do not pursue un-education under the federal/state system. These "sanctions" also fall under the heading of "accountability."

Will any child be able to take and pass the state assessment? In a word, "No." Remember, the state assessment is to determine if the child has demonstrated proficiency of the new basics: team work, critical thinking, problem solving, communications, adapting to change, and understanding whole systems. Does this sound like math, science, history, English, geography ...?

Very few homeschool or private school education programs focus on these new basics. Too, the state assessment is looking to see if the child is performing the wanted process defined as behavior/procedure or product defined as result of doing (Stiggins, 1986). In other words, systems education is a process to inculcate in the child the wanted behaviors and procedures to assure the wanted product.

The documents forthcoming from the Schools for the 21st Century pilot project for education reform in Washington state (many states piloted this program) were very enlightening. It became very apparent from these documents that ..

• content is defined as excellence in terms of the change agenda;
• process is the product; the destination; what learning is about;
• emotionality and affectivity are the means by which content and process will be achieved;
• feelings are paramount (SBE, 1995).

To this end, subjects are "integrated" or taught across the curriculum in the context of unit themes or thematic units focusing on four areas: world ecology (environment), world economy (globalism), world security and world population growth. Knowledge is only incorporated as it is used and applied in teaching the unit themes or thematic units. If the child needs to know that 2 + 2 = 4 in the teaching of the unit theme or thematic unit, the child will be taught that. Otherwise, the child will not be taught that 2 + 2 = 4.

The same is true with career paths where the child will be taught what the child needs to know to pursue a career path. The child will not receive a liberal arts education. Systems education follows the socialist/communist/fascist mantra of "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs." This falls right in line with the purpose of systems education: to produce a world-class workforce (WTECB, 1994).

Should parents not pursue homeschooling or private education? Yes, they should. It is imperative that parents remove their children from harm’s way. But, once they have secured the immediate safety of their children, parents must pursue the long term safety of their children by getting involved to help stop the system that is being built and is almost complete at this time.

In stopping this system in its tracks, in returning to the intent of our Founding Fathers in the wording of the First Amendment, then and only then will future generations of Americans be able to enjoy the freedom that their forebears enjoyed, that their forebears fought and died for.

Last Thursday, I gave a speech at UNC-Charlotte called “Why Liberals Hate Freedom.” The main point of the speech was that “liberals” hate freedom because they are not really liberals. Unfortunately, during and after the Q and A things got heated with a few of the communists who decided to awaken from their drug-induced stupor and attend the speech.

Since I was overly harsh with most of them I would like to offer the following apology, which truly comes from the bottom of my heart:

I am sorry that communists actually exist in the United States of America – a nation so great that it must construct walls to keep people out.

I am sorry that these communists would like to turn this great nation into one that must construct walls to keep people in.

I am sorry that one of the communists attending my speech chose to accuse me of conflating the terms “communism” and "socialism.”

I am sorry that, in my mind, I may have conflated the terms “imbecile” and “idiot” while the aforementioned communist was speaking.

I am sorry that the communist who falsely accused me of falsely accusing Hillary Rodham Clinton of being a Marxist has not bothered to read her Master’s thesis or “her” book, It Takes a Village.

I am sorry that the communist on the back row pretended not to understand that the main point I was making with regard to Clinton was: There is already a trend towards socialism in America, which will be accelerated sharply if Clinton is elected president.

I am sorry that the aforementioned communist instead chose to claim that I said “Clinton will seize control of all private industry as soon as she takes office.”

I am sorry that communists are unable to address smart arguments from capitalists, opting instead to refute dumb arguments that no one else but communists are making.

I am sorry that the communist love of straw man arguments is symbolic of the fact that communists are living in a make-believe world with make-believe enemies.

I am sorry that my articulation of the above observation caused this particular communist to scurry out the back door of the auditorium while I engaged in a rational point-by-point refutation of his “arguments.”

I am sorry that another communist chose to approach me with the ridiculous argument that Jesus’ multiplication of bread and feeding of masses was proof that Jesus, too, was a communist.

I am sorry that the communist who accused me of being “un-Christian” because I oppose socialism was unaware that I tithe 10% of my income to orphans in Africa – and that 100% of them are black.

I am sorry that this un-bathed communist was forced to admit that he donates 0% of his money to charity.

I am sorry that his excuse for giving nothing to charity was “But, I’m not a Christian.”

But I really am sorry that he only halfway believes in the saying “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

I am sorry that the aforementioned communist did not shower because he believes that soap is bad for the environment.

I am also sorry that yet another communist attacked my position on gay marriage by saying that the government should stay out of marriage altogether.

I am sorry that when I asked whether the government had the authority to keep a 43-year old from marrying a five-year old he could not give a straight answer.

I am sorry if the aforementioned communist was gay and, therefore, offended by my suggestion hat he could not give a “straight” answer.

And, finally, I am sorry that the money I made giving my speech at UNC-C was spent on expanding a firearms collection that will help ensure that the Adams household will not soon be overtaken by un-bathed hippy communists who seek to re-establish the world’s most vile and murderous ideology with the possible exception of radical Islam.

I am sorry if any Islamic Jihadists were offended by the previous run-on sentence. I was just trying to avoid using any sentence fragments that might make this apology sound sarcastic. I really mean that. Seriously. I do.

Preserving liberty and restoring constitutional precepts are impossible as long as the welfare mentality prevails, and that will not likely change until we've run out of money. But it will become clear, as we move into the next century, that perpetual wealth and the so-called balanced budget, along with an expanding welfare state, cannot continue indefinitely. Any effort to perpetuate it will only occur with the further erosion of liberty.

The role of the US government in public education has changed dramatically over the past 100 years. Most of the major changes have occurred in the second half of this century. In the 19th century, the closest the federal government got to public education was the Land Grant College program. In the last 40 years, the federal government has essentially taken charge of the entire system. It is involved in education at every level through loans, grants, court directives, regulations, and curriculum manipulation. In 1900 it was of no concern to the federal government how local schools were run at any level.

After hundreds of billions of dollars, we have yet to see a shred of evidence that the drift toward central control over education has helped. By all measurements, the quality of education is down. There are more drugs and violence in the public schools than ever before. Discipline is impossible out of fear of lawsuits or charges of civil rights violations.

Controlled curricula have downplayed the importance of our constitutional heritage while indoctrinating our children, even in kindergarten, with environmental mythology, internationalism, and sexual liberation. Neighborhood schools in the early part of the 20th Century did not experience this kind of propaganda.

The one good result coming from our failed educational system has been the limited but important revival of the notion that parents are responsible for their children's education, not the state. We have seen literally millions of children taken from the public school system and taught at home or in private institutions in spite of the additional expense. This has helped many students and has also served to pressure the government schools into doing a better job. And the statistics show that middle-income and low-income families are the most eager to seek an alternative to the public school system.

There is no doubt that the way schools are run, how the teachers teach, and how the bills are paid is dramatically different from 100 years ago. And even though some that go through public schools do exceptionally well, there is clear evidence that the average high school graduate today is far less educated than his counterpart was in the early part of this century.

Due to the poor preparation of our high school graduates, colleges expect very little from their students, since nearly everyone gets to go to college who wants to. Public school is compulsory and college is available to almost everyone regardless of qualifications. In 1914, English composition was required in 98% of our colleges; today it's about one-third. Only 12% of today's colleges require mathematics be taught, where in 1914, 82% did. No college now requires literature courses. But, rest assured plenty of social-babble courses are required as we continue to dumb down our nation. (No wonder U.S. students rank 36th in the world!)

Federal funding for education grows every year, hitting $38 billion this year, $1 billion more than requested by the administration and 7% over last year. Great congressional debates occur over the size of a classroom, student and teacher testing, bilingual education, teacher's salaries, school violence, and drug usage. And it's politically incorrect to point out that all these problems are not present in the private schools. Every year there is less effort at the federal level to return education to the people, the parents, and the local school officials. For 20 years at least, some of our presidential candidates advocated abolishing the Department of Education and for the federal government to get completely out of the public education business. This year we will hear no more of that. The President got more money for education than he asked for, and it's considered not only bad manners but also political suicide to argue the case for stopping all federal government education programs. Talk of returning some control of federal programs to the state is not the same as keeping the federal government out of education as directed by the Constitution.

Of the 20 congressionally authorized functions granted by the Constitution, education is not one of them. That should be enough of a reason not to be involved, but there's no evidence of any benefit, and statistics show that great harm has resulted. It has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, yet we continue the inexorable march toward total domination of our educational system by Washington bureaucrats and politicians. It makes no sense!

It's argued that if the federal funding for education did not continue education would suffer even more. Yet we see poor and middle-class families educating their children at home or at a private school at a fraction of the cost of a government school education, with results fantastically better--and all done in the absence of violence and drugs. A case can be made that there would be more money available for education if we just left the money in the states to begin with and never brought it to Washington for the bureaucrats and the politicians to waste. But it looks like Congress will not soon learn this lesson, so the process will continue and the results will get worse.

The best thing we could do now is pass a bill to give parents a $3,000 tax credit for each child they educate. This would encourage competition and allow a lot more choice for parents struggling to help their children get a decent education.

-- From "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" by Dr. Ron Paul

I know, I know, "reading" is a righteousness issue: the kind that brings the well-meaning and high-minded to the table, causes them to pull off their spectacles and pass their palms across their foreheads at the imputation modern kids don't want to do it. I mean, don't want to read because of all the competing temptations out there -- weak schooling, video games, the Internet, TV -- as identified by commentators on a new study.

The study, issued by the National Endowment for the Arts, says daily pleasure reading among kids is on the decline. But -- aha! -- so also among adults. Indeed, the study correlates the drop in reading to declines in performance on math and science.

Among other findings: When you have books at home, you read more; when you don't, you don't. And another: Low reading skill correlates to low pay.

I have to acknowledge this isn't the first time we have heard such stuff. I couldn't say exactly when I first read about, perhaps commented on, pronounced declines in the intellectual drive of American students. Elvis might still have been alive then (if he isn't now).

What's easier to know, though not to understand, is the intractability of the desire not to learn. That's right -- not to. Americans spend enormous amount of money each year on trying to persuade students they should care whether "cat" has two t's or just one and whether Robert E. Lee played the bull fiddle with Bob Wills or built the Brooklyn Bridge -- whatever the Brooklyn Bridge may be, and wherever Brooklyn is -- whoever Bob Wills was.

A half decade in higher education convinces me that hard as the grown-ups try these days -- and that isn't monumentally hard -- the kids end up with pretty much what they want in the way of knowledge: a lot or a little. Curiosity seems to drive it: the thirst to know, or not know. I had college journalism students for whom, curiously enough, curiosity was a lost art. There wasn't anything they particularly wanted to find out about. They just wanted their degrees so they could do something or other.

Reading, we're all taught to understand, is the passport to wisdom. Except I gather that's not what everyone wants -- wisdom. There's a lot of just-get-by-ness out there in the world, and not just among students but also among those ex-students who propagated them originally. I don't mean this to sound snobbish. I don't care whether a good plumber can quote "Purgatorio" (actually, I can't either), but I care very much how he works with a pipe wrench. We do as we do because we do: I can't put it any other way.

At the same time, we could do better than we do. Quite a lot better. The willingness of the public schools to enforce standards of knowledge and attainment fell off the cliff during the 1960s. What? Standards? Someone better/smarter than someone else? We can't say things like that! Feelings might be hurt!

So -- ha, ha (not caring if I hurt feelings), I probably know more poetry than you do, simply because the public schools I attended, in the '50s, made us commit to memory such jewels as "Let us then be up and doing/with a heart for any fate/still achieving and pursuing/learn to labor and to wait."

The times in general are non-conducive to the pursuit of knowledge through (ugh!) looking at words on a page. Probably the point to bear in mind is that Our Times, as such, never last: they melt, they merge, and they fade. Often, that's a good thing.

I worry along with the NEA about the state of reading -- the most enlivening of pastimes -- but I know at the same time that curiosity is uncontainable. Those who want to know will know.

Why, when ready, they'll even pick up a book and bury their noses between the pages to smell the glue. And then for the rest of us, learn to labor and to wait.

Sometimes it can be hard to focus more on your marriage than on your child, but this prioritizing is vital in your homeschool. On today’s Home School Heartbeat with Mike Smith, we’ll hear from Dr. Emerson Eggerichs—a homeschooling father of three and the president of Love and Respect Ministries.

Mike Smith:
Dr. Eggerichs, this week we’ve been talking about how homeschool parents can make their marriage a priority. How does having a strong marriage help a family’s homeschool and influence their children’s education?

Dr. Emerson Eggerichs:
Well, Mike, good question. As Sarah and I homeschool through the years, we realized there are matters of the mind and there are matters of the heart. And homeschooling educates the mind primarily, although we seek to develop character. Overall we’re educating, according to the standards of the culture, the mind. But the interesting thing is, we knew that our marriage educated the hearts of our children. And again we felt, how sad if we educated the minds of our kids because of the excellent homeschooling but we wounded their hearts; we wounded their hearts because of a bad marriage. It just made no sense to us. So from God’s view, the best education is an education of the heart and mind and your marriage goes right toward the heart.

Mike:
So you would agree that God called us to raise our children for heaven rather than Harvard?

Dr. Eggerichs:
You know, I haven’t seen any scriptural texts that suggest that Harvard may be a goal.

Mike:
Well, our point being that he’s called us to first of all, spend our time on our children’s spiritual development, and then of course their intellect would be important as well. Well listeners, please join us join us again next time to hear more on marriage from Dr. Eggerichs. And until then, I’m Mike Smith.

"Home School Heartbeat" is a production of the Home School Legal Defense Association. All rights reserved. For more information on Home School Heartbeat or the Home School Legal Defense Association please contact us at:
Home School Heartbeat • P.O. Box 3000 • Purcellville, Virginia 20134-9000
Phone: (866) 338-8614 • Fax: (540) 338-8609 • Email: heartbeat@hslda.org
Web: http://www.homeschoolheartbeat.org/

"Once people realize they can control their own lives, that their own power exists within them rather than outside of themselves...then the controlling game is over."

"Strange times are these in which we live, when old and young are taught falsehoods in school, and the one man that dares to tell the truth is called at once, a lunatic and fool." -- Plato