Why You Shouldn't Focus on Your Child's Happiness

I believe it was Isocrates who said that the healthy child wants to become an adult. In raising our children well, we must teach them how to act and think like mature people.

Yet, the phrase we hear most often repeated is this: 

"I just want him to be happy." 

But if you think about it, it isn't what you most want. What you most want is that he grows up to be a decent, hard-working, mature adult. If you raise him to become these things, then happiness will follow.

As the ancients understood and current research now proves, happiness is found in living a virtuous life. The modern pursuit of pleasure and good times, it turns out, is just a myth being thrust upon us by very sophisticated and manipulative marketing techniques.

Contrary to this empty rhetoric, a good life does not come from the pursuit and acquisition of pleasure, in whatever form you desire, but it comes from being a virtuous person. As the concept of "virtue" seems to be an idea that’s gone out of fashion, let me share with you some of the qualities that a virtuous person might possess:

Humility, courage, mercy, patience, tolerance, diligence, and generosity. These are some of the qualities a truly “happy” person might embody.

To inculcate these kind of qualities in your child, you must begin when he is very young.

You must train him in the way of good habits, and then, and only then, will you be able to raise a happy child who later becomes a happy adult. One state naturally follows the other. 

What is the key to raising a child with good habits?

Raise a child who is obedient and does the right thing, not from fear of you, but from a deep love and respect for you. 

We don't need behavioral studies to prove this; we need to pay attention. A child who is always complaining and throwing tantrums and always asking for this and that is not a happy child, is he? Nor is the child who is always doing what he is told not to do. 

However, the kind of training that protects from these unhappy states must start when your child is very young. You should begin training your child in the ways of good behavior as soon as he or she turns two years of age.

If you wait until much later to begin, the training process becomes increasingly more difficult. Waiting too long means you will need to correct bad habits first and then work on instilling the good habits in your child.

It’s a much more tedious and frustrating experience to correct bad habits than it is to avoid them from forming in the first place.

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.”

— Aristotle

If you fail to raise your child well, then he will be destined to spend the rest of his life working to correct deeply ingrained negative traits (a lifetime pursuit and not for the easily discouraged). Even worse, he will perpetuate and suffer the ills in life (as will everyone he encounters) that arise from not being a good person.

You see, the opposite of the virtuous person would be the wretched one who will never know any real happiness. We've all known wretched people, especially as they get older and nature carves their wretched states into their faces. We certainly don't want this for our children!

In a nutshell, if you focus on the happiness factor when your child is young, you will fail to raise a happy child. Focus on raising a decent child first, and his happiness will follow. 

If you don't know where to begin, do this: throw out all of your parenting books and stop asking your friends for advice (the latter is the equivalent of the blind leading the blind).  Moving forward, begin to think about the consequences of your actions as a parent.

Start asking yourself questions such as, "If I do this, then what is the message I am giving my child?" If I let him do this, then what am I teaching him about his behavior and the journey of life?"

For example, this may surprise you to know that many parents look to their children's desires to decide how they should educate them. I know this for a fact (no studies done, yet) because the parents say things to me like, "I thought about homeschooling, but he wanted to go to school with his neighborhood friends," or "I thought about homeschooling, but he's so social, and I think he'd be happier in school."

How you educate your child is a huge decision that will alter the course of his life, but he is too young to make such a life-changing decision. You are the adult; this is your decision to make for your child. 

It doesn't matter if he prefers to go to school with friends or that you think he would be happier in school because he has friends to socialize with every day. What matters is whether or not a school is the best place for your child or whether another option might be such as homeschooling.

You have to weigh the pros and cons accurately and objectively before you make this kind of a decision.

Base your decision upon your values and what you want for your children. If you want to raise decent children, you have to consider the moral environment of the child.

If you're going to raise highly intelligent children, you have to evaluate the level of academic training a school offers. If you want both, then you have to look for an educational model that provides both,

If you only care about your child's immediate happiness, then you can let him make this decision. 

I used the example of educational decisions because I hear about them a lot, but the truth is that there are many decisions we let our children make every day, such as when they can finish playing; when they need to do their chores; when they need to get ready for bed. 

Instead of training them to understand that these are non-negotiable commands we make of our children, we go to the negotiating table with them and let them argue their case for an extension of time for whatever it is they want to do.

We also exhaust ourselves in the process, which is one reason parents find raising children so challenging today. It's always tiring to have to argue with someone and then give in to them when they should have done what you asked them to do in the first place.

Children need most, and what they don't have enough of are adults who guide them on their way to maturity by concerning themselves less with whether or not their children are happy and more with whether or not the parents are training their children well.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

— Aristotle

The point to childhood is to prepare for adulthood; you should be less concerned about making a child happy and more concerned about raising a child who grows up to be a responsible, honorable, and mature adult.

It's not uncommon today to see grown children well into their 30's, or 40's still living at home because they can't make it on their own. The other day, my 30-something chiropractor told me that half of his friends still live at home.

I know of many situations where the parents still have aging children at home. An offspring well into adulthood and living at home out of necessity was unheard of when I was young.

Literally.

Make your priority for your children less about their happiness and more about behaving well and doing the right thing.

If you do, the chances are strong that you'll be able to enjoy your golden years knowing your kids are doing well and on the way to acquiring the kind of happiness that comes from living a good life.

*****

Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

Become a Smart Homeschooler, literally, and give your child a first-rate, screen-free education at home and enjoy doing it. Join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course.

For parents of children under age seven, Raise Your Child Well to Live a Triumphant Life, course will be open again sometime in March, 2021.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is an educator, veteran homeschooler, a lover of the classics, and a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 19 years of experience working in children’s education.

Utilizing her unusual skill set, coupled with the unique mentors she was fortunate to have, Elizabeth has developed a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child. She devotes her time to helping parents get it right.

☞ Disclaimer: This is not a politically-correct blog.

The Six Purposes of Schooling by John Taylor Gatto

When people have asked me why I homeschooled, I tell them I had no choice. I tell them that if they understood what I understand about public education, they would homeschool too. John Taylor Gatto was the man who opened my eyes to the nefarious agenda behind public school.

What follows is a transcription of the key section from John’s classic speech and opus, The Underground History of American Education. John was a brilliant and well-researched man. I have read what is below in Ingles’ book myself; it is all true.   

Transcription of John’s Talk

“I have something here.  I have the six purposes of schooling [from the book Principles of Secondary Education by Alexander James Inglis] as laid down in 1917 by the man whom Harvard named their Honor Lecture in Education for. 

So far from being a fringe individual, this guy is the reason the Harvard Honor Lecture in Education is named as it is:  The Inglis Lecture.  I would like to read you the six purposes of schooling.  I moved heaven and earth as it took years to find this book [Principles of Secondary Education]--just like trying to find in past years a copy of the Carol Quigley [book] Tragedy and Hope.  

I learned about Inglis from a twenty year President of Harvard [1933-1953], James Bryant Conant, who was a poison gas specialist in World War I--and was in the very inner circle of the Atomic Bomb Project in World War II--was High Commissioner of Occupied Germany after the War. 

So he [James Bryant Conant] wrote--there must be 20 books about the institution of schooling--of which he was completely a proponent.  And he is a very, very bad writer.  I forced myself to read most of these books, and one of them he says that if you really want to know what school is about, you need to pick up the book that I’m referring to Principles of Secondary Education. 

Two years it took me to find a copy of the book [Principles of Secondary Education by Alexander James Inglis]--750 pages, tiny print and as dull as your imagination can be.  And furthermore, it is not till you get to the very middle of the book--in an unlabelled section--that he spills the beans.  Let me spill them for you.  

 There are six purposes, or functions, as he calls them.  The first he [Alexander Inglis] calls the Adjustive Function: Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.  That’s their main purpose--habits and reactions to authority. 

That is why school authorities don’t tear their hair out when somebody exposes that the Atomic Bomb wasn’t dropped on Korea, as a history book in the 1990s printed by Scott Foresman [did], and why each of these books has hundreds of substantive errors.  Learning isn’t the reason the texts are distributed.  

The Adjustive Function

So, first is the Adjustive Function--fixed habits.  Now here comes the wonderful insight that being able to analyze the detail will give you.  How can you establish whether someone has successfully developed this Automatic Reaction because people have a proclivity when they are given sensible orders to follow. 

That is not what they want to teach.  The only way you can measure this is to give stupid orders and people automatically follow those.  Now you have achieved Function #1.  

The Integrating Function

Have you ever ever wondered why some of the foolish things that schools do or allow to continue?  [Function] #2, he [Inglis] calls it the Integrating Function, but it is easier to understand if you call it the Conformity Function. 

It’s to make children alike as possible--the gifted children and the stupid--alike as possible because market research uses statistical sampling, and it only works if people react generally the same way.  

The Directive Function

The Third Function he calls the Directive Function: School is to diagnose your proper social role and then log the evidence that here is where you are on the Great Pyramid, so that future people won’t allow you to escape that compartment.  

The Differentiating Function

 The Fourth Function is the Differentiating Function.  Because once you have diagnosed the kids in this layer, you do not want them to learn anything that the higher layers are learning.  So you teach just as far as the requirement of that layer.  

The Selective Function

 Number five and six are the creepiest of all!  Number 5 is the Selective Function.  What that means is what Darwin meant by natural selection: You are assessing the breeding quality of each individual kid.  You’re doing it structurally because school teachers don’t know this is happening. 

And you’re trying to use ways to prevent the poor stuff from breeding.  And those ways are hanging labels--humiliating labels--around their neck, encouraging the shallowness of thinking.

 I often wondered, because I came from a very very strict Scotish-Irish culture that never allowed you to leer at a girl.  But when I got to NYC, the boys were pawing the girls openly and there was no redress for the girls at all, except not showing up in the classroom--high absentee rates. 

Well, you are supposed to teach structurally that sexual pleasure is what you withdraw from a relationship and everything else is a waste of time and expensive.  

 So, the Selective Function is what Darwin meant by the favored races.  The idea is to consciously improve the breeding stock.  Schools are meant to tag the unfit with their inferiority by poor grades, remedial placement, and humiliation, so that their peers will accept them as inferior.  And the good breeding stock among the females will reject them as possible partners.  

The Propaedeutic Function

 And the Sixth is the creepiest of all! And I think it is partly what Tragedy and Hope is about--a fancy Roman name, the Propaedeutic Function.  Because as early as Roman bigtime thinkers, it was understood that to continue a social form required that some people be trained that they were the custodians of this.  So, some small fraction of the kids are being ready to take over the project. 

That’s the guy--the honor lecturer [Inglis], and it will not surprise you that his ancestors include the major-general of the siege of the Luknow of India--famous for tying the mutineers’ on the muzzle of the cannons and blowing them apart, or somebody who was forced to flee NYC, a churchman at the beginning of the American Revolution, because he wrote a refutation of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. 

They were going to tar and feather him.  He fled and was rewarded by the British by making him the Bishop of Nova Scotia.  Those are Inglis’ ancestors!  

 So, Al Inglis is certainly--when I learned of this and wrote to Harvard, asking for access to the Inglis Lecture.  Strike me dead, Lord, if I’m exaggerating at all.  I was told “We have no Inglis Lecture--hasn’t been for years, and we have no records. 

It was the same that happened when I discovered that Elwood B. Cubberly, the most influential schoolman of the 20th century and the bionomics genius had been the elementary school editor of Houghton Mifflin, and I wrote Houghton Mifflin--Is there any record? And they said, “We have no record of anyone named Elwood P. Cubberly. 

Now Harvard is telling me, “There is no Inglis Lecture.  A week passed and I got a call from Harvard, from some obscure office at Harvard, saying “What is your interest in the Ingles Lecture?”  I knew that I was on thin ice. 

And I said, “Well, James Conant referred me in his books to the man the Inglis Lecture is named after, and I was just wondering if I could get some background on this fellow, and a list of the lectures.  

 And in due time, I got a list of the lectures and instructions [on] how to access the texts, but not easily. Enough hoops that someone who has to mow the lawn and burp the baby wouldn’t jump through those hoops.  I was able to prove Harper’s [magazine] wouldn’t publish [it in] the cover essay I wrote, which Lew Laflin [?] named Against School, but I had called The Artificial Extension of Childhood because I think that is the key mechanism at work here.  

 So, they wouldn’t print the information about Cubberley because Houghton Mifflin denied it.  It was only months after that I looked through my extensive library of incredibly dull books about schooling, and I opened [one]--and on the facing page said Elwood B. Cubberly, Editor and Chief of Elementary School, publishing arm of Houghton Mifflin. 

By the way, the secondary Editor and Chief was Alexander Ingles.  So you see how this cousinage works.” 

*****

Download your free copy of 10 Surprising Facts About Homeschooled Kids.

*Video transcribed by Roger Copple. To watch the full 12-minute video: The Six Purposes of Schooling [Video]

Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

Become a Smart Homeschooler, literally, and give your child a first-rate, screen-free education at home and enjoy doing it. Join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course.

For parents of children under age seven, Raise Your Child Well to Live a Triumphant Life, course will be open again sometime in March, 2021.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is an educator, veteran homeschooler, a lover of the classics, and a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 19 years of experience working in children’s education.

Utilizing her unusual skill set, coupled with the unique mentors she was fortunate to have, Elizabeth has developed a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child. She devotes her time to helping parents get it right.

☞ Disclaimer: This is not a politically-correct blog.

Goodbye, Mr. Potato Head

Mr. Potato Head is losing his gender, at least on the box he comes in. Moving forward, he will be known only as Potato Head.

It's a little confusing, so let me explain: he's still a Mister in the box but not on the box.

Apparently there were a lot of articles that emerged Friday morning spreading fast the news that the toy company, Hasbro, who created the character of Mr. Potato Head in the 1950s, was going gender-neutral.

But then, the news article I was reading, by CNN, was updated later when Hasbro tweeted that the brand name had changed but not the characters.

I was relieved to learn that. 

When I was young, we had a funny sitcom about a talking horse called Mister Ed. After reading the Potato Head article, I was trying to imagine what would happen if Mister Ed became just Ed, but then that's a man's name.

And that got me thinking, exactly how would the TV producers handle Mister Ed today? Would they have to change his name? And what would they change it to since names from the beginning of time have always been based on gender? 

And what about adults? When I was young, children still addressed grown-ups with titles such as, Mr. Jones or Mrs. Smith. Since we were not allowed to call an adult by their first name, what would we have done if the gender issue had existed then?

Would we have had to drop the Mr. and Mrs. when we spoke to an adult? As calling an adult by their last name was rude, dropping the titles would have put us in another bind.

My daughter told me at gender-neutral Berkeley, on the first day of her classes, the professors ask each student to state their pronoun preference. Some classes have as many as 300-400 students.

This perplexed me because I wondered how the teacher would then keep all of that straight? If the professor has to know what the pronoun preference for each student is, does that mean that every time they need to use someone's pronoun they have to look at their roster, find the person's name, see their pronoun preference, and then speak? 

As I considered this, I couldn't help but think about the cost of tuition and how much class time this must take up?

Anyhow, I continued reading the article and found that Mattel, the maker of Barbie dolls, also wanted to introduce "a multi-dimensional view of beauty and fashion." To accomplish this, they introduced new dolls with disabilities, hair loss, and “vitigilio.”

I'm not sure what vitigilio is but I know that vitiligo is related to a disease affecting the skin pigmentation. 

Either way, it reminded me of a time when I was waiting to get my primary health care license in Chinese medicine. I worked for a company that sold a product for treating hair loss based on Chinese herbs. One day I was in a salon talking about the product to the owner when one of her customers came in. 

The customer, an attractive young woman, was invited into the back room by the owner.  While I didn't understand why she had been invited to join our conversation, she understood. She asked me if she could show me something. I said that she could.

She pulled her hair off and was completely bald. To clarify, her hair was a wig; she had no hair. She suffered from a disease called alopecia which causes all of a person's hair to fall out.

It was a shock to witness this, and I'm sorry, Mattel, but it was not at all beautiful. So when Mattel says they want to promote “beauty and fashion” by making a doll with thinning hair, again, I'm confused. Women and men spend billions of dollars each year to not have thinning and balding hair. 

Does Mattel not know this?

Potato Head aside, what all this confusion indicates to me is that we are beginning to lose a grip on a reality that we have agreed upon since the beginning of time. 

We are not thinking rationally and logically because we have been dumbed down by an educational system being manipulated by the corporate world since the mid-1800's and which now includes tycoons like Bill Gates. 

Gates has far more global power today than any one man should ever have. Where are the checks and balances for such unrestrained greed and lust for power?

And is it a coincidence that he largely funded the development of a national curriculum, and that most schoolchildren are now at home learning online?

It's pretty amazing if it is. 

If I were a young parent today, I would reflect on your child's exposure to the gender conversation very seriously, and I would do several things to protect them from it and anything related to it. 

Understand that this nefarious social conditioning taking place in school and the media is inevitably destined to alter their understanding of what is beautiful, good, and true.  

I want to share my 8 Steps to Protect Your Child's Heart and Mind with you, but before I do I need to make a request. Please resist the inclination to ignore them because you think they are too extreme.

It is precisely extreme measures we must take to win this battle because we are too far out in left field now. 

Personally, I don't care what people do behind closed doors, and I believe that each human being possesses an inherent dignity that is worthy of respect, but I have to draw a line when aggressive marketing campaigns are launched to literally alter our perception of reality in order to satisfy a very small group of people.

If you want to protect your children and are ready to be proactive, here is a downloadable list of 8 things you can do to make sure what's beautiful, good, and true in life remains beautiful, good, and true in your children's eyes too.

Beauty. Goodness. Truth. Now those are ideals worth pondering; those are ideals worth striving for.

On a final note, you can save your money because Potato Head is a toy not worth buying. He occupies your children's time for about five minutes and then they get bored. My kids played far longer with two sticks that cost me nothing than they ever did with Mr. Potato Head.

Still, I don't like to see the Mr. of Potato Head removed from the box.

Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

Become a Smart Homeschooler, literally, and give your child a first-rate, screen-free education at home and enjoy doing it. Join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course.

For parents of children under age seven, Raise Your Child Well to Live a Triumphant Life, is where you want to start.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is an educator, veteran homeschooler, a lover of the classics, and a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 19 years of experience working in children’s education.

Utilizing her unusual skill set, coupled with the unique mentors she was fortunate to have, Elizabeth has developed a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child. She devotes her time to helping parents get it right.

Disclaimer: This is not a politically-correct blog.

One Method to Raise Courageous Children and Catapult Their Careers

Courage is a great virtue and one every successful person embodies. But it’s an often misunderstood virtue.

Many people think courage is a lack of fear, but courageous people experience fear. The difference is that courageous people will act despite their fear whereas cowards will succumb to their fear and be unable to act. 

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.”

— Mark Twain

Life, to be lived to its fullest, has challenges and obstacles that we must all face and learn to overcome. If we let our fear conquer our minds, we will struggle to live purposeful lives because cowardice is paralyzing.

It will stop us from making decisions or acting in ways that will propel us forward in our life's true purpose.

If you want your child to embrace his life, to live life to its fullest, to realize his life's work and purpose, then you have to allow him to take risks in childhood and learn to overcome the obstacles and challenges that he'll face. There are physical challenges he must overcome as well as challenges of the mind. 

The mental challenges are the more difficult to overcome because man is a master at self-delusion. But we can help our children learn to face them with courage when they are young, to overcome them when they are older.

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”

— William Faulkner

The greatest fear of the mind is the fear of performance, otherwise known as the fear of looking stupid. There are ways your child can confront this fear in youth so it does not immobilize him when he is older.

Give your child a head start developing the confidence to perform by having him perform for audiences during his childhood. There are various situations you can put your child into to give him the practice he needs to overcome this fear. If you can do this for him, he'll be at a great advantage in his life.

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”

— E.E. Cummings

Here are three situations to consider for your child to help him discover the stuff he is made of, his "mettle," as Homer would say.

Music

The first is by having him learn a musical instrument and performing in music recitals. Find a music teacher who provides recitals for the children at least twice a year. If you find a teacher you like, but the teacher does not provide recitals, suggest he or she does and offer to help organize the recitals. If this fails, then continue looking until you find a competent teacher who does provide recitals. 

Music recitals are extremely important for children because they develop the confidence they need to walk out onto a stage and perform under pressure. In the beginning, it will be difficult for them but, when they are very young, they have the advantage of being less self-conscious.

Children also tend to have less of an opinion about things when they are younger, so they'll be more willing to perform when they understand that it's expected of them. 

 As they grow older, with enough practice, they'll get used to performing for others and be able to bring joy to people through their music. While they may feel nervous before they start to play, they will understand that their fear is not a reason to cower down; they will learn to act despite it. 

Poetry

As part of your child's education, have him memorize poetry. Once a month, get together with other families whose children are also engaged in memory work and do a joint recital. Let each child have a turn coming to the stage and reciting by heart the poem he learned.

Afterward, have tea and cookies and let the children enjoy their accomplishments together. The goal is to let it be an event they can look back on with fondness while they are developing confidence in learning to perform. 

Projects

Have a quarterly or bi-annual project night where children speak on some aspect of history or science through a project they made. This is not only a good opportunity for them to learn to ignore their fear and learn to perform well, but it is a great academic learning and teaching opportunity too. 

There are other things you can do to help your child gain confidence in performing when he is young; still, these suggestions are a place for you to begin thinking about the kind of opportunities that will help your child gain confidence in his ability to perform well. 

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

— Winston S. Churchill

If you can do this for him, you will have helped him learn that fear is not a reason for inaction; we act despite our fear when there is something worth doing. The more we act, the more courageous we become.

When your child is young, let me offer you a word of caution: do not let him get into the habit of always being the center of attention. Teaching your child to perform and indulging a child in excessive attention are two very different things.

One leads to courage, and the other leads to self-centeredness. 

Your goal is to raise him to be courageous and to be able to rise to the occasion when life demands it of him. This is the beginning of the journey to living a life of purpose.

The great sage Rumi said that every person was born with a desire for some work in his heart. Raise your child to be courageous so he can discover that work. 

Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

Become a Smart Homeschooler, literally, and give your child a first-rate, screen-free education at home and enjoy doing it. Join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course.

Free Download: How to Raise a More Intelligent Child and an Excellent Reader—a reading guide and book list with 80+ carefully chosen titles.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is an educator, veteran homeschooler, and a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 19 years of experience working in children’s education.

Utilizing her unusual skill set, coupled with the unique mentors she was fortunate to have, Elizabeth has developed a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child. She devotes her time to helping parents get it right.

Disclaimer: This is not a politically-correct blog.

Your Children Must Learn to Write Verse!*

According to Mr. Gwynne (of GwynneTeaching.com and the author of Gwynne’s Grammar), all schoolchildren in England, century after century, used to be taught how to write verse. Back then, writing verse was considered an elemental component of an elementary education

How many adults do you know today who can write verse? Allow me to answer that question for you. Most likely, none.  At least, not classical verse, which is the topic under discussion in what follows.

Fundamental opening question: what exactly is real verse, classical verse?

Let us begin by looking at what of modern verse, more commonly known as "free verse," consists of, and, after that, do the same for traditional verse. 

Free verse is when someone takes a thought and writes it in a style that may or may not offer a vague hint of traditional poetry, but pays no attention to the rules of traditional poetry, and in consequence is not, technically speaking, poetry at all.

Let's look at an example of free verse: this, from T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

 We are the hollow men

 We are the stuffed men

 Leaning together

 Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

 Our dried voices, when

 We whisper together

 Are quiet and meaningless

 As wind in dry grass

 Or rats' feet over broken glass

 In our dry cellar

“Free verse proliferated in the twentieth century because it was “modernistic”, secular and easier to write; but it moved poetry closer and closer to prose until it reached the point when it was no longer possible to tell the difference when read aloud.”

— Geoff Ward, Academic

Now, let me give you an example of traditional verse, in the first stanza of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

Whose woods these are, 

I think I know,

His house is in 

The village though

He will not see 

Me sitting here, 

To watch his woods

Fill up with snow.

Please read it two or three times out loud to get a sense of the feel of the poem. That done, now read a later "stanza" of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

Let me be no nearer

In death's dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer-

Please read that "poem" out loud two or three times too. 

Notice that, in the genuine poem by Frost, there is an exactness in the number of units that each line is divided into. In consequence, the poem has a rhythm. By contrast, in Eliot's "poem" nothing is measured at all; there is no rhythm of any kind. It could perhaps be not unfairly described as a free-flowing regurgitation of thought. 

 In Eliot's "poem" each line simply has as many feet (units) as Eliot happened to feel like giving it. Far from there being any coherent structure to the “poem”, each "stanza" has an indeterminate number of lines broken up into lines at random – which, by any traditional definition or practice, simply is not poetry.

“Led mainly by Ezra Pound in the United States, and quickly followed by T. S. Eliot in England with “The Waste Land,” both meter and and rhyming were abandoned, first by very few and then by more and more until where we are today, when they are scarcely to be seen today in published poetry.”

— Mr. N. M. Gwynne

In summary of the essential difference between classical poetry and modern poetry-so-called that we have arrived at: what is referred to as free verse is -- by contrast with traditional, true poetry -- in reality no different from prose. In no way, shape or form does modern so-called poetry bear any real resemblance to poetry as traditionally recognized over the past several thousand years dating back to Homer and before. 

Please think about this, good readers. For centuries—no, for millennia—the term “poetry” was given to a particular type of writing that met certain exacting criteria; whereas, by contrast, as with so many things in our “brave new world,” we have kept the name, but completely lost its meaning. 

Might you perhaps be wondering if I am exaggerating? Well, consider the modern Orwellian tendency of so many people in today’s world to adjust the meaning of terms to suit our version of reality.  

Homeschooling no longer means schooling at home outside schooling institutions. Now included as constituents of homeschooling are charter schools and online virtual public schools. Parents who want to be called "homeschoolers" no longer need to do their own teaching of their children, and to do it at home, as traditional homeschoolers have always done in the past, but can now enroll their children in a school and still call themselves "homeschoolers."

A mother is now called a "primary care giver." Anyone who cares for the same child while the mother works is also called a primary care giver, even though he or she is not the mother. (The implication here is that anyone can fulfill a child's need for his mother, which is not true.) 

Homosexuality, originally called “one of the four sins crying out to Heaven for vengeance” in traditional catechisms, more recently rated as “a carnal sin,” and then, more recently still, defined as a mental illness, is now considered to be nothing more than a lifestyle choice. Fundamentally  it is not a choice of lifestyle, however. At root, it is a choice of sexual activity, full stop.

Words frame our realities, something it would behove us not to forget. We need to work diligently to preserve our language and thereby, ultimately, to preserve our reality, and poetry is one of the means by which we can do this. The words that make up a poem, however, must be more than free-flowing. They must be used with precision, in accordance with the rules governing poetry.

While it is true that words can change their meanings over time, nevertheless, if we are to preserve our perennial understanding of reality, a tree  should always remain a tree and a rose should always remain a rose. When we state that a tree is no longer a tree and a rose no longer a rose, we have, whether intentionally or otherwise, altered our reality.

And when reality is altered in a way that decreases our intellectual powers and our heart-felt sensibilities, as the meaning of the word “poetry” has been altered in recent times, should we not oppose, even fight, the change?

Mr. Gwynne thinks that we should. According to Mr. Gwynne (in the U.S. edition of his book Gwynne’s Grammar):

In order to be categorized as verse,

(1) the verse has to be made up of lines, and each line has to have a fixed number of accents or stresses, and each accent has to have a fixed number of unstressed syllables, one or two, attached to it, and

(2) each line has to be divided into feet and each foot has to have a specific combination of accented – stressed -- syllables and unaccented syllables.

If it has a regular meter and regularly rhymes at various intervals, it is called "rhyming verse." If it has a regular meter but does not rhyme, it is called "blank verse." Verse of either kind is what verse has always been in the past and what it must always remain in future in order to be justifiably referred to as “verse.”

To determine if a piece of writing is truly a poem, rather than prose posing as a poem, the reader must be able to "scan" the poem. That is to say, the reader must be able to determine how many feet (see above) per line the poem has and where the accents/stresses in each foot are placed. There are various forms of meter, but, to write poetry, you must use with precision whatever meters you decide to use. 

Composing a true poem demands that you choose words for each line (1) that fit your meter and (2) the stresses of which (in each word) fall on the correct syllable of whatever word is used in any particular place, and never on the wrong syllable. To do this successfully is genuinely demanding for the brain. 

Robert Frost had to think hard and carefully about each line in the poem that he was composing; T. S. Eliot minimally so by comparison. 

Adequately skilled poets know that they cannot just pick any word and put it anywhere in the sentence that seems fitting at first sight. Such poets know that each word must have a precise position in the sentence that “works” if the sentence is to succeed with its readers. They need to give careful thought to finding the exact word for in the line of the poem that it is needed for, and then to fit it in exactly the right place there.

Let us now have another look at that opening of the first stanza of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods…”: 

Whose woods these are, 

I think I know,

His house is in 

The village though…

Can you “hear” that each line has four units, and that the accent is on the second and the fourth syllable in each line, creating a rhythm and natural flow to the line; so that it rolls comfortably off your tongue as you read it?

That of course is not mere accident, but exactly what Frost intended. The poem is regarded as a classic and has stood the test of time partly because it is a poem that follows traditional rules for verse. Following traditional rules of verse is an essential part of poetry that is genuinely glorious, as well as of poetry that is “merely” good poetry! 

Now let us return to that first stanza of Eliot’s:

 We are the hollow men

 We are the stuffed men

 Leaning together

 Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

 Our dried voices, when

 We whisper together

 Are quiet and meaningless

 As wind in dry grass

 Or rats' feet over broken glass

 In our dry cellar

Line one has three feet; line two has three feet with a different rhythm; line three has two feet; line four has four feet; line five has three feet; line six has two and a half feet; line seven has three feet; line eight has three feet of a different form from those of line seven; line nine has four feet;  line ten has two and a half feet.

If you were to look, stanza by stanza, through the whole "poem" (most of which I have not quoted), you would also find that each "stanza" has a different number of lines.  

There is no flow or rhythm to Eliot’s words. There are some clever phrases, such as "We are the hollow men, We are the stuffed men,” but a clever phrase here and there is not sufficient to make genuine poetry. 

Also, the stresses are out of joint and, as one reads through the “poem,” the sounds feel jerky to the ear. It may be considered good writing, though even that is arguable, but it is not poetry.

Poetry is a science as much as it is an art. There is both a mathematical and a grammatical element to it,  and if either of those two elements is neglected, let alone if both of them are, a poem cannot be competent, let alone great. Meaningful, it might possibly be, but it cannot belong to the category of poem!

Let us look at two more stanza's, each by a different poet. Make your judgement as to which of them needed the greater intelligence and skill and intellectual prowess for its composition, and then move on to where I tell you who wrote them:

There is a change—and I am poor;

Your love hath been, nor long ago,

A fountain at my fond heart's door,

Whose only business was to flow;

And flow it did; not taking heed

Of its own bounty, or my need.

*     *     *

“I have a lover with hair that falls

like autumn leaves on my skin.

Water that rolls in smooth and cool

as anesthesia. Birds that carry

all my bullets into the barrel of the sun.”

If you said the last poem, well, perhaps. It  was written by the upcoming, contemporary "poet," Brian Turner. Turner actually won some literary recognition for his poetry. 

Now, may the real poet, out of the two of them, stand up. William Wordsworth: the first of the two verses above is from his poem “The Complaint.”

I rest my case. 

Your children should learn to write verse for several reasons.

1. Learning to write good verse produces good writers.

2. It expands your vocabulary and your understanding of the precise meaning of words.

3. It helps to preserve the English language, the language of great writers such as George Gascoigne, William Shakespeare  and John Milton. 

4. Learning to write good verse compels the writer to learn how to turn a phrase well; a skill without which, if you do not master it, you can never be a great writer, and with which, if you do master it, could bring you into the catalogue of the most remembered writers of all time. 

To turn a clever phrase -- to say things with an eloquence, a profundity and a beauty in a way no one has ever achieved with them before -- will improve even your prose one-hundred fold.  Examples of such achievements:

"They were the best of times, they were the worse of times." -- Charles Dickens

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” – William Shakespeare

“Solitude sometimes is best society.”  -- John Milton

*This blog post is a combined effort of both myself (Elizabeth) and Mr. Gwynne. While I wrote the article, Mr. Gwynne kindly edited it and thereby improved upon it significantly, to which I owe him many thanks.

John Taylor Gatto: A Friend Remembered

“I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”

— John Taylor Gatto, Author, Distinguished Educator

John Taylor Gatto

This month marks two years since we lost our beloved John Taylor Gatto.

John was a man with a brave heart. 

As you probably know, he was named New York State Teacher of the Year one time and New Your City Teacher of the Year three times, and then he suddenly quit.

He quit the public school system for good. If you haven't read John's op-ed announcing his decision, it was published by the Wall Street Journal in 1991.

What struck me about that moment in John's life was that he was older and nearing the time when he could have retired with a comfortable pension for himself and his wife. Yet, he quit anyway.

Courage. To have the courage to live according to our principles, not too many of us can do that.

Why He Quit

Late into his career, John discovered that, in the name of education, public school was harming children, and that was why he quit.

“Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.”

— John Taylor Gatto, Author, Distinguished Educator

Some of us work at professions that are harmful to others, and we learn how to justify what we do so living with ourselves is not too unbearable.

Rare is the person who will risk the security of his livelihood because of a principle he chooses to live by. Rare is the man who will leave a distinguished career for the sake of not harming others. John Taylor Gatto was a rare man.

Our First Meeting

When I met John for the first time in 2003, he greeted me with a huge, warm, Italian smile. He greeted everyone that way. I had invited him to be a guest speaker at an event on education that my organization was hosting. 

Allow me to share with you a reflection that weekend that has remained with me these past years. 

I picked John up the morning of the event to take him to the venue at UC Berkeley. After settling himself inside my car, he confessed that he'd been up until 3:00 a.m. rewriting his talk. He showed me his pages of lines drawn through sentences in black ink and tiny scribbles of notes piled upon one another in the margins.

The talk he was scheduled to give, however, was the same talk he is best known for, The History of Modern Education. I wondered what he meant when he said he had been awake half the night rewriting it? 

As he delivered his speech, I came to understand his meaning. He had been rewriting it because he gave the talk anew each time. He never delivered his speech the same way twice, as so many public speakers do. Taking the time to refresh his talk, John personalized it for each audience.

There is nothing worse than hearing someone deliver a lecture they've delivered a thousand times before so that even the jokes sound rehearsed. A good teacher knows this, and a great teacher practices it. John was a great teacher.

John refused to give us anything less than his very best each time he stood before us.

It was the ability to see life through fresh eyes even when the eyes were old, to learn as much as he could about many things, not even stopping for death, to experience the ordinary occurrences in life as if they were extraordinary, to encounter each human being as the most precious person he had ever met, and to believe in the magnificent potential of the human spirit that made John such a singular and sublime individual.

There was a vibrancy to John Taylor Gatto, and one felt more alive just from being in his presence. 

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

— John Taylor Gatto, Author, Distinguished Educator

October 25, 2020 was the exact day of the second year of his passing. Please take a moment to say a prayer not only for a truly great man but also for a man who affected so many of our lives in such profound ways.

We are people who refuse to accept the status quo for ourselves and for our children, as John inspired us to do. As we work hard to educate our children and to help them live more meaningful lives, let us not forget that we each carry a little of John Taylor Gatto with us.

May his spirit live on.

Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

Become a Smart Homeschooler, literally, and give your child a stellar, screen-free education at home and enjoy doing it. Join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course. Special Covid pricing will remain through December 10, 2020.

Free Download: How to Raise a More Intelligent Child and an Excellent Reader—a reading guide and book list with 80+ carefully chosen titles.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is an educator, veteran homeschooler, and a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 19 years of experience working in children’s education. Using her unusual skill set, coupled with the unique mentors she was fortunate to have, Elizabeth has developed a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child. She devotes her time to helping parents get it right.

Disclaimer: This is not a politically-correct blog.

Has Your Child Studied the Greatest Creature on Earth?

What creature is that? You might ask.

It is the whale.

When I think about it, I find it strange that I spent so much of my life knowing so little about whales. I don't remember studying them in school; however, I do remember studying dinosaurs in the second grade, yet, dinosaurs pale in comparison to whales.

But while reading Moby Dick, I find a fascination for whales emerging because they are undoubtedly sublime creatures, if not the most sublime. 

Here are 8 facts about whales that you can share with your child:

Fact 1: They Are the Largest Creature on Earth

Did you know that they are the largest animal on Earth, even bigger than the T-Rex Dinosaur? The nine heaviest creatures belong to the whale family. A blue whale weighs 200 tons, and when they give birth, their babies weigh three tons and gain 200 pounds per day!

Compare this to the largest elephant ever to exist (as far as we know), who weighed only 4 tons, and you begin to realize the magnitude of these creatures. 

Fact 2: They Have the Largest Brains

The sperm whales have the largest brains of any animal, including man. Not only do they have the largest brains, but their brains contain a neocortex, like the human brain. The neocortex governs higher cognitive functions such as planning, memory, empathy, and language.

The sperm whale has a highly sophisticated language that is based on sound. They emit coded clicks at the speed of milliseconds and can emit these sounds at vast distances. 

Scientists today are trying to decode their language using artificial intelligence. Someone even wrote a book about real conversations with whales and how the lessons we learn from them can help us live more joyful lives.

“As for his true brain, the whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world. ”

— Moby Dick, Herman Melville

Fact 3: They Rely on Sound to See

Because most of the whale’s life is spent at the bottom of the ocean, they must rely on sound to see. The clicks they use to communicate also facilitate them in what is called echolocation. Echolocation is when the click sounds they make bounce off of an object and send back an echo to the whale that tells them where the object is. 

Fact 4: They are the loudest animals alive

They rely on click sounds to see, and these sounds can be as loud as 230 decibels making them the loudest animals alive. In comparison, if you stood next to a jet engine, the engine's sound is about 150 decibels. Whales are so loud that their clicking sounds can kill a man. 

Fact 5: Whales Hold Their Breath for 90 Minutes

Whales can live underwater for about 90 minutes because their bodies can store massive amounts of oxygen in their muscles. When whales surface to breathe, they breathe for about seven minutes before they go underwater again. 

Fact 6: Whales Have Complex Social Structures

Female whales live in multi-generational families while the male whales live solitary lives and return to the females during the mating season.

Whales will mourn the death of a loved one, and they will celebrate the birth of a calf, according to Shane Gero, a behavioral ecologist and founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. They have different dialects for each whale pod.

Fact 7: Their Excrement Is More Valuable than Gold!

Yes, it’s true. Whales eat large squid, and the indigestible parts of the squid are eventually excreted. These excretions float in the water for seven years, going through various changes, and can be washed up on shores in the form of what is known as ambergris. 

“It’s beyond comprehension how beautiful it is, It’s transformative. There’s a shimmering quality to it. It reflects light with its smell. It’s like an olfactory gemstone,” is how Mandy Aftel, a perfumer describes ambergris.

It can sell for anywhere from 10K to 100K, depending upon the size. 

Fact 8: Great Whales Are an Endangered Species

Sperm whales are the citizens of the ocean, and they are dying.

"Why are they dying?" asks Shane Gero. He answers his own question: "It's us," he says. "All of us." 

The deluge of gargantuan shipping fleets on our oceans to bring us our goods from all over the world are killing them.  Calves are born, and they are dying from accidents caused by large freighter ships.

In the 18th and 19th centuries sperm whales were hunted for oil and spermiceti, but now they are killed because of our ignorance. It’s ironic that arguably the most intelligent animal on Earth is going extinct because of man’s stupidity.

Today, six out of 13 great whale species are considered endangered including the sperm whale who was the subject of Melvilles masterpiece.

Teach Your Children Well

Teach your children about the greatest creature on Earth when they are young. After they reach adolescence, you can read Moby Dick with them.

Moby Dick is not an easy book to read, but it's a powerful book with many themes of human nature and human folly woven through the tale of an obsessive pursuit of one albino Sperm whale named Moby Dick by a man with a wretched heart called Ahab.

“God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates. ”

— Moby Dick, Herman Melville

John Taylor Gatto used to have his sixth-grade students read Moby Dick.

Though I never asked him why he chose Moby Dick, my guess is that it was because once you read Moby Dick, you can successfully tackle any other work of great fiction.. 

Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

Become a Smart Homeschooler and give your child a stellar, screen-free education at home and enjoy doing it. Join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course. Special Covid pricing will remain through December 10, 2020.

Free Download: How to Raise a More Intelligent Child and an Excellent Reader—a reading guide and book list with 80+ carefully chosen titles.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is an educator, veteran homeschooler, and a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 19 years of experience working in children’s education. Using her unusual skill set, coupled with the unique mentors she was fortunate to have, Elizabeth has developed a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child. She devotes her time to helping parents get it right.

Disclaimer: This is not a politically-correct blog.

Educate Your Child to Think Like a King

People homeschool for many different reasons. Some are personal, some religious, some moral, and some academic. Whatever your reasons, if you are homeschooling then you have the opportunity to train your child’s mind well, and a well-trained mind has many advantages in life.

One of these advantages is that it leads to a state of personal sovereignty, a word John Taylor Gatto used often.

Be the king of your mind and the ruler of your heart. Be the writer of your own script. 

“You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else’s script.”

— John Taylor Gatto, Author, Distinguished Educator

Keep this goal in mind, and the top universities will be a natural by-product of an excellent education. In other words, you don't need to aim for an Ivy League; aim for an education and the rest will follow.

There are a few strategies you want to have in place to reach this objective that successful homeschoolers will incorporate. The strategies will assist you in giving your child the kind of education he or she deserves, not the public school kind.

#1 Know your objective

Assuming your long-term objective is to provide your child an excellent education, you want to be clear about the goals you need to reach to get them there.

For each school year, you will need to know what you want your child to accomplish for that year; and for each subject, you will need to decide what you want your child to learn about that subject. 

You are moving from generals to particulars when you work out your homeschool plan.

A lot should go into you homeschool planning, too. If we are going to reach any goals in life, we must be intentional and have a map of how we will get there. Intentional homeschoolers plan out the school year and know what their end-year objectives are.

#2. Be Flexible

Your child will become interested in subjects you may not have anticipated. Even though you have your schedule, you've got to be flexible enough to shift when the winds change direction.

Any time your child becomes interested in something, that's when you want to teach it. We learn best when we are motivated to learn. A desire to know something motivates us.

There are things your child must know such as how to read, and there is no way around it (though when taught correctly, they will be self-motivated to learn to read too), but there are things you will not have on the schedule that he becomes interested in.

Put them on your schedule even if it means you have to take something else off. 

#3 Have High Expectations

Don't expect mediocrity from your child. Let me tell you a story to illustrate this: I met two brothers in a hotel the other day. They were from Israel, and they were somewhere in their 70's, would be my guess.

I was having breakfast, and they sat down at the table next to me.  We got to chatting and fell onto the topic of how the Jewish people are known for being very intelligent. They said it was because they had superior genes! I asked them to tell me about their childhoods.

I explained that I worked in children's education, and, contrary to what they thought, I didn’t believe that they possessed superior genes! Jewish children must be raised a certain way. I didn’t share with them what I thought that “way” was because I didn’t want to influence their answer.

Both of their faces lit up and they told me this: "Our mothers drill it into us from an early age that we are going to grow up to be an engineer or a doctor or something of importance. We are raised to understand this and failing isn’t an option!"

They were laughing as they said it, but it was clearly an impressionable part of their childhood and something they both vividly remembered. They had to grow up to reach the top. Mediocre expectations were not a part of their childhood.

With all due respect to natural ability, people who excel usually do so because it was expected of them or the means to excel was a part of their environment as a child. I'm convinced that most parents could raise a genius if they knew how to do it.

“I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. ”

— John Taylor Gatto, Author, Distinguished Educator

#4 Know what to teach

Most of us went through the public school system. Consequently, our standards for an education are pretty low unless we dig into the history of education and realize that we had been cheated of one. But without knowing this, and without knowing what a real education looks like, it's natural to adopt a public-school-at-home kind of homeschooling.

Warning: you do not want to do public school at home! You really don't.

“That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

— John Taylor Gatto, Author, Distinguished Educator

You want to understand the subjects a child should learn and the books a child should learn from. This is a whole other topic, but let me say that a thorough knowledge of grammar, Aristotelean logic, and rhetoric would be a good place to start, none of which are taught in public school today.

Which means that if you want to give your child an excellent education at home, you have to opt-out of any public-school related programs all together. Sometimes we can compromise a little, but on this point I don’t believe we can. 

#5 Enjoy homeschooling

As the teacher to your child, you want to enjoy teaching your child. If you don't, your child will sense this, and it will put a damper on his experience of learning. We want to nurture our child's love of learning; it is vital to his education that we do this. 

If you aren't enjoying teaching your child, it's probably because you haven't found the sweet-spot in homeschooling. It's there, you just need to discover it.

“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.”

— Mark Van Doren

Start by recognizing the magnitude of what you are doing; you are educating a child, your child. Acknowledge your courage and dedication. Focus on the positive aspects of homeschooling, and don't harbor thoughts of all that you have to do in a day, and when will you ever find time to do it all?!

Even if you weren't homeschooling, you'd still have a lot to do. You may have more free time, but you'd quickly fill it up with other things. When you’re homeschooling, you’re filling your time up with a service that will pay you back 100-fold for the rest of your life.

#6. Be content

Homeschooling is a service we provide to our children. It takes up our time and it takes up our energy. It's so important to structure our days and weeks so we don't get burned out and want to quit. 

It's important to build some fun time into your life that does't involve your children.  What is it that you enjoyed doing before you had children? What is is that relaxes you and boosts your mood?

Whatever it is, make sure you schedule it into your week. 

There is nothing worse than a cranky homeschooler (I know from experience!), and you'll become cranky if you don't fill your own reserves at least once, if not twice a week.

A friend once said to me, "Life is difficult, but it should be enjoyed." There will be difficult days when you homeschool.

There are always difficult days no matter what we do.

But, overall, you want to enjoy it. If you enjoy homeschooling, your children will enjoy it, too. 

And they will learn to write their own life script, too.

Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

Raise an intelligent and decent child by joining the Smart Homeschooler Academy now, and learn how to give your child an excellent education at home.

Join our waiting list for Elizabeth’s online course: Raise Your Child Well to Live a Successful Life.

How to Raise a More Intelligent Child and an Excellent Reader—a free guide and book list with over 80+ carefully chosen titles.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is an educator, veteran homeschooler and a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 17 years experience working in children’s education.

Using her unusual skill set, she has developed a comprehensive and unique understanding of how to raise and educate a child, and she devotes her time to help parents get it right.

Disclaimer: This is not a politically-correct blog.

Successful Homeschooling Begins with This One Tactic

Each child has only one chance to develop his mind when he is young.

There are no second chances with childhood, just as there are none with life. As parents, we need to guide our children to use their time wisely, especially regarding their education. 

Establishing goals for our children and making sure they reach them is a part of everyone successful homeschooler’s plan. Whatever educational goals you have for your child, it is vital that you become crystal clear about these goals and how your child will reach them.

Is there a subject or skill you want your child to master as part of his education? Maybe it's a foreign language, a study of the Roman Empire, or a musical instrument?

There will be some subjects which will be mandatory because your child needs to learn them, such as grammar and Latin, but others will be dependent upon your child's level of interest, such as studying art, music or sports. 

Whatever it is that you decide upon, you have to be intentional in making this endeavor a priority in your child's life.

“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.”

— Pablo Picasso

State the goal, you want your child to reach, decide what steps your child needs to take to achieve it, and then build a plan to help him reach the finish line.  

When you set the goal (s), make sure it meets these five criteria: the goal is specific, the goal is measurable, the goal is actionable, the goal is relevant, and the goal is timely.

Be intention and make your goal a priority in the sense that regardless of how busy you are, you will take the time to ensure that your child will study daily this one subject or skill as often as it needs to be studied.

You must be intentional and committed to seeing your children reach the goals you set for them or the goals they set for themselves.

Because without a clear plan in place that includes stated goals and objectives, your chances for your child being successful in reaching them will be less. Our chance for success is always less when we are less intentional about it. 

“A goal properly set is halfway reached.”

— Zig Ziglar

One could even say that, apart from the factor of luck and fate, the degree to which we succeed is proportional to our level of intention. 

When you look at people who master a subject or skill, you will find they are intentional about their study. Maybe they don't start this way, but at some point during the process, they decide they want to become better than average, and they make a commitment to themselves to reach this goal. They become committed and unstoppable.

Because they were unstoppable, they moved beyond average into an outstanding level of proficiency. 

Juxtapose this to the person who says they want to be great at something, but never make a firm intention to become great. They become like a ship at sea with no rudder, and they never move beyond the mediocre.

“In all things that you do, consider the end.”

— Solon, Athenian Statesman

Your child is capable of reaching great heights. Don't settle for mediocrity. Let him reach a level of proficiency in at least one skill; this will raise his standard for everything he attempts to learn well in life. 

He will aim high because he knows how high he can reach.

Becoming intentional with your goals for your child is key to your homeschooling success.

Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

Homeschool the smart way by joining the Smart Homeschooler Academy summer program to learn how to give your child the best of an elite education at home.

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How to Raise a More Intelligent Child and an Excellent Reader—a free guide and book list with over 80+ carefully chosen titles.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is an educator, veteran homeschooler and a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 17 years experience working in children’s education.

Using her unusual skill set, she has developed a comprehensive and unique understanding of how to raise and educate a child, and she devotes her time to help parents get it right.

Disclaimer: This is not a politically-correct blog.

Dare to Homeschool! Overcoming the Fear that You Are Not Good Enough

As women, we tend to think we are not enough as we are. Add homeschooling into the mix and our list of not enoughs now includes neither smart, nor patient, nor educated enough to homeschool.

The thought of homeschooling conjures up fears that we may fail; we may disappoint our families, we may hinder our children's chances of success.

We look at brave homeschooling moms and think they are smarter, better educated, and have it more together than we do.

The truth is that even if all of these beliefs were true, which is unlikely, you could still succeed at homeschooling if you put your mind to it.

You can overcome the unwelcome thoughts in your head that say you are less than every other mother trying to give her child a better education at home. 

I'm Not Smart Enough or Educated Enough

To this, I would ask, who is? My father was in the category of truly learned men of the 20th century, and he never considered himself educated. My father's position used to baffle me until one day I understood that the more you know, the more you can comprehend how little you know.

We still can’t answer fundamental questions with 100% certainty, such as, Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is the purpose of my life?

“It’s an irony of life that the most simple questions contain the greatest mysteries.”

While it is true that most of us are far less intelligent than we would have been had we been properly educated during our prime learning years, but we can always choose to correct the problem.

It’s never too late to work at developing our intellects.

We used to think the brain became fixed at a certain age and didn’t change after that, other than to decline as you aged, but neuroscientists have shown that this isn't true. The brain continues to wire itself, which is why learning unto the grave prevents ailments like dementia and Alzheimers. 

The good news is that when you homeschool, you will develop your mind alongside your children. Becoming smarter and improving your brain's capacity is a byproduct of homeschooling.

Talk to homeschooling moms you know to see how this works. You'll find that homeschooling moms always have a lot of general knowledge. The more children they have, and therefore teach, the more general knowledge they gain. They can't help it. 

Even with no college education, you will still do a better job homeschooling your children than the public school system. 

Do not let a feeling of intellectual inferiority stop you. You will rise to the occasion and become a better person yourself by having done so. 

I'm too Impatient; I could Never homeschool

You may be impatient, but you can correct this. Impatience stems from three causes: 1) a physical imbalance or 2) an emotional imbalance, 3) bad habits.

Physical Imbalance

When people are irritable and impatient, in Chinese medicine, we diagnose them with having internal heat of either an excess or deficient nature. You can correct this by dietary changes, herbs, alternative healing therapies, and lifestyle changes. 

If you feel run down and exhausted, you may be suffering from what we diagnose as deficient Qi. Exhaustion will make you feel impatient and irritable too. You'll yell at your children more, and you'll also have less time for your spouse. The latter can lead to a negative feedback loop. 

The less time you have with your spouse, the less support you feel, and the more exacerbated your symptoms become. Instead of being a respite for one another during the years when your young children are more demanding, you grow apart.

Emotional Imbalance

If you find yourself feeling resentful and unhappy with your life, it may be because you aren’t doing anything to replenish yourself. Mothers get into this state when they eliminate all the things they enjoyed doing before having children.

We get too busy, and it’s easy to stop going for bike rides or having lunches with girlfriends, or going to a movie with your spouse, Life suddenly becomes all work and no play.

Play is important for children, but it’s also important for us. Play is what rejuvenates us and keeps us going. Figure out what it is that you love doing most and build some of it back into your life.

“When enough people raise play to the status it deserves in our lives, we will find the world a better place.”

— Dr. Stuart Brown

Take care of yourself so you can take better care of those who depend on you without feeling resentful.

Bad Habits

You may have a bad habit of getting upset too quickly. In this case, you want to pay close attention to when this happens so you can start to correct your behavior. Easier said than done, I know, but you can do it.

If you get your irritability and patience level under control, homeschooling will be just one more thing you do during the day. 

You May Surprise Yourself

The other consideration is that you may believe you will be an impatient homeschooler, but once you start, you find you have more patience than you realized. 

You may enjoy the homeschooling lifestyle so much that you wonder why you didn't start sooner. 

But you won't know that until you give it a try. It takes courage, and courage comes from acting despite your fear. We all experience fear, but mothers who homeschool don't let it get in their way.

The cost is too high, and they understand this. 

Homeschool the smart way by joining the Smart Homeschooler Academy summer program to learn how to give your child the best of an elite education at home.

How to Raise a More Intelligent Child and an Excellent Reader—a free guide and book list with over 80+ carefully chosen titles.Elizabeth Y. Hanson is an educator, veteran homeschooler and a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 17 years experience working in children’s education.

Using her unusual skill set, she has developed a comprehensive and unique understanding of how to raise and educate a child, and she devotes her time to help parents get it right.

Disclaimer: This is not a politically-correct blog.

Bill Gates Should Learn the Difference Between Online Schooling and Homeschooling

As a parent, who may have a child learning online, you are entitled to know the facts about Bill Gates and his corporate push towards online schools.

The Business of Virtual Schools

The fact is that nationalizing our public school curriculum through the adoption of the Common Core, largely funded by Bill Gates to the tune of billions, opened the door for any Tom, Dick, or Harry to offer an online learning program to the public schools. How do these online programs get paid for their services? By us, the unconstitutionally-taxed taxpayers.

Here’s how it works: the public schools contract these online learning businesses, such as K-12 Virtual Academy, to teach the public school students. We, the taxpayer, then fill the corporate coffers with more of our hard-earned cash in what amounts to millions of dollars.

Another brilliant coup on the American people from some of the world's most greedy yet brilliant businessmen.

Shocking, no?

Isn't big businesses' hold on public education a sign that something is terribly wrong with our system? These are not educators calling the shots; these are businessmen interested in making money. They are not interested in providing a quality education for your child, nor do they provide one.

John Taylor Gatto courageously informed us in his History of Modern Education why this is so. If you have school-age children, you may want to read his two classics: Dumbing Us Down

and The Underground History of Modern Education. 

And if you have a child enrolled in an online learning program, you want to understand something Bill Gates does not: the difference between online learning and homeschooling. 

The two are not the same at all.

Why Online Schools Are Not Homeschooling 

Let's begin with the definition of homeschooling.

The Confusion of Terms

The original definition of the word "homeschooling" meant to educate your child at home. You had the option to hire a tutor, as the aristocracy always did (telling in and of itself), or you could teach your child yourself. 

In other words, homeschooling is the action one takes to educate one's children at home free from state control. The key point here is that the State has zero involvement in your child's education. 

Any other definition of homeschooling is erroneous and misleading.

Since people such as Bill Gates and other cronies like the ex-con, Mike Milken of K-12 Virtual Academy, have entered the fray, homeschooling has now come to have various meanings today. 

The definition of homeschooling now can even include its exact opposite: an outside location where children are taught in a school through the charter (public) school system.  

Children in these charter schools are legally classified as public-schooled children, yet, many call themselves homeschoolers.

How is it possible that homeschooling has come to include the exact opposite meaning from its original definition?!

Public-School Students Are Not Classified as Homeschoolers

With the onslaught of the charter school programs—a hotbed for much financial fraud—many parents enroll their children in these charter / virtual school programs and call themselves homeschoolers even though the State does not classify them as homeschooled students.

The State actually classifies them as public school students because they are public school students. 

I once asked a friend who ran a "co-op" charter school why they didn't just call it for what it was: a school. She told me that the State forbid them to call themselves a school. The State mandated that they call themselves homeschoolers even though they are registered by the State as public-school students.

What?!

Well, here's a reason to go digging, which I did at the time of hearing this. I was pretty disgusted with what I found, which is why I mention Bill Gates and Mike Milken.

What it would behoove you to understand is what homeschooling actually means. If you are Covid-19-stuck-at-home with your children who are ostensibly being "homeschooled" I want you to know that there is a much better way to educate a child than what these insatiable businessmen are making claim to. 

“For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”

— Dorothy Sayers

There is an easier way, too, where your children can get a stellar education in half the time and you will enjoy teaching them and also educate yourself. If it sounds too good to be true. It isn’t.

We need to say “no” to the fraud of online learning while we still can because it will not provide your child with an education. Not the kind of education I’m talking about, anyhow, or the kind of education we were once admired for around the world.

Our literacy rates were not only high then, but higher as a nation than any other country and other countries looked up to us for this.

Now we are so dumbed-down as a nation that it’s embarrassing, courtesy of mandatory schooling.

“Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes with guns — by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.”

— John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

*****

To be continued next week in Part Two:

If you are "Homeschooling," You May as Well Homeschool

Homeschool the smart way by joining the Smart Homeschooler Academy to learn how to give your child the best of an elite education at home.

How to Raise a More Intelligent Child and an Excellent Reader—a free guide and book list with over 80+ carefully chosen titles.Elizabeth Y. Hanson is an educator, veteran homeschooler and a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 17 years experience working in children’s education.

Using her unusual skill set, she has developed a comprehensive and unique understanding of how to raise and educate a child, and she devotes her time to help parents get it right.

10 Books Every Concerned Parent Should Read

The world is a little topsy-turvy right now especially when it comes to raising and educating our children.

The following books were carefully chosen as a guide to help you navigate some of the issues you will face as a parent living in the West.

1. Hold On to Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate, M.D.

In trying to understand why children no longer revere their parents in the same way that my parent's generation revered their parents, I turned to Neufeld and Mate's book, Hold On to Your Kids.

Part of the answer lies within the pages of this book and will help you understand why peer pressure is so real, and how you can lose your children to peer pressure. It also contains some suggestions for how to protect the bond between you and your children. 

While their solutions are somewhat naive, if I may be so bold as to say that, the authors delineate a very real situation that every parent should understand.

2. Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers

This essay is Dorothy Sayer's famous critique of modern education using her great wit and brilliant insight. It's amusing as well as informative.

To raise the standard for your child's education, you need first to understand what level of academic work he's capable of doing. There's no better way to do this than to ignore the standards of modern education, and, instead, look at what school children used to learn. 

3. The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman

Neil Postman was a perceptive social critic who argued that childhood was disappearing. The reason for the disappearance was the blurred lines that technology created by exposing children to the adult world too soon.

With the loss of childhood also came the loss of adulthood, which continues to present a significant problem for our society's ability to remain civil. 

4. Gwynne's Latin by N. M. Gwynne - The Introduction

Mr. Gwynne is an expert on the subject of the Latin language. He tells stories of having studied Latin for 90 minutes a day, five days a week as a schoolboy.

By the time I (and later, you) went to school, they had eliminated Latin from the curriculum. To our detriment, too, because without the study of Latin, you can never fully understand or appreciate the English language. 

People who learn Latin are better educated. It's a simple fact. The reason you should read his introduction to his Latin book is that he will give you an irrefutable argument for why you should have your children learn Latin. You can study it, too, as I do–it's never too late.

5. The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto

Gatto's opus work tells the story of how a sub-standard modern education came to be, and why you must understand it's origins so you can make informed decisions for your children when it comes to deciding how you want to educate them. 

I prefer Gatto's original work over the newly revised work of the same title. Buy a copy of the older book, if you can. His newer version was written during his last years, and intended as a three-volume set, but, sadly, he never finished it. 

6. The Platonic Tradition by Peter Kreeft

You may be wondering why I included this title? It's vital to Western civilization that we understand the ideas upon which our civilization was built so that we can protect them when they're under threat of being undermined as they are today.

We also need to pass this understanding onto our children, so they are not easily swayed by the high falutin rhetoric that robs us of our civil liberties under the guise of equality. Kreeft's book will correct the errors in understanding that brought us to where we are today.

7. Glow Kids by Nicholas Kardaras, Ph.D.

A ground-breaking book that exposes the technology industry for what it is, and the harm it's inflicting on our children during their most vulnerable years. Protect your child by reading this book and passing it on to your friends to read. We need a no-tech revolution, at least no tech in the lives of children. 

8. How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren

The title seems like an oxymoron, but it's not. The authors acknowledge our ability to read but also our failure to read with deep understanding. We were never taught the skill of reading beyond a rudimentary level, and this is the gap How to Read a Book attempts to fill. 

They will show you how to tackle a book in a way that will make it your own. Especially if you plan on homeschooling, you want to learn this skill so you can teach it to your children when they get older. 

9. Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto

Dumbing Us Down was Gatto's landmark book when he first entered the world of non-schooling education. He writes an easy-to-read book about the problems with modern education and why you should consider alternatives to a "school-like" training for your child.

Whether you do or not, you should understand the system so you can help your child navigate it if you decide to put him or her into school.

10. The Leipzig Connection by Paolo Lionni

How modern psychology removed the soul from the study of psychology and then coupled that soul-less subject with the department of modern education and the subsequent impact it has had on children's education. An important read!

Some of these books are inexpensive, some are more expensive, but they are all worth reading.

Receive a free download with the titles and links to 10 Books Every Concerned Parent Should Read.

Join the Smart Homeschooler Academy to learn how to give your child an elite education at home.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 17 years experience working in children’s education. She has two successfully homeschooled children in college.

What Do Banana and Honey Sandwiches Have to Do with Literacy?

Neil Postman made an argument in 1982 that childhood was disappearing because multi-media erased the boundary between what adults knew and what children knew.

In the same vein, he warned us, so is adulthood disappearing.

A pathetic statistic is that adult television shows cater to the mentality of a twelve-year-old child, according to Postman, who wrote the prescient book, The Disappearance of Childhood.

Isn’t that mortifying?!

The literate world of adults was the boundary that separated children from adults. With everyone plugged into the same immature television shows, and few people reading today, that boundary is disappearing.

Childhood / adulthood aren’t the only things at risk of becoming obsolete. We call ourselves a literate society, but are we, really?

When we declared ourselves a literate country, there was no television and, if you could read, you read at more sophisticated levels because it was pre-dumbed-down America.

This is no longer true. Writers who write for the average public intentionally use less vocabulary and shorter sentences to meet the demands of a populace of poor readers.

Yet, if we understand the mechanics of reading and writing at a basic level, we’re classified as literate even if we can’t do either well.

Someone who can barely run around the block, however, can hardly be called a runner. Someone who can barely hit the ball over the net can hardly be called a tennis player, someone who knows how to make a hotdog can hardly be called a cook.

We aren’t labeled a runner, a tennis player, or a cook until we can perform at an intermediate level, at least. Until then, we’re learning how to do said skill.

Out of curiosity, I looked up UNESCO's definition of literacy. Not surprisingly, the definition changed around the time institutionalized schooling took root.

UNESCO used to define literacy as an ability to read and write (presumably well) to the following mumbo jumbo:

Literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society (UNESCO, 2004; 2017).

“You can teach children to hate reading, to do it poorly, and to hate themselves for not measuring up to the false premises of institutional reading practices–premises which provide the foundation of our multi-billion dollar reading industry.”

— John Taylor Gatto - The Exhausted School

If we redefine literacy to include only those people who were proficient readers, and by proficient reader I mean someone who could read, discuss and write about a piece of work such as The Federalists Papers or The Iliad, we'd have to conclude that we're mostly an illiterate society.

Before you decide my suggestion is literacy ad absurdum, consider this: 

Our standards for literacy are so low that if an adult can read a simple newspaper article and underline what the swimmer ate, we classify him as literate.

Lest you think I'm being facetious, here's a question, taken from a newspaper article, that was on the National Adult Literacy Test: 

Q. Underline the sentence that tells what Ms. Chanin ate during the swim.

A. A spokesman for the swimmer, Roy Brunett, said Chanin had kept up her strength with "banana and honey sandwiches, hot chocolate, lots of water and granola bars."

As long as someone can make out the spelling of banana, which is not difficult to do, he can figure out that this is the correct sentence to underline.

But is this the right approach? Shouldn’t we raise the standards, so we educate our children to become adults who can tackle difficult reading material?

You probably have school-age children whose education you’re concerned about. These are the years when you want to put a lot of effort into training your children's minds.

You can train them to run intellectual circles around the rest of us, or you can train them to underline what a swimmer ate; the choice is yours.

Let me offer you a hand by sharing a few strategies you can use to keep the door of knowledge open for your children:

Make It Easy

With any bad habit we try to break, the first step is to get rid of the obstacles keeping us from adopting the new habit. In this case, we should start with our screens.

A movie on the weekends for older children is plenty, if they ask. Other than that, keep the screens tucked away someplace. 

To take this step requires an understanding that if you want more for your child, if you want him to rise above the less-than-mediocre standards today, then you will need to make some sacrifices. 

Let me ask you a question: do you have a television in your living room so you can watch the news every evening?

For many of us, keeping screens hidden is a burden because they're so much a part of our lives now. We depend upon them for many things such as answers to quick questions, the latest news, and frying our brains.

Speaking of frying our brains, the other day I went to a piano recital where my son was performing. The recitals are usually in a church, and so there's an unspoken understanding that it isn't a place for chitchat or smartphones. But this last recital was in the Steinway piano store.

We got there just before it started, so we had no choice but to sit in the back. It turned out that the back of the room was where all the parenting smartphone addicts sat. My God, the number of mothers glued to their phones was astounding.

The only time they looked up was when their own child performed. 

They have no idea what they missed.

Anyhow books (nor piano recitals) can successfully compete with screen time. It's a known fact which anyone can easily test without leaving home. 

Find Inspiring Friends

Find like-minded families to raise your children with; people who will support your values and your high standards rather than undermine them. (And be that family for someone else.)

Company matters.

If you can't find like-minded families, start talking about your concerns until someone will listen, but don't give up. Someone will eventually listen and be brave enough to do what Neil Postman advises us to do, go against the culture.

“There are parents who are committed to doing all of these things [no screens], who are in effect defying the directives of their cultures. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. ”

— Neil Postman

If our culture is producing mediocrity, then we can't do what everyone else is doing. We have to muster up the courage to go against the grain of society.

To become a truly rebellious spirit, line your walls with good books and start reading everyday to your children. If you aren't a reader yourself, have faith that you can become one.

Many people who weren’t formerly good readers chose to become good readers in adulthood, but it takes determination and perseverance. 

You can do it. I know people who have.

Everything is in a state of flux; you are either flexing the noodle between your ears and making it stronger, or you aren't. 

Create a culture of wonder and learning in your home. Have intelligent discussions with your children about the great ideas, history, science, literature, philosophy, and so forth.

Raising and educating children today takes a lot of work; it always did. We're used to delegating the task to the government with the consequence of getting a child who is not all that he or she could be. 

Mediocre is not the same as excellent or, for that matter, even very good.

The brain is a phenomenal organ, and it grows with the right kind of stimulation. It houses the mind like the body houses the soul.

Let it be a great mind.

How to Raise a More Intelligent Child and an Excellent Reader, free guide and book list with over 80+ carefully chosen titles.

Join the Smart Homeschooler Academy to learn how to give your child an elite education at home.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 17 years experience working in children’s education. She has two successfully homeschooled children in college.

Teach Your Children to Cook!

In each home, around in the world, there is nothing more comforting than the smell of delightful aromas coming from the kitchen.

Yet, so many girls and boys are coming of age and do not know how to cook. What's more, young women seem to see it as a sign of their liberation. 

Being dependent upon other people for food is not a sign of liberation; it's a sign that you don't know how to do something as fundamental as providing a home-cooked meal for yourself, nor for anyone else. 

“If you are a chef, no matter how good a chef you are, it’s not good cooking for yourself; the joy is in cooking for others - it’s the same with music.”

— will.i.am

The irony is that children love to cook. Why are they coming-of-age bereft of this skill? Let's not dwell on the reasons here, but let's work quickly to fix the problem.

7 Easy Steps to Teach Your Child how to Cook

Step 1) Correct the Problem

It begins with you. If you're a mother who is not providing nourishing meals for her family, you must first learn to correct this.

(The variables of family are too numerous today to keep up with, hence, we'll take the less-complicated version: mom cooks and dad brings home the bread.)

YouTube is full of chefs dying to teach you how to cook. By studying two or three of their recipes, you will completely change the environment in your home and be cooking 5-star meals before you know it. 

Now that your children have a role model to emulate, you can begin to teach little John and little Mary how to cook a meal or two.

Step 2) First Teach Them Only What Their Hands Can Do

In the beginning, you'll have them do things like shell peas and tear up lettuce for the salad. Before they are old enough to be responsible with a knife, you'll have them do any task that doesn't involve sharp items.

Step 3) Peeling Progression

Around the age of six, you can show them how to peel potatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and anything else you can think of. Let the peeling of anything become their domain. 

By the way, these are not chores. Helping to prepare the food should be seen as fun time in the kitchen with mom (which means that you should NEVER complain about having to make dinner).

Step 4) Salad’s On

By the age of seven or eight, if not sooner, they should be able to prepare a salad on their own. Give your children the task of making the salad once or twice a week, or more often if you prefer. 

Step 5) Carbs Galore

Next come the preparation and cooking of the rice and potatoes. This next step involves the stovetop, so they have to be old enough to handle a flame. If you have a gas top, the pressing concern here is that they are responsible and focused enough to remember to turn the flame all the way off. 

If not, you should supervise them until they are. In the meantime, show your children how to rinse the rice. Next, show them how to measure the water, bring the rice to a boil, cover and let simmer for 20 minutes. There are tricks to making a perfect bowl of rice, so if you know these tricks (I don't), then be sure to include them. 

Next, they can learn to make mashed potatoes. They peel, wash, and boil the potatoes. Drain the potatoes (you may have to help here, because the pan may be too heavy for them), add butter and milk and mash. If you don't like mashing potatoes, the good news is that children love it. You will never have to mash potatoes again.

Step 6) The Big Fish

Next, show them how to prepare the main dish. I recommend beginning with fish, which is less complicated to prepare. Show John and Jane how to wash the fish, put it in a baking dish, make the sauce, pour it over the fish, and cook it. 

Step 7) Early Graduation

Once they complete all three of these steps successfully, you are now ready to grant your children the privilege of cooking an entire meal. They should be around nine or ten by this time (could be sooner!).

You now get to sit back, enjoy a cup of tea and some conversation with your spouse, and wait for what will soon be a delicious meal.

Moving forward, let your children take over the kitchen at least one night during the week to learn how to master the art of cooking and to give yourself a break. 

“A chef’s palate is born out of his childhood, and one thing all chefs have in common is a mother who can cook.”

— Marco Pierre White

By the time your children are 11 and 13, they should be able to handle an entire Thanksgiving dinner for ten people all by themselves. 

I only know this because when my children were these ages, I was recovering from the flu and not up to cooking our annual Thanksgiving dinner. 

I was lying in bed the day before Thanksgiving, and, while not contagious anymore, I was still exhausted. My intention was to call my guests that morning and let them know that I  wouldn't be able to host the Thanksgiving dinner that year.

My daughter came in quietly and said in a low voice, Mom, do you think I could make the Thanksgiving dinner, so we don't have to cancel our party?"

"Do you think you can handle it?" I ask, quite frankly, incredulously. 

"Yes," I'm sure I can."

"Then I think it's a fabulous idea!"

“Always remember: If you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?”

— Julia Child

Truthfully, and I'm not the kind of mother who exaggerates her children's accomplishments, but it was one of the best Thanksgiving dinners ever. 

The other point to mention is that, at their ages, it would never have occurred to me that they could handle a meal of this magnitude. 

Homeschooled kids, I have found, are like this. Nothing is ever too big to tackle. By the time they reach the teens, if homeschooled well, they will know how to teach themselves just about anything one can learn, within reason. 

One warning, though: while your children are capable of cooking a full meal long before they will be ready to move out, you don't want to give up your place in the kitchen for more than one or two nights a week. 

There will never be anything as comforting as "mom" in the kitchen, whipping up a fabulous meal. No one can fill the shoes of your child's mother, ever. 

They're your shoes to walk in; enjoy the journey.

Don’t miss your copy of:  Top Ten YouTube Cooking Channels. With the download, you’ll also get a link to a great film about a famous chef that’s guaranteed to inspire you.

Join Elizabeth’s signature parenting course: Raise Your Child Well to live a life he loves.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 17 years experience working in children’s education.

When We Were Smarter

The educational system of the Finnish people, arguably one of the best, differs from the US system in some interesting ways.

THE DIFFERENCE

One difference is that their teachers don't just get a teaching credential, but they are also well-educated. Finland requires its teachers to have a master's degree even for teaching kindergarten.

In Finland, the teaching profession is also competitive which implies good pay and job satisfaction.

Juxtapose this to the American system where teacher's earn a bachelor's degree, and 44% of new teachers quit within the first five years. From ill-mannered children and notoriously low pay to the "teaching to the test" mentality of the public-school system, is it any surprise?

But it wasn't always this way.

WHEN AN EDUCATION WAS AN EDUCATION

Your 17th-century tutor was educated in Europe and could teach algebra, geometry, trigonometry, surveying, navigation, french, Latin, Greek, rhetoric, English, belles lettres, logic, philosophy, and other subjects.

Do you know anyone who can teach all these subjects today?!

Someone with this breadth of knowledge has to love learning for learning's sake.

Teachers who love knowledge inspire their students to do the same. When you have a teacher who is so well learned, your children have a role model for reaching greater intellectual heighths.

Your children have a vision of what's possible for themselves.

THE TEACHER

Who your child's teacher is matters. I would venture to say that your child's teacher matters the most.

What your well-educated teacher knows is this: given the right environment and the right instruction, your child can become well-educated too.

It's not going to happen in public school, though, unless your child gets super lucky, at least not to the standard of earlier times. I got somewhat lucky, but it wasn't until college which was a little late.

In college, I had a professor who inspired me to know more, who inspired me to stretch my intellect.

His name was Barrett Culmbach. He was a messed-up philosopher who happened to be a brilliant teacher. One thing he knew was that the education we’d been fed had little to do with education.

When you think about your child’s education, base your expectations for it on earlier standards when our standards were still high; our literacy rates were in the 90th percentile during the time of our one-room community schools.

Today, According to a study by the U.S. Department of Education, 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. Amongst those who can read, reading for leisure is at an all-time low–under 30 percent and even lower. Very Orwellian.

“Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850, and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. ”

— John Taylor Gatto

Assume responsibility for your child's education, don't leave it up to the State. And don’t forget the manners, because the State won’t teach those either!

Mediocre and ill-mannered are the new norm. Other than becoming a subversive teacher like John Taylor Gatto, or starting a community school based on the traditional model, the only way to battle Orwell's 1984 is to homeschool.

THE ACTION

Anyone can homeschool for the first few years; it's so easy if you know what to do. If this seems like too much for you, then just teach your child to read before you put him into the public school system.

Teaching him to read first could be the difference between his making it to college or not.

Many children get a rough start in the system by being taught to read too soon. Being expected to keep up with the group is another problem they may face. Not all children learn at the same pace.

Nor are children today raised on good literature that sustains their interest and stimulates their imaginations and intellects. Your choice of reading material for your child is crucial too.

You are the best teacher for your child's early-reading lessons. You love him the most, and you care most about his success.

Teach him to read like mothers used to do in the days when we were smarter.

 Are you wondering what kind of books you should read to your children? Get your free list of Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

Don’t miss Elizabeth Y. Hanson’s signature course, The Smart Homeschooler Academy: How to Give Your Child a Better Education at Home.

A veteran homeschooler, she now has two successfully-homeschooled children in college.