4 Keys to Raise a Decent Child in Indecent Times

Societal influences can make it easier or more difficult to raise a decent child. In today’s climate, it’s not always that easy, but there are some things you can do to ensure a better outcome.

When our children are young, we want to train them to do the right thing, so they develop the right habits in childhood and learn to make the right choices.

“Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.”

— Mark Twain

It begins with little things such as learning to pick up after themselves, doing chores before they play, being considerate of other people's needs, and having good manners.

Role Models

Good role models in a child’s life are essential too. If the parents treat each other courteously, if they are respectful to their family and friends, if they are honest and helpful with others, their children are more likely to follow suit.

Discipline

There is also a training through discipline that has to occur, too, as no child is born perfect no matter how good his or her role models may be.

Good parents can produce bad children; there are no guarantees that children turn out well.

You have a higher chance of having them grow up to be good people, however, if you understand how to train them in the ways of respect and obedience. 

Public School

Public school can undo your hard work, though, because rudeness and crudeness are now the norms, and the teachers have very little authority when it comes to correcting the children's behavior. 

This is telling in and of itself. Children sent to school for eight hours a day where the teachers are not allowed to discipline them are at a disadvantage to children who aren't.

In a home or private schools, adults have authority over the children and can discipline them as needed. The right training in childhood is essential to raising a well-mannered, happy child.

Spare the rod, spoil the child, was an old adage that adults used to repeat before the 60's cultural revolution when sound parenting principles were abandoned in favor of unproven new theories.

Modern Inconveniences

Today, we can add to the problem modern inconveniences such as vulgar films, ribald music, video games, social media, and inappropriate television programs, and you have a recipe for disappointment with your children.

Negative influences will unravel any good work you've done to raise your children well, which is why we need to be diligent with the environments we let influence our children.

The Ancient Greeks knew that negative influences in a child's life would help mold their character, and any educator since who has studied the classics or has an ounce of common sense, understands this too.

The rest of society has forgotten it, though, making us negligent in our duty to raise our children according to time-tested principles that work. 

A Dishonest Trend

Ninety-seven percent of schoolchildren are dishonest according to statistics gathered by Vickie Abeles, who produced the documentary, Race to Nowhere.

Even without the statistics, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that we are no longer an honest society. 

My son recently took a statistics exam online only to receive an email from the teacher the following day, announcing that it was clear some of the students had cheated on the exam. The teacher had tracked their activity to see if they changed tabs to find the answers during the exam.

My son said the exam was easy, too, making it an even more pathetic situation. 

College students cheating on an easy exam?

“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

What happened to the concept of hard work and honesty? In this case, they didn't even have to study hard, but they still felt the need to cheat. 

Cheating is a habit for many children today.

When the lines between honesty and dishonesty become so blurred that cheating on exams becomes all too common, we have a serious problem. Cheaters are cheaters. Liars are liars. School doesn't end; real life begin, and these students suddenly turn honest again. 

They have become dishonest people. Their characters have formed this way because they are raised in a system that doesn't uphold the values of truth, goodness, and beauty; once so honored in the West.

In a Nutshell

Raise your children well, keep them out of public school, screen multi-media use when they are young (or eliminate it!), avoid inappropriate music, and surround them with natural beauty and good people.

If you do, you'll have accomplished something that is becoming more and more uncommon today; you’ll have raised decent children. That is, children who grow up with the ability to discern truth from falsehood, beauty from ugliness, and good from bad, and they’ll choose right more times than wrong.

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 summer program 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 Life He Loves.

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.

5 Reasons Why You Will Love Homeschooling and Never Look Back

Fear is the #1 reason that stops most parents from homeschooling.

Once you move beyond the fear, though, and decide to homeschool anyway because public school or online schools are no longer options for you, a whole new world emerges.

Most homeschooling parents then wonder why they waited so long to embrace the teaching of their own.

Here are four homeschooling perks that will make you fall in love with your new homeschooling lifestyle.

You Own Your Time

1. While the fear is that you'll lose your free time, what you don't realize is that you gain control over your time, you don't lose it. School no longer dictates what nights the kids need to be in bed early or when you can take your vacation or when your day ends and when it begins. These decisions are now yours to make.

If you have a family party to attend on a Sunday, you can stay as late as you like, maybe treat Monday like a Sunday and begin this particular week on a Tuesday instead. If you want to travel overseas for a vacation, but not pay prime rates for high season and deal with a deluge of other tourists, you can visit off-season and adjust your homeschool schedule to fit into your vacation time. 

Compound Perks

2. The compound perks that vacations offer is that you can turn any vacation into a homeschooling day of study. Think history, art, literature, and language arts. You are no longer restricted to the classroom for study, but travel can also become a hand's on way of learning.

If vacations are more than your budget can afford, weekly outings can fill the same role. 

As for your own free time, if you learn to manage your time and manage your children well, you should be able to replenish your energy reserves weekly. If you are going to homeschool, this is essential as the state of burn-out is real.

You avoid this by planning ahead and making sure you have enough time  to fill your reserves as needed. 

Many parents today are more overwhelmed because their children run them ragged with their constant demands on their time. Parents no longer know how to establish clear boundaries with their children.

To homeschool successfully, you have to get the management of your family under control first.

Homeschooling is a job, but it isn't one that should leave you feeling exhausted. On the contrary, it should feel rewarding and fulfilling to you. If it doesn't, then something needs tweaking. 

3. Another significant stress in life that the act of homeschooling eliminates immediately is the battle parents and children endure every day regarding getting to public school, readjusting to coming home from public school, and the homework fiasco. 

All the stress these demands bring into your life melt away just like that.

Gone. 

Regarding homework, parents who help with homework are homeschooling, so why not just homeschool without all the extra pressure that comes with having your children in school?

4. Your children do not get graded and slotted into arbitrary categories of excellent, above average, average, and below average. They don't get ranked with their peers and made to feel better than they are or worse because there is no average with homeschooling. 

They don't develop false limitations about their academic ability, but they learn to do well and to excel in their studies. If they don't, you don't move them on until they do. You are a private tutor to your child when you homeschool, so you know when he knows the material and when he doesn't know it.

It's that simple.

You might do reviews with him, but you never need to test or grade him. He is competing with himself, and he naturally learns to do his best work. Sometimes, this may require a discipline tactic or two, but he is being trained in your home school to be his very best, including the work he produces.

Grading, on the other hand, is for the classroom when a teacher has no idea where each of her 30 students is concerning what she has taught them. How can she be expected to know this without testing them?

And then come the grades with the boxes children get squeezed into that help to form their perception of who they are rather than who they can become. 

5. While your children may easily find friends in public school, you may not always approve of their friends, and you seldom know the family of their friends. If your child gets in with the wrong crowd, and there is no guarantee that he or she will not, you will watch your child be brought down by bad company, and there will be little you can do to stop it. 

With homeschooling, a prudent parent will choose good friends for their children, because the children are too young to know a good influence from a bad influence. When they get older, they'll have more discernment and be able to choose wisely for themselves.

As a homeschooling family, you'll make friends with other homeschooling families. You plan social events as a family, not as individuals.

Socializing as a family is the norm in so many other parts of the world, but in the West we've lost this habit that’s so vital to our family’s well-being. 

Homeschooling is a lifestyle that puts the family back at the center again and allows us the time to build stable families with members who enjoy each other's company and are loyal to one another. 

Many homeschooling parents have told me that they felt a distance grown between them and their children once the children entered school.

Have you noticed this too?

My own mother said this about all of her children, and she had seven. It's par for the course, this social distancing, and it's impossible to avoid when children spend eight hours in school and then two to four hours doing homework in the evenings.

Your children are not with you for a large part of the day, and you don't share a social circle. When families were tighter, there was less segregation by age and more intermixing of entire families.

This mixing brings shared experiences and fond memories, which are the stuff bonds are made of.

After having gone through the public school system myself, and after homeschooling my now-grown children, I can honestly say that putting my children into public school for their elementary or middle-school years was never a serious consideration, ever. 

The homeschooling lifestyle was too good.

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

Increase your child’s intelligence by joining the Smart Homeschooler Academy summer program to 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 Life He Loves.

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.

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

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.

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

Here are some points to consider now that your children are home, and you are expected to homeschool them.

Even if you were already homeschooling, these points will serve as a good reminder of the advantages to homeschooling.

A Real Homeschooler

A "real" homeschooler does not enroll their child into a state-funded program because you understand that it's an oxymoron. You cannot homeschool and have your child enrolled in public school at the same time. They are two different approaches to a child’s education.

In other words, your are either homeschooling your child or you are not homeschooling him. And the reality is that if he is in an online program, you are not homeschooling.

He's public-schooled at home and classified as such by the state. 

Furthermore, enrolling your child in a public-schooled at home program defies the benefits to a homeschool, which are many.  It’s crucial that you understand these differences so you can make an informed decision for your family that will serve your family in the highest way.

Freedom of Choice

For starters, you want to exercise your freedom of choice regarding your child's education. You want to be free to choose when you teach, where you teach, what you teach, and how you teach and for how long you teach. 

You also want the freedom to take vacations when you want to take vacations. Vacations are very important when you are homeschooling!

When You Teach

Not all children are ready to learn all things at the same time. One of the benefits of homeschooling is to start your child when he is mature enough for formal training, and you want to let him go at his own pace.

Allowing your children to go at their own pace, teach them to compete against themselves, which fosters an independent and self-motivated spirit. It also allows them to soar ahead when the material grabs their attention or just because they can. 

It's common for homeschooled children to be above their grade level in subjects for this very reason. The system is not tethering them to mediocrity. 

What You Teach

Educate your child with books, not on a computer. Raise them to treasure the feel of a book, the smell of a book, the content of a book.

Make reading their habit, not staring at a computer screen, which is both bad for the brain and bad for the eyesight, not to mention one's overall health (think childhood obesity). 

Expand their minds with the original writing of great men and women who have made major contributions to Western civilization instead of watching sound bites by people who regurgitate what has already been regurgitated many times before. 

Educate your child to know that they can learn anything they put their mind to learning. There are few limitations to discovering the universe of the mind for a child who is raised to understand that he is capable of so much more. 

How You Teach

When you homeschool your children, they are not stuck in a regime of boring classes that consume the better part of their day.

A real homeschooling day is much, much shorter than this leaving the child time for leisure activities to help him discover who he is and what motivates him in life; to contribute towards making him a person who is interesting to others rather than a good imitator of the latest ill-mannered sitcom character. 

Where You Teach

When you are homeschooling, you can teach your child anywhere because the world is his classroom. Establish a homeschool room in your house with a desk where he can write. Let him read in the living room, let him do science and art outdoors.

Take him on road trips to learn history, travel the world with him. There is no limitation to where you can teach a homeschooled child. You can teach him anywhere, no computer needed.

These are just a few of the characteristics of a real homeschooled education. If you choose to use an online program, understand that for all intent and purposes, your are not homeschooling your child.

Despite the fancy rhetoric, he gets classified as a public schooled student by the government, with all due respect, like all the other bricks in the wall as Pink Floyd so fittingly put it. 

If you haven't seen it already, do not miss this video clip!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjrfuDAEl10.

In a nutshell, bring your children offline and into the real world of learning. Resist the pull to depend upon the state for support by assuming responsibility for your child's education, and lastly, enjoy it.

Homeschooling is a marvelous lifestyle!

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.

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.