When schools reward repetition over reasoning, speech is the first casualty.
What “like,” homeschooling, and the loss of rhetoric reveal about modern education.
The overuse of “like” is not lazy speech; it is the sound of thought struggling to keep pace with a culture that rewards reaction over reflection.
The growth of homeschooling makes that question harder to dismiss. Once treated as a marginal alternative, home education has become a serious response among families who no longer trust large institutions to cultivate attention, judgment, and speech with sufficient care. Its rise is not only a story about parental preference or educational politics. It is also a warning. When enough parents begin seeking smaller, slower, more deliberate settings, they are saying something about what the ordinary classroom has struggled to protect.
Homeschooling is not a cure-all, and it should not be romanticized any more than classical education. A home can repeat the same mistakes as a school: memorization without reasoning, reaction without reflection, opinion without discipline. But at its best, homeschooling reveals what education requires at any scale: time for conversation, room for questions, adults who can listen closely, and daily practice turning scattered impressions into ordered thought. That is why it belongs in this argument. The issue is not merely where children are educated, but whether any setting still teaches them to think before they speak.
That question also prevents the homeschooling discussion from becoming merely defensive. The point is not to retreat from public life into private enclaves, nor to pretend that every parent is prepared to provide what every school has failed to give. The deeper point is that education requires an intimacy of attention that bureaucratic systems often struggle to sustain. Someone has to notice when a child is repeating words without understanding them, when fluency masks confusion, when confidence supplants evidence, and when silence would be more honest than performance. Whether that person is a parent at the kitchen table or a teacher in a crowded classroom, the work is the same: to slow the child down long enough for language to become thought rather than noise.
The overuse of “like” is not lazy speech; it is the sound of thought struggling to keep pace with a culture that rewards reaction over reflection. Continue reading →