If you are a parent or a teacher, you most probably read stories to young children. Together, you laugh and point at the pictures. You engage them with a few simple questions. And they respond.
So what happens to children when they participate in shared reading? Does it make a difference to their learning? If so, what aspects of their learning are affected? Continue reading
An illustration from Dickens’s novel The Pickwick Papers. Dickens’s most vivid personalities are celebrated in the Guardian’s resource Charles Dickens’s Characters in Pictures.
Charles Dickens’s Characters in Pictures is a guide to some of the most vivid personalities in Dickens’s novels. Created by the Guardian, the resource contains illustrations of characters including the Artful Dodger and Ebenezer Scrooge, along with extracts about them from Dickens’s work. It provides inspiration for activities including role play, descriptive writing and costume design.
What the Dickens? is a website for students and teachers containing creative-writing lesson plans, activity sheets and an outline for a Dickens-themed assembly. There are also short videos from children’s authors celebrating the work of Dickens and an interactive story-writing competition open to 9- to 14-year-olds. Continue reading
I was recently looking through Intellectual Takeout’s archives and once again stumbled upon Annie Holmquist’s article “Middle School Reading Lists 100 Years Ago vs. Today.” Annie’s comparison of how reading lists have changed reveals how students today aren’t held to as high of standards as students 100 years ago, and Annie’s commentary got me curious about how else education has changed through the decades, particularly since America’s founding.
What did the Founding Fathers, many of whom had a homeschool educational upbringing, think about education? And how does American education compare today? Continue reading
(Courtesy of Byrndle Photo via Mandy Davis)
A former school principal who grew frustrated with the school system quit her job and instead chose to homeschool her three kids on a 10-acre (4.05-hectare) homestead. Merging her children’s learning with their land and home, she has created an immersive “real world” educational experience based on her kids’ unique needs. Continue reading
Several states across the nation are letting parents have control of school funds to steer their child’s education.
Education is one of the most important aspects of having a functioning society. Good education for everyone seems like a fairly uncontroversial proposal. Unfortunately, we live in a world where not all educational institutions are created equal.
Public schools in the inner cities and rural outer ranges are much worse off than schools in the hearts of thriving suburbs. Private schools are expensive and have the right to choose who they do or don’t accept. Charter schools are largely on a lottery system. Homeschooling comes with tremendous advantages but ultimately is also expensive. Continue reading
Pat Montgomery
The ubiquity and widespread acceptance of homeschooling as a valid educational option for American families can obscure the fact that homeschooling freedoms were hard-fought.
The ubiquity and widespread acceptance of homeschooling as a valid educational option for American families can obscure the fact that homeschooling freedoms were hard-fought.
Homeschooling didn’t become legally recognized in all U.S. states until the 1990s, with families who chose to teach their own children in earlier years often harassed and sometimes criminally charged with truancy. The DeJonge family of Michigan was among them. On a fall day in 1984, the DeJonges were visited at their home by the Michigan Department of Social Services telling them they were breaking the law by homeschooling. A year later, the parents were charged and convicted of educating their children without a state teaching license. Continue reading
This year I will graduate my first homeschooler. It seems like only yesterday I was teaching our oldest child to read, and now she’s an adult taking college courses. For the last 14 years I’ve been knee-deep in educating our eight children, recently as many as five grade levels at a time, in a one-room schoolhouse style approach. Sometimes it has felt more like being in the trenches – overwhelming and chaotic – but as my older children daily demonstrate, homeschooling is a great way to educate children and grow them into intelligent, connected, focused, happy adults. Continue reading
“We want to be as big as Boy Scouts, be that kind of a household name.” ~ Barefoot University Co-founder, Madeleine Braden
It was a cool, muddy morning in March when I pulled into the empty parking lot of a sprawling forest and nature preserve about 40 miles outside of Fort Worth, Texas. Soon, cars began arriving, filled with exuberant children of all ages, and their parents, who were ready to spend a few hours together in the woods. Donned in rain boots and parkas, these nearly three-dozen nature-goers were part of Barefoot University, a rapidly expanding national network of forest school programs for homeschoolers that was founded by Madeleine Braden and Amber Brown in 2019. Continue reading
Get your children OUT of the System – NOW
Parents Urged to Flee Public Schools, Rescue Kids From ‘Poison’
Plenty of children these days are so obsessed with having internet access that they will It’s not a question of if – not even a question of when. Michele Bachmann says parents should withdraw their children from public schools immediately!
Keep them at home…
Trust between schools and parents has been irreversibly damaged, the former U.S. congresswoman and 2012 presidential candidate said last week during an interview on the “Understanding the Times” radio program – adding: “Our school system is completely gone now.”
Whether it’s the mission to teach Critical Race Theory as fact or the full embrace of the gender dysphoria movement, Bachmann – now dean of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University – says America’s public schools have set themselves up as the sole authority on social issues involving their students… (Continue to full article)
These Government Indoctrination Centers We Refer To As ‘Schools‘
One government indoctrination center in Vermont has decided to eliminate the words male and female from the 5th grade curriculum. Students can’t use the words boy and girl in school because, after all, this school is in the process of becoming woke, and using such antiquated terms as boy and girl omits the other 126 sexes some flaky scientists and politicians have only recently informed us are now in existence.
How many other public schools are like this one nationwide? More than you’d like to think about. But you’d better start thinking about it because the Theology of Woke will be coming to a public school near you if it’s not already there.
In the April 10th issue of the New American magazine a homeschooling dad commented on what he learned about public schools after he removed his son from one. He observed… (Continue to full article)
Unlike any other point in the prior four decades, the push to reform the education system through school choice has serious political support and is likely to be passed in many states in the coming years.
Over time, education reformers have met with success in showing how the education system, despite sucking up ever more taxpayer funds, has declined so precipitously that many teachers and schools fail to achieve the mission of educating America’s youth. Far too few of America’s youth can read, write, or perform math anywhere near what’s needed for them to fully engage in American society. Continue reading
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, John Adams and Teddy Roosevelt: What do these American Presidents have in common? They were all homeschooled.
When we think about traditional education in America we tend to think of public schools, classrooms, and a one-size-fits-all curriculum designed to educate the masses quickly and efficiently. This type of education is not only inefficient, but inconsistent with the very essence of what it is to be American. Being an American means having freedom of choice, freedom of expression, and the opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness. Public education offers the antithesis of these values and has, since its origins, been a means of indoctrinating its students with whatever values the leaders of the time wanted to pass on. Continue reading
The state of Utah has a new homeschool voucher law which is supposed to help homeschool families with educational expenses. At least that’s what we’ve been told. The ink was hardly dry on the legislation before some were concerned that it could be used by some homeschool groups to possibly promote neo-nazi and white supremacy propaganda. It seems such happened someplace in Ohio and some Utah parents were concerned that could happen in Utah. And I expect this concern was genuine on the part of some parents.
I suppose this concern will eventually lead to some do-gooder proposing that Utah enact some legislation that will act as guidelines forced on those who take any state money–and forced on all homeschoolers if they feel they can get away with that! Continue reading
Depressed boy sitting on floor & holding his head. Frustrated with exam pressure.
Articles about the horrible quality (on purpose) of what passes for education in public schools have become so prevalent that people now tend to take this inferior education for granted and so are tempted to just ignore it.
We recently were informed that some schools are now ending their honors programs so they can promote “equity” (racism). It seems that lots of the white kids do well in the honors programs so that now must cease and we must begin to enforce a stultifying conformity, a “one size fits all” program they have mislabeled as “equity,” The concept of “equity” has trumped any idea of real education–but, then, real education has not existed in public schools for generations anyway. Continue reading
Get your children OUT of the System – NOW
For seven years, I slogged through the public school system before my parents made the decision to homeschool. At the time, I couldn’t understand why they were so concerned about making the switch.
Frankly, I wasn’t learning anything in public school, so from my perspective, it couldn’t get any worse. Only later, when I asked my parents about their thought process, did I learn how much propaganda there is against homeschooling.
The core of this propaganda is the idea that parents are unqualified to teach their kids. After all, public school teachers are required to have a degree and license. Continue reading
The average American child fell behind in math by six months due to COVID school closures, with students in the nation’s poorest areas behind two-and-a-half years. Continue reading
The threat of mandatory temperature checks and mask wearing in schools has some parents at the tipping point, where they start to plot a future with tutelage of their kids moved firmly under their supervision and roof. This was preceded by evidence of extreme liberal agendas being added to curriculums in some states, where traditional notions of sexuality and gender are being challenged or overturned completely. Divisive and disturbing statements made by academics from elite universities on race and gender have further undermined confidence in the educational system in the US and Europe.
When Pink Floyd sang “we don’t need no education”, they were lamenting the harsh and industrial nature of the schools of the 1960s and ‘70s, where cynicism and the cane were the order of the day. The pendulum of western society has now swung towards parental paranoia around safety and an indulgence in the requisite metrics to achieve success for their children in the academic sphere. Continue reading
Keep them at home…
I recently saw an article on “World” by Adeline A. Allen, who is an associate professor of law at Trinity Law School. She wrote about the death of classical education in most schools today, but noted that, in some instances, it is making a comeback.
Allen noted that: “As a child growing up in the 18th century in the Caribbean and by no means wealthy, Alexander Hamilton had a number of books. One of which seems to have been Plutarch’s “Lives.” Judging from Hamilton’s writings from his youth onward, Plutarch helped form the man he became. The kind of education that would have students read Plutarch has long fallen by the wayside in mainstream American schools–but thankfully, not in all schools.” Continue reading
Our public school system continues to be corrupted by liberalism and Marxism. Some states have taken steps to prevent it, while others have embraced it and are even attempting to mandate it.
By spreading radical liberal propaganda, the National School Board has already lost almost half of the country. Continue reading
America used to have the best education system in the world. To understand this statement we have to look at the original foundation of our education. Our original educational book was the Bible. This book was used to teach all aspects of life, business, math, philosophy, as well as how to conduct their personal lives. The Founders placed such a high importance on education that they enacted laws to ensure that children were educated and they also placed scripture knowledge in the same category. The arrogant fools of the Supreme Court of 1947 believed that the Bible should not be allowed in schools but the Founders believed different.
The Founders actually placed a premium on biblical knowledge. In my book ‘Defining American Exceptionalism’, I have a full chapter on education in early America. There are many documented situations that refute the 1947 decision so I would like to discuss a few of them. From this, we will see what the Pilgrims and the Founders believed to be the most important aspects of education. Continue reading
There was a good article on Liberty Nation recently about how the political left …”desperately wants to keep parents from homeschooling their children.”
The article stated that: “What happens when parents realize the public school system isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and start seeking other alternatives? Ever since the debate over the material being taught in K-12 classrooms erupted, government schools have been under well-deserved scrutiny for injecting far-left ideas regarding race, sexuality, and gender into their curricula. Now, the nation is seeing a backlash from Democrats and their comrades in the activist media with attempts to limit options for parents who have become disillusioned with their children’s learning institutions.” Continue reading