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.

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.

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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.

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.