Some Bad Arguments Against Homeschooling

If you pull the average American off the street and ask them to describe what they think the average homeschool family looks like, they’d probably paint the picture of a bunch of children and adults wearing pleated khakis, button-downs with sweaters, socially awkward children, sheltered and overly-structured in their lives (or, oddly enough, totally unstructured in their […]

Hayek and Camus Walk Into A School

There are practically as many philosophies of education as there are schools in the United States. There are the Prusso-American schools of Horace Mann’s age, there are the public schools of the No Child Left Behind era, there are parochial schools of varying denominations, there are different types of military, boarding, and prep schools, there are Montessori, […]

Let’s Abolish Childhood

Childhood is a stage of life primarily defined by being a student in most developed nations. While the concept has at least three components — legal (i.e., being less than 21 years of age in most states in the US), biological (i.e., being at a stage when most of the body is still developing — […]

What Is The Purpose of Childhood?

The average child spends eight-to-ten hours in school every day of the week — getting up before dawn, standing in the cold, getting on a bus, and sitting through learning materials that have been pre-determined to be necessary for their success as students. The average American elementary schooler spends 934 hours in school per year, […]

In Praise of Hands-Free Teachers

I was publicly schooled all through my upbringing (minus a Montessori pre-K that I attended) and I am — by all conventional measures — fairly successful so far in life. I can read, write, and do calculations on the right-side of a normal distribution, I was accepted to an Ivy League institution, I’ve worked on […]