History, Homeschooling and the Internet

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Barbara Frank

I’ve been addicted to reading since I was three years old. I can’t help it, it’s what I do.

For many years, well into adulthood, I spent several hours each weekend reading the voluminous Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune. But it’s now a shadow of its former self, thanks to the Internet, which is where I do most of my reading these days.

I love having such a variety of interesting things to read. Once in a while, however, I hit on something really good, something someone has written that is so spot-on that I just have to share it with others. And have I got something good to share today.

Prolific writer and economic historian Gary North has written an awesome piece entitled “Public Education is Going Down” that clearly explains how the rise of the Internet is slowly killing public education. His theory is that, thanks to the growing availability of knowledge online at an increasingly lower cost, we parents are regaining the educational control that was lost centuries ago:

Home schooling is a throwback to the fifteenth century. It lets parents choose the content and structure of their children’s education. But it goes far beyond anything available then. One size does not fit all: all parents or all children. There is enormous diversity today, and it is getting even more diverse.

Read the entire article for yourself, and be sure to catch his last line. It made me smile 🙂

My New Book is Almost Ready!

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Barbara Frank

Last year I wrote about how I was buckling down to finish the book I’ve been working on for a long time. Well, it was worth it: the book will be out next month!

It’s called Thriving in the 21^st Century: Preparing Our Children For The New Economic Reality, and I wrote it to explain what has changed in our economy and what specific things we can do to help prepare our children for a world of work much different than the one we grew up in.

Here’s what it will say on the back cover:

Today’s children will reach adulthood in an economic environment unlike anything the world has ever seen. The 21st century global economy is powered by an increasing rate of technological change as well as growing foreign competition; both are contributing to the high U.S. unemployment rate and stagnating American wages. How can we as parents prepare our children for success in this growing maelstrom that many are now calling “the new normal”?

In Thriving in the 21st Century, Barbara Frank demonstrates that we must move beyond the common wisdom of the 20th century that emphasized a college diploma and lifelong employment with a large company as the only way to success. Instead, we need to set our children on a new path, one that will help them not just survive, but thrive in the 21st century.

In this book, you’ll learn:

The Seven Strengths your child will need to prosper in the 21st century, why they’re needed and how you can develop them in your children

The most efficient (and increasingly popular) way to give your child those Seven Strengths

Why public education has failed to prepare our children for the 21st century

How we can help our children become the lifelong learners needed in a rapidly changing global economy

The surprising truth about today’s colleges and universities

How economic change is affecting a variety of career areas, and which of them are projected to grow dramatically in the coming years.

This book is packed with ideas and resources for raising our children to become adults who respond proactively when faced with economic challenges, and who can prosper during times of great change. We can help our children reach young adulthood ready and able to tackle the future with all its challenges. And that, of course, is the key: we must prepare our children for the future…not the past.

The book’s website is www.Thrivinginthe21stCentury.com. There’s already a lot of information there, and more to come in the near future.

I hope you’ll find this book inspiring and informative.

Schools and Chicken Legislators

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Barbara Frank

The highway that runs through the town we live in is the one Democratic members of the state legislature took recently when they ran like cowards from the state capitol of Madison to cross the Wisconsin/Illinois border so they wouldn’t have to vote against the teachers’ unions.

That event was still fresh in my mind this morning when I heard on the radio that Indiana legislators are now copying the Wisconsin chickens by crossing the border into Illinois to avoid voting on school vouchers.

How interesting that they’ll go to such lengths because they don’t want parents to be allowed to direct their tax dollars to the educational institutions of their choice.

The reason, of course, is that if all parents were to do that, the already shaky public school system would weaken, private schools would thrive, and homeschoolers would be able to use tax dollars to pay for the cost of homeschooling their children.*

I know many parents would still send tax dollars to the public schools, and that would be their right. It would also force public schools to cut back on the ridiculously high administrative costs they incur; I’m betting that the current $10,000+ per student per year average cost would drop dramatically. And that would be a good thing.

After all, when I was a kid, and we Baby Boomers clogged up schools all over the country, a school could be run with just a principal, a couple of secretaries, a librarian, a gym teacher and a few custodians. Also, there was no huge bloated district office running our school district; just a superintendent with an office staff. Why can’t this happen again? It should happen again, because in this economy, who can afford continually rising property taxes to pay for schools that can’t even teach most kids to read well?

*Personally, I wouldn’t take money from the government to homeschool my kids, because I don’t want them telling me what to teach. But all homeschooling parents should certainly have that option.

Homeschoolers Score Above Average on ACT Tests

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Barbara Frank

ACT Inc. has announced that the average homeschooled student taking the ACT scores higher than the national average.

I know that this merely emphasizes what has been shown in previous studies and tests, which is that homeschooled students do better scholastically than public school students in general. But it’s always nice to add to the pile of evidence that homeschooling works.

I wonder how long it will take for the education establishment to admit it?