Today’s school-aged parents are parents of my generation. We’re accustomed to changing technology—at least in our adult lives. Sometimes however, we seem to recollect our own childhood education experiences as the continuing norm when that just isn’t so. When we were school-aged, we went from a period of no public internet to dial-up internet. Our idea of research was to randomly browse a ProQuest archive for as long as it took to find something relevant, because searching was an emerging art. This isn’t the world today, and we should stop acting like it where our children are concerned.

I’m not an expert, but I am a parent. I’m a parent who cares about and is committed to my children’s success. I’m one of many who have been on the fence about, but am now leaning towards and preparing for homeschooling. In exploring this idea and making preparations to execute it, here are some of my findings.

Homeschooled kids have largely been stereotyped as being socially awkward and not prepared to handle the real world. However a new Harvard study has found exactly the opposite; Homeschooled kids are more well adjusted and engaged than their public schooled peers. This is because homeschooled kids are more self-sufficient, and thrive on how to think than what to think.

If you think as a parent you are unfit to teach your children, this is merely a confidence problem you have to overcome, rather than an ability problem. This is especially true since we live in the age of information, whereas the self learning experience is a far cry from what it was when we experienced gradescool. 

Where exactly are your kids with education? How do you know where to start? The easiest answer is simply to let your kids show you.

For literacy, start with your child journaling. Whether a real journal about their day, or imaginative stories, they’ll show you exactly where they are. The words they misspell are their challenge words. They clearly know what the word means if they’ve used it accurately in context, so now it’s time to teach them how to spell it. Then it’s time to teach them similar words, and their meanings, that follow the same spelling rules while you’re on that theme. Then teach them a few alternate synonym word choices to that word. Encourage them to use these new words in their future writing. You’re creating a literacy web, while you should be challenging them to expand.

Once you have expanded literacy, you’ve given them the opportunity to learn whatever they would like if you have fostered an environment of curiosity. Raise a self starter and they will learn.

Mathematics is a challenge for me, but lucky for me I’m good with money. Coincidentally, money is a great way to introduce any mathematical concept visually all the way up to Pre Algebra. Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Decimals, Fractions and Percentages can all be visually taught with pocket change. It’s crucial to visually teach these concepts with real world tangibility before moving to written mathematics. Teaching the “why behind the what” with something as motivating as money is a great way to introduce new concepts. As for that later Algebra stuff… well, I have a few years to figure that out.

If you’re still stuck on the social aspect part, then there’s a good chance that you’re actually shallow and you should work on that. You weren’t really socialized so much as you were part of a hierarchy, and lucky you for not having been at the bottom of that hierarchy like I was. Getting pushed didn’t do much for me socially. Getting a concussion in a classroom only to have the school lie to my father about it (zero tolerance bullying) didn’t do much for me socially. Getting put in choke holds in the locker room didn’t do much for me socially.

Sunday school did a lot for me socially. If it weren’t for Sunday School, I’d be far worse off socially. If public school is where I gained my social skills, I’d probably be a psychopath right now. I understand religion is a debatable topic in libertarian circles, but community churches certainly engage in the community service and voluntarism that libertarians espouse. Sunday School is where these concepts were introduced to me and where I first engaged in them. 

Regardless of how one feels about religion, your child will fare far better socially by going to Sunday School than public school. Or any club or sports team. There are far more beneficial ways for your children to learn constructive social skills than public school. Even just a few short hours a week of constructive social activities far outweigh hours long days of public school where kids are exposed to negative behaviors and interactions. Even the kids who bully other kids aren’t getting anything positive socially, because that behavior won’t get them far in the real world, even though schools effectively enable it by pretending it doesn’t happen.

All in all, you as a parent are your child’s best teacher. There are resources out there to help you that didn’t exist when you were your child’s age. If you are committed, your children will be better off learning from you. 

The post Considering Homeschooling? You’re Far From Alone. appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The same concept works with ideas. Yet, people tend to have a different reaction to loud voices, regardless of how fringe the idea. If it’s loud and repeated often enough, your average individual will grant it a degree of merit. The idea of acceptance upon repetition is stupid, but it’s the reality of how terrible ideas spread.

For a much more in depth understanding of how terrible ideas spread into acceptance, I would recommend a book called The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad.

It’s how we’ve arrived at the idea of Critical Race Theory, or state sanctioned racism being taught in public schools. Students are taught that the idea of meritocracy is a characteristic of white supremacy, and schools work to lower the bar in the name of equity, to celebrate mediocrity over achievements. 

This has been the work of loud voices being mistaken as popular or rational. The squeaky wheel has gotten the grease. As radical Left and Communist ideology achieve benchmark after benchmark, the wheel keeps squeaking towards the next ideological goal. 

The squeaky wheel gets the grease is an idiom people tell their children, that ironically conflicts with the children’s book If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. 

But outside of the world of storybooks and idioms, at some point we must ground ourselves in reality. A wheel that won’t stop squeaking needs to be replaced. Otherwise, your own well-being and that of your family’s is at risk.

Resident of the Pacific Northwest, Christopher Rufo, has been a leading voice of reason to replace that wheel.

Much of his work against state sanctioned racism has resulted in legislation at state levels to ban racism from being taught in public schools.

So far Idaho has signed such legislation into law, while bills in Oklahoma and Arkansas are awaiting their Governors to sign into law, while a number of other states have passed the house and are awaiting on a Senate vote, or are in the process of amending.

Some people actively go along with terrible ideas because they believe them to be popular. Other people quietly tolerate ideas out of fear of being called names and eventually submit into acceptance.

Others stop living at the demands made by their own bane and peril, roll up their sleeves, pump up the car jack, and replace that wheel. 

It may be thankless work now, but you’ll thank yourself later.

The post The Squeaky Wheel Needs To Be Replaced appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

“White passing” is a loathsome, offensive phrase. No one is responsible for the physical cues that others take from one’s appearance, and you’re not obligated to sport a sandwich board itemizing your racial breakdown.

Fredi was a strikingly beautiful mulatta and exceptional actress, yet Jim Crow segregation barred her from playing non-black roles. The Chicago Defender quoted her in 1945: “Frankly, I do not ascribe to the stupid theory of white supremacy and to try to hide the fact that I am a Negro for economic or any other reasons. If I do, I would be agreeing to be a Negro makes me inferior.”

By identifying solely as Negro, she did tacitly endorse supremacist ideology’s assertion that one-drop of Negro blood disqualifies one from entering the realm of “pure” whiteness. Yet Fredi had no choice; no mixed-race option existed for her to embrace, and that surely would have led to “Trying to be white!” accusations. White passing charges endure even now, as humanity evolves.

The 2020 Census allowed multiracials to again choose multiple boxes, though the government often collapses those responses to reflect exclusively minority race tabulations. That nuanced application of the “one-drop rule” notwithstanding, latter day Fredi Washingtons, like former actress and British royal Meghan Markle, unflinchingly avail themselves of identity choices independent of the societally imposed black/white binary.

But during the 2020 election, political expediency prohibited Kamala Harris from publicly embracing her Asian heritage, and the media’s current insistence on capitalizing “Black” and “White” reinforces the boundaries between supposedly mutually exclusive races. It’s regressive, part and parcel of a campaign that can best be described as willful resegregation.

Consider ABC’s “mixed-ish“ 2019 sitcom about an ‘80s interracial couple and their three kids relocating from a hippie commune to suburbia. The parents struggle with their new life’s challenges; their kids negotiate public schooling in which classmates have difficulty pigeonholing them racially. The family’s encounters typify the struggle in finding one’s identity when the larger society can’t determine to which sociopolitical bloc you belong.

The initial episodes entertained; I even chuckled at installment one’s slave ship joke. Considering Mixed-ish is a prequel spin-off of the popular Black-ish, the writers pleasantly surprised by not overly insinuating one-drop commentary into the dialogue — until the third episode’s treatment of “black hair.”

Then, they let loose with what you had to know was coming. The three siblings are unquestionably black, and their desire to wear their hair au naturel is a sign of their black pride.

Academia’s most notorious one-drop devotees, critical race theorists, have scant objection to Mixed-ish, yet a particular Marxist critique on a Facebook group dedicated to positive mixed-race identity caught my eye. Brother Karl would ostensibly view the show not through the lens of an interracial family, but via proletarians abandoning their communalist ideals to embrace a bourgeois lifestyle centered on careerism and consumerism.

America’s problems do primarily manifest along class lines, but neo-Marxists cannot abandon race, to their detriment. They critically reinterpret Marx’s class conflict meditations into one wherein history is primarily the dramatic struggle between colonialist, oppressive white racists and exploited groups “of color.”

After eight years of the first mixed-ish president marginalizing his MulattX heritage and propagating identity politics, enough working class whites perceived Democrats as hostile to their concerns and swung the 2016 election to Donald Trump—who expertly exploited their fears. 45’s inept handling of the COVID-19 epidemic combined with Black Lives Matter’s proletariat insurrection following George Floyd’s murder combined to deny him reelection, though.

The response that BLM’s impressionable disciples cannot rebut is “All Black Lives Should Matter.” Gangbangers kill far more blacks than do white cops, but that doesn’t fit BLM’s narrative. Even considering the significantly fewer incidents of police shooting and killing unarmed minorities, we need to honestly acknowledge the cause-and-effect relationship in play. Some degree of perceived police brutality is more about unacknowledged biases cultivated through overexposure in high crime areas than naked racism.

Narratives outweigh facts, though. Economist and erstwhile Marxist Thomas Sowell argues that progressives have no interest in creating black wealth—only with the imperative to redistribute what exists, e.g. slavery reparations.

Psychological manipulation compelling kneeling and confessing white skin privilege confirms that what many cannot cultivate through the internal work necessary for individual spiritual growth, they attempt to appropriate from others and redistribute to the collective via repugnant guilt-trips.

Blackness and whiteness are both value-neutral, yet for years I wandered in the darkest mental ignorance before discovering that my purpose on this planet was not as a loyal servant to “woke” racial identity politics. Would that Fredi could have realized the same.

Charles Michael Byrd is a freelance opinion writer whose pieces deal with racial identity politics and religion. He is of white, black, and Native heritage. He lives in Queens, N.Y.. You can follow him on Twitter @ChasbyrdM.

Image: Gage Skidmore

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Now, math education itself has been deemed “racist.” A group of educators just released a document calling for a transformation of math education that focuses on “dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math.”

Among the educators’ recommendations, which officials in some states are promoting, are calls to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views,” “provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance,” and “encourage them to disrupt the disproportionate push-out of people of color in [STEM] fields.”

Beyond activism, these recommendations also argue that traditional approaches to math education promote racism and white supremacy, such as requiring students to show their work or prioritizing correct answers to math problems. The document claims that current math teaching is problematic because it focuses on “reinforcing objectivity and the idea that there is only one right way” while it “also reinforces paternalism.”

Prominent Professors Push Back

This week, some prominent university professors spoke out against these new woke math education recommendations. Princeton mathematics professor Sergiu Klainerman wrote a guest post on the topic at journalist Bari Weiss’s website. He says: “Attempts to ‘deconstruct’ mathematics, deny its objectivity, accuse it of racial bias, and infuse it with political ideology have become more and more common — perhaps, even, at your child’s elementary school.”  

Klainerman, who grew up in communist Romania, warns that this current classroom dogma is dangerous. He writes: “When it comes to education, I believe the woke ideology is even more harmful than old-fashioned communism.” 

Columbia University English professor John McWhorter also chimed in against this math education document and its recommendations. 

“This lovely pamphlet is teaching us that it is racist to expect black kids to master the precision of math,” he writes in a blog post. “To wit – its message, penned by people who consider themselves some of the most morally advanced souls in the history of the human species, is one that Strom Thurmond would have happily taken a swig of whiskey to.”

While the growing emphasis on critical theory in American classrooms has broader societal implications, including the devaluation of objectivity and individualism, the real victims of this educational approach are the students themselves. In one of his final articles before he died last December, economist Walter Williams decried the poor academic performance of students in large urban school districts. 

“In two city high schools,” Williams wrote of Detroit, “only one student tested proficient in math and none are proficient in English. Yet, the schools spent a full week learning about ‘systemic racism’ and ‘Black Lives Matter activism.’”

Public School Exodus

As this “woke” worldview continues to penetrate classrooms with mandatory curriculum standards, families who don’t agree with this ideology—or who simply want their children to learn basic academics—should have the opportunity to pursue alternatives to their assigned district school. Currently, 26 states have active school choice legislation that would enable funding to follow students, including adopting education savings accounts or tax-credit scholarship programs. Meanwhile, overall support for school choice policies has grown since last spring. 

The COVID-19 school shutdowns have put parents back in charge of their children’s learning in ways that were unimaginable pre-pandemic, with many parents leaving their district schools in droves. Indeed, the Associated Press reported a sharp decline in public school enrollment this academic year across the 33 states for which data were available. Millions of families have pursued private education options such as independent schooling and homeschooling that can offer more consistent, higher-quality in-person instruction than a district’s Zoom schooling or hybrid offerings. 

As the New York Times reported on Monday, fewer than half of K-12 students are currently attending full-time, in-person schooling and families are increasingly seeking other options. 

“Now many parents are beginning to rebel, frustrated with the pace of reopening and determined to take matters into their own hands,” the Times reports. “Some are making contingency plans to relocate, home-school or retreat to private education if their children’s routines continue to be disrupted this fall — a real possibility as some local school officials and teachers’ unions argue for aggressive virus mitigation measures to continue, potentially even after educators are vaccinated.”

The amplification of “woke” ideology in classrooms is likely to accelerate the current exodus from district schools. Parents have experienced a renewed sense of responsibility over their children’s education. Now they in many cases have had a front-row seat to what their children are actually learning through Zoom school, and hopefully will feel more empowered to push back against new critical theory curriculum standards—and choose education that values individualism over collectivism.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Image: woodleywonderworks on Flickr

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With the November election just around the corner, it’s only to be expected that President Trump would seek to rally conservative voters and drive his supporters to the polls. So, when his administration, on September 4, instructed the federal government to eliminate all training in “Critical Race Theory,” some thought it was just a red-meat stunt to excite the Republican base. Others saw it as an act of right-wing censorship and an obstruction of racial progress.

In truth, there’s much more to this development than mere politicization and censorship.

Here’s a breakdown of what the administration is doing and why it’s a welcome move.

The Executive Memo

“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought wrote in the executive memorandum.

“Employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism,’” Vought explained. “According to press reports, in some cases these training [sic] have further claimed that there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.”

The order instructed federal agencies to identify and eliminate any contracts or spending that train employees in “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” “or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

The Exposé

How did it “come to the President’s attention,” and what press reports is Vought referring to?

Well, President Trump is known to watch Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. And days before the memo was issued, Carlson had on journalist Christopher Rufo to discuss his multiple reports uncovering the extent to which Critical Race Theory (CRT) was being used in federal training programs.

“For example, Rufo claimed, the Treasury Department recently hired a diversity trainer who said the U.S. was a fundamentally White supremacist country,” wrote Sam Dorman for the Fox News web site, “and that White people upheld the system of racism in the nation. In another case, which Rufo discussed with Carlson last month, Sandia National Laboratories, which designs nuclear weapons, sent its white male executives to a mandatory training in which they, according to Rufo, wrote letters apologizing to women and people of color.”

Rufo challenged President Trump to use his executive authority to extirpate CRT from the federal government.

The Debate

CNN’s Brian Stelter (as well as Rufo himself) traced Trump’s decision directly to the independent investigative journalist’s self-proclaimed “one-man war” on CRT, of which the recent Carlson appearance was only the latest salvo.

Selter characterized Trump’s move as a reactionary attack on the current national “reckoning” on race. He cited the Washington Post’s claim that, “racial and diversity awareness trainings are essential steps in helping rectify the pervasive racial inequities in American society, including those perpetuated by the federal government.”

So which is it? Is CRT “divisive” and “toxic” or is it “rectifying” and “anti-racist”?

Intellectual Ancestry

To answer that, it would help to trace CRT to its roots. Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory, which began as an academic movement in the 1930s. Critical Theory emphasizes the “critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures,” as Wikipedia states. Critical Race Theory does the same, with a focus on racial power structures, especially white supremacy and the oppression of people of color.

The “power structure” prism stems largely from Critical Theory’s own roots in Marxism—Critical Theory was developed by members of the Marxist “Frankfurt School.” Traditional Marxism emphasized economic power structures, especially the supremacy of capital over labor under capitalism. Marxism interpreted most of human history as a zero-sum class war for economic power.

“According to the Marxian view,” wrote the economist Ludwig von Mises, “human society is organized into classes whose interests stand in irreconcilable opposition.”

Mises called this view a “conflict doctrine,” which opposed the “harmony doctrine” of classical liberalism. According to the classical liberals, in a free market economy, capitalists and workers were natural allies, not enemies. Indeed, in a free society all rights-respecting individuals were natural allies.

A Bitter Inheritance

Classical Race Theory arose as a distinct movement in law schools in the late 1980s. CRT inherited many of its premises and perspectives from its Marxist ancestry.

The pre-CRT Civil Rights Movement had emphasized equal rights and treating people as individuals, as opposed to as members of a racial collective. “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Martin Luther King famously said.

In contrast, CRT dwells on inequalities of outcome, which it generally attributes to racial power structures. And, as we’ve seen from the government training curricula, modern CRT forthrightly judges white people by the color of their skin, prejudging them as racist by virtue of their race. This race-based “pre-trial guilty verdict” of racism is itself, by definition, racist.

The classical liberal “harmony doctrine” was deeply influential in the movements to abolish all forms of inequality under the law: from feudal serfdom, to race-based slavery, to Jim Crow.

But, with the rise of Critical Race Theory, the cause of racial justice became more influenced by the fixations on conflict, discord, and domination that CRT inherited from Marxism.

A huge portion of society’s ills were attributed to one particular collective’s diabolical domination: capitalist hegemony for Marxism, white supremacy for CRT.

Just as Marxism demonized capitalists, CRT vilifies white people. Both try to foment resentment, envy, and a victimhood complex among the oppressed class it claims to champion.

Traditional Marxists claimed that all capitalists benefit from the zero-sum exploitation of workers. Similarly, CRT “diversity trainers” require white trainees to admit that they “benefit from racism.”

Traditional Marxists insisted that bourgeois thoughts were inescapably conditioned by “class interest.” In the same way, CRT trainers push the notion that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” as a result of their whiteness.

Given the above, it should be no wonder that CRT has been criticized as “racist” and “divisive.”

Reckoning or Retrogression?

Supporters of CRT cast it as a force for good in today’s “rectifying reckoning” over race.

But CRT’s neo-Marxist orientation only damages race relations and harms the interests of those it claims to serve.

In practice, the class war rhetoric of Marxism was divisive and toxic for economic relations. And, far from advancing the interests of the working classes, it led to mass poverty and devastating famines, not to mention staggering inequality between the elites and the masses.

Today, the CRM-informed philosophy, rhetoric, and strategy of the Black Lives Matter organization (whose leadership professed to be “trained Marxists”) is leading to mass riots, looting, vandalism, and assault. The divisive violence has arrested progress for the cause of police reform, destroyed countless black-owned small businesses, and economically devastated many black communities.

Those who truly wish to see racial harmony should dump the neo-Marxists and learn more about classical liberalism. FEE.org is the perfect place to start.

Is Trump’s Ban a Form of Censorship?

So much for CRT being a force for good. Of course, even horrible ideas are protected by the First Amendment. The government should never use force to suppress people from expressing ideas, speech, or theories it dislikes.

Critics insist that President Trump is engaged in this kind of censorship by targeting CRT.

Not so.

No one is banning White Fragility, the blockbuster CRT manifesto. No one is locking up those who preach CRT or ordering mentions of it stripped from the internet.

The memo simply says that taxpayer dollars will no longer be spent promulgating this theory to federal government employees. As heads of the executive branch, presidents have wide latitude to make the rules for federal agencies under their control. Deciding how money is spent certainly falls under their proper discretion—and it is always done with political preferences in mind, one way or the other.

It is not censorship for Trump to eliminate funding for CRT, anymore than it was “censorship” for the Obama administration to choose to tie federal contracts to a business’s embrace of LGBT rights.

Elections have consequences, one of the most obvious being that the president gets to run the executive branch. If we don’t want the president’s political preferences to be so significant in training programs, then we should simply reduce the size of government and the number of bureaucrats.

In the meantime, stripping the federal government of the divisive, toxic, and neo-Marxist ideology of Critical Race Theory is a positive development for the sake of racial justice and harmony.

Dan Sanchez

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor of FEE.org.

Tyler Brandt

Tyler Brandt is a Senior Associate Editor at FEE. He is a graduate of UW-Madison with a B.A. in Political Science. In college, Tyler was a FEE Campus Ambassador, President of his campus YAL chapter, and Research Intern at the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy.

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo is a libertarian-conservative journalist and the Eugene S. Thorpe Writing Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

Republished with permission from the Foundation for Economic Education.

Image: YouTube

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