If our new Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, is looking for a creative way to fix our public schools, she should look to homeschoolers. As Thomas Purifoy explains, homeschooling offers a model for how our schools can be run more effectively.
“Public education is the fount of most problems in the United States, not simply based on content, but also on structure,” says Purifoy. “Simply put: it is economically impossible for American public education to be successful in the long run (or the short run, for that matter).” Purifoy offers three lessons centralized public education can learn from the free market economy of home education:
Instead of getting more centralized, educational and curricular control should be pushed down to the lowest possible level (the school and the teacher herself, with significant parental control). This would require booting out the unions (that efficient perpetuator of educational mediocrity), breaking our huge schools apart and creating a whole new market-based model of education, where size/content matches local market needs, curriculum and methods are in the hands of parents/teachers, etc. It would also require public schools to compete with each other for students (who would likely use vouchers—although when I say this, it is a concession to a faulty principle, since vouchers are just another form of redistribution of wealth, albeit far superior to the current setup).
What is my proof for this? Consider one fact: There are hundreds of thousands of mothers who have no educational degrees, no educational backgrounds, and almost no educational experience who spend far less time educating their children than their public school counterparts, yet their kids consistently outperform the vast majority of public school students in the nation year after year.
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Joe Carter is a Senior Editor at the Acton Institute. Joe also serves as an editor at the The Gospel Coalition, a communications specialist for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College.
This article was originally published at acton.org. Used with permission.
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