THOUGHTS ON TEACHING:

The lingering inertia of the ‘normal’ exerts an enormous pull even among those who should know better. In spending time among homeschoolers and those in the Classical education movement one commonly encounters the notion that if only things were the way they were five, ten, twenty, etc. years ago, there would be no need for their independent approach, and a kind of bunker mentality where, if we simply wait out this storm, the sunshine will come again soon.

This will not happen and the system is your enemy. By system I don’t specifically mean the public school system, although that is a major part of the problem. I mean managerialism as a method of rule and neoliberalism as the ideology behind it. . . .

The homeschool movement is one of the two most important phenomena in education in the last century, along with the ascent of progressive education in the 1920s and 30s. While the latter hammered the final nail into the coffin of public education as the culturally-informed pursuit of excellence, the former represents a guerilla movement aimed at the entire progressive ascendency. Nothing signifies dissent from the neoliberal consensus like withholding one’s children from Mammon, and homeschooling signifies the fullest possible assumption of personal and familial autonomy. Nothing terrifies the managerial elites like homeschooling; if they ruled over a disarmed population it would already have been banned, as it has been among the beaten peoples of Western Europe. Much of the discourse around capitalism’s demand that women work outside the home ignores the fact that the two-income trap is designed as much to keep the public schools going as the reverse. . . . Nothing terrifies the managerial elites like homeschooling; if they ruled over a disarmed population it would already have been banned.

20 years ago I would have thought this was overwrought and paranoid.