Meet the parents yanking their children — some five million of them — from schools that they say aren’t working.
In March 2020, as the coronavirus engulfed America, Kristen Wrobel got the news: “We heard on Friday that there would be no school for two weeks. Which just turned into no school.”
That was the last time her children — one in third grade, one in first — were in a classroom.
In the beginning, they did the remote-school thing. Wrobel, a 42-year-old stay-at-home mom with a bachelor’s degree in software engineering, called it a “nightmare.” The Zoom sessions, the Italian lessons on Duolingo, the stuff she had to print out, the isolation, the tears, the nagging, the shuttling the kids between her house, near Burlington, Vermont, and their dad’s, a half-hour away.
“Everyone was freaking out all the time,” she said.
By May, at the risk of violating state truancy laws, Wrobel had stopped fighting and let her kids log on (or not) whenever they felt like it. It was, she said, “the darkest hour before dawn.”
That September, she started homeschooling. She didn’t like all the restrictions her kids’ private school had implemented: Students seated six feet apart. Masked. In wedding tents. Outside.
She figured she’d send her kids back to the school in 2021, after everything had gone back to normal.
That was then. Now? “There’d have to be a revolution in schooling.”
. . .
Dave Cormier, who runs the Office of Open Learning at the University of Windsor, suggested that homeschooled students are simply forcing a long overdue conversation.
“We used to live in a world of information scarcity,” he said. “At the first universities, 800 years ago, students couldn’t even touch the books, so whatever you wrote down or could remember was fantastic.” In the age of Google, we face the opposite problem: information overload. “This all requires us to ask the question, ‘What are we really doing here?’”
Are we creating a brave new, standardless world stripped of any canonical texts? Or are we reaching backward?
Roy Speed, in Bethel, noted that many of those behind the most radical political experiment in history studied in little, rickety houses, in medium-sized, mostly uncultured cities or on the edges of sprawling farmlands. They read with the aid of candlelight. They were Zoom-less. They squeezed their studies in between milking cows and learning how to use a rifle. They were steeped in the greatest minds of the ancient world and the Enlightenment.
The Founders did not have the benefit of any playground or tablet or teachers union, but they were free thinkers. The Constitution, Speed pointed out, “was largely the work of people instructed at home.”
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
