From Home

Schools here are shut down. At first it was a week extension of spring break. Then it was another two weeks or so. Then there was this headline:

“Large numbers” of Texas kids could miss rest of school year, education commissioner warns.

This is part of the attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19 to avoid overwhelming healthcare resources. Our churches are also closed. Political conventions (probably any other convention as well) are being postponed. What had been a request to avoid gatherings over 100 went down to 50, and earlier today the President and team announced we should avoid gatherings over 10.

Here at the Spherical Model household, we were already working at home. But that didn’t mean staying home all the time. So, apparently to enforce his need to abide by the directive, Mr. Spherical Model went and broke his ankle over the weekend. Ouch! Looks, as of today, that no surgery will be needed, so it will just be a temporary adjustment. Been there, done that. Healing happens—eventually. So, anyway, we’re staying home.

But, about those schools. What do families do when the government fails to educate their children as promised?

Homeschool.

That's the realization that hit me when someone offered this helpful schedule:

Found on Facebook; don't know original source

I thought, "That looks like a homeschool schedule." Not exactly ours. I knew homeschoolers who scheduled out the entire day in 15-minute increments. Ours was much less structured, but there was always an underlying schedule or expectation. It turns out there isn’t a right or wrong way: there is just your way, which will look different from everybody else’s way.

By the way, there was a followup to that graphic, with some humorous reality:

But what does it take for education to happen? It doesn't require anything that looks like a classroom reproduced in a home. Instead, it requires acting intentionally. Following through. And enjoying it together. Improved relationship means learning happens better. There’s evidence that learning can actually be undone in a negative environment—like a public middle school or high school where a child faces bullying or lack of social acceptance.

Here’s the thing: the government has been failing to adequately educate our children for quite a long time. This pandemic is just getting everybody’s attention.

I’m not the only one thinking along these lines as we hunker down in our virus-free homes. Andrew Klavan said this in his podcast today:

Maybe we can use this moment to think about what an even better future might look like….

Now that children are staying home from school and workers are telecommuting, maybe this is a moment to wonder: do we really need to send our kids to government facilities where teachers’ unions keep dangerous incompetence in place, spouting leftist gender horse manure? Couldn’t more moms work from home so that kids could be schooled in the values of their families? It’s worth wondering, anyway, if our new technology could bring back some of the home industries.

Maybe this is a moment when we solve the college debt problem by not sending kids to crappy colleges where they learn to hate their native land by reading communist histories by guys like Howard Zinn. Maybe this is the moment when places like Hillsdale can teach the truth in beauty online, and that’ll count as a college education.

Many more people could homeschool than thought they could. Here’s an opportunity to find out whether you can. And the world is adjusting to help you out.

I’m about to share a bunch of memes that we homeschoolers are getting a kick out of. Then I’ll share with you some of the links that have popped up just this week to help you out. The first has been around a while; I don't know the origin. The others were passed along by a homeschool friend; they were listed as posted by Leah Hovey (whom I don't know; she may have created them or just passed them along). 

OK, here are the links for you online learning enjoyment:

Scholastic releases free daily courses for kids stuck home amid coronavirus school closures

Over30 Virtual Field Trips with Links

Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden Home Safari Facebook Live each weekday at 3pm EDT

Stuck at Home? These 12 Famous Museums Offer Virtual Tours You Can Take on Your Couch

Paris Museums Put 100,000 Images Online for Unrestricted Public Use

  

75+ Entertaining and Educational Activities for When You’re Stuck Indoors

  

LUNCH DOODLES with Mo Willems!

Kennedy Center Education Artist-in-Residence at Home

LearnInColor.com

Not long ago, I posted about some of the various online resources for free or nearly free.

So, think about this: if it’s possible to do this for free, from home, do we need public schools? Is their main purpose just to house our students as a daycare facility? Or worse, to indoctrinate our kids with things we’d never want them to be taught if it were up to us?

Because it is up to us.

So, let this be your experiment. Take this sudden break from how things are always done. Use it. Choose to enjoy this crazy time with the family. Read aloud together. Talk about things that interest you, and what interests them. Use these great online resources. Do some online exploring every day. Do some play-learning together every day. And see if their appetite for learning goes up. See if yours does.

Maybe you were meant to be your kids’ main teacher all along.

Higher Education, Part I

There’s yet another free course available online from Hillsdale College: Economics101: The Principles of Free Market Economics. This is in addition to a growing assortment of online courses I’ve been enjoying the last couple of years:

·         Introduction to the Constitution

·         Constitution 101: The Meaning and History of the Constitution

·         Constitution 201: The Progressive Rejection of the Founding and the Rise of Bureaucratic Despotism

·         History 101—Western Heritage: From the Book of Genesis to John Locke

·         History 102—American Heritage: From Colonial Settlement to the Reagan Revolution

Hillsdale College

You could additionally enjoy the weekly radio series, Hillsdale Dialogues: A Survey of Great Books, Great Men, and Great Ideas, which is an hour-long discussion between Hillsdale President Larry Arnn and radio host Hugh Hewitt. All are archived, in case you miss them live.

Hillsdale online also provides the Kirby Center Lecture Series Archive. And there’s a Hillsdale College YouTube channel.

All of the above are free.  The courses are essentially the same courses, including readings, lectures, and discussions, as for students on campus. You can attend as given, keeping up with the coursework. Or you can do whatever part you want, at your convenience. Even if you do nothing more than listen to the lectures, you’ll be getting a lot. But the reading is also very worthwhile. And if you do it as given, you can participate in the Q&A followup to the lecture.

The Econ 101 class started a last week, September 23^rd, with a new lecture once a week, and the Q&A a few days later. So if you sign up right away, you can keep current. In the first week’s Q&A, there was some discussion of Scottish author Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Its publication coincided with the Declaration of Independence, 1776. That means the ideas were out there by our nation’s founding, but the book couldn’t have been widely read yet. However, by the 1790s the book showed up in 28% of libraries in this country. It was one of the pieces of common literature our founders were familiar with by the time they wrote the Constitution.

You can of course make a donation any time, although none is ever required. For a $50 donation, in conjunction with the Econ101 course, you can receive a copy of The Capitalist Manifesto. (If $50 is too much, you can get that book at Amazon for much less, but without the good feeling of supporting the Hillsdale educating-the-world mission.)

If you’re one of those people who have just started to awake to the need to pay attention to politics and current events—because of the tragedies of our times—and you want to educate yourself, these Hillsdale courses are an excellent starting place.

If you’re homeschooling teens, and you want to give them challenging work—something you’re willing to study along with them—these courses are a great resource. And they have the benefit of preparing your student for the kind of thinking required of them at a good college.

I don’t mean for this to be simply an ad for Hillsdale. I have been thinking specifically about higher education, and higher education costs, since the president’s speech on the subject in late August.

There is more I have to say on the president’s plans, which have slipped into obscurity during discussions of Syria, Obamacare funding, and debt ceilings.

In these posts I’ll cover the increasing free/low cost resources online for higher education. Then we’ll look at these questions:

·         What is the connection between higher learning and higher debt?

·         Is government best suited for taking on the rising cost of college education?

Higher Education Part II

Some years ago I was staying with my mother for a visit and happened across an AARP newsletter that actually interested me. The article was called “How to Learn Just about Anything Online for Free.” I’m all for learning, and even more so for free or very low cost.

It was a pretty good list. Some of it included major universities that have put lectures online—MIT (MIT OpenCourseware), Harvard (Harvard@home), and Berkeley (webcastBerkeley) among them. It listed a couple of sources for downloading textbooks and other books for as low as a dollar: AbeBooks.com and Alibris.com. This was before practically everything became available for e-readers through Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but I think these sources are supposed to be even less expensive.

OpenCulture.com was another recommended site being updated with new content. And for the even more tech savvy senior, ITunes U with over 100,000 educational video and audio files. Add to that AcademicEarth.org and of course YouTube EDU, which offers lectures from some of the top universities. Then there’s VideoLectures.Net and TedTalks (one of my favorites). There’s also WebMD and BBC video language learning courses. The list isn’t quite endless (although it might be nearly endless, now several years hence), but let’s just say there are a great many low-cost ways to get yourself educated from your computer. It’s not unheard of to imagine homeschooling through college on a shoestring budget.

For a little more cost, there’s GreatCourses.com, at about $100 per college level course.

Getting the information you want to learn—for little or no cost—is not the problem with higher education. So maybe it’s about getting a degree.

Options for that are growing online as well. BYU-Idaho, for example, has a growing program called Pathways, to help people get their college degrees through distance learning combined with local class groups. This can be ideal for homemakers who dropped out to support a spouse, or people who made it partway through college, took a job, and eventually had a career stall. The program is real college, accredited, with more support than traditional distant learning classes. (Mrs. Political Sphere and her sister are both in their first month of this program, and feeling great about getting back into progress toward a degree.)

Meanwhile, a typical college education is currently costing in the range of a starter home—often without the promise of salary commensurate with paying back student loans. 

Andy Kessler and Peter Thiel on Uncommon Knowledge

While I was thinking about higher education and gathering this list, I happened to spend an evening listening to the latest Uncommon Knowledge discussion, this one from September 20^th, with PayPal founder/venture capitalist Peter Thiel and author Andy Kessler talking with host Peter Robinson about the progress of technology, including the disappointment that it hasn’t gone further. Twenty-one minutes in, they switch gears and started discussing higher education.

I got down part of the conversation (from notes, so not necessarily direct or full quotes):

Peter Thiel: The top universities serve as a sort of tournament credential….  These colleges never want to expand the number of people they let in.

Peter Robinson: So they are in the business of exclusivity?

Peter Thiel: In that sense education is not a positive sum game about learning and education, but a zero sum game.

Andy Kessler: Universities are a sorting mechanism…. If corporations were allowed to give aptitude tests, universities would wither.

Peter Thiel: Yeah, 15-minutes aptitude tests would not cost you a quarter million dollars a semester…

Andy Kessler: And four years of your life….

Peter Robinson: So, top universities are in the best shape, not because they do a better job of educating, but because they’re in a better position to do the sorting.

Peter Theil: They [graduates] want to have the credentials of a top university, because it is an IQ test in disguise, yes.”

Andy Kessler [about online education affecting K-12 education]: We have the same problem we have with energy and pharmaceuticals. It’s a regulatory issue.

Peter Theil: Large sectors of our economy are government run—quasi-government run. And so, if you define technology as doing more with less—more computing power with less cost—education is the opposite. We’re doing less with more. We’re spending more and more money. The quality of the public school teachers has steadily gone down. So you’re getting less for more. So it’s actually moved in the opposite of a technological—it’s an anti-technological direction.

 

To summarize, what we have is a burst of availability of information and education sources for lower costs—just like you’d expect from a free market technology economy. But simultaneously we have ever more expensive and limited sources for the credentials necessary for upper-middle-class-and-higher success.

And it is at this point that the president steps in to “solve the problem of the cost of higher education.” Recall what Reagan once said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'”

Part III to come.