Education & Parenting

Learning at Our House is a suite of products for homeschoolers that covers history, music, literature, and science. The classes are taught online to a live audience and are available as recordings as well. Scott Powell created History at Our House, the original program, and later invited others to create the adjunct products.

The U.S. government’s “pay as you earn” program for financing college students’ education is immoral, as it forces taxpayers to subsidize student loans and to assume the financial risks of doing so. Fortunately, Lumni, a pioneering private college finance company, offers an inspiring example of how students can acquire college financing by strictly voluntary means.

Although history departments in liberal arts colleges certainly should teach students about America’s founding documents and principles, government has no moral right to force colleges to teach that subject or any subject—nor does it have a moral right to compel taxpayers to finance colleges.

Children need to learn science for the same reason they need to learn the other core subjects: to prepare them for life; to prepare them to achieve their values and be happy. Science education, as well as education in the other core subjects, prepares children by developing their ability to think.

According to Sunstein, although the Chinese government was not uniformly successful, “the new curriculum greatly affected students’ thinking” in various ways. Sunstein writes that the Chinese government indoctrinated students (among other things) to view the government as legitimate and democratic and to view free markets with suspicion.

Every major conservative who has commented on Common Core, pro or con, agrees that government should operate schools and establish curricula for those schools. They disagree only about the proper mix of involvement by federal, state, and local governments, and about the proper content of those standards.

When the student has to guess what the test writer means, or accept the teacher’s arbitrary pronouncements about what the vague problem “means,” the student “learns” not to solve math problems using his mind, but to doubt the efficacy of his mind and to become dependent on the teacher’s say-so.

Fractured political control may in some ways be slightly less-bad than centralized political control. But the only approach consistent with individual rights and with the aim of quality in education is to remove political controls from education entirely and thus to enable a free market in education to thrive.

The solution consistent with individual rights is neither to force students to pledge allegiance to a nation “under God” nor to forbid them to do so. Rather, the solution is to get government out of education altogether and leave private schools to establish their own policies on such matters.

Government funds its schools by forcibly confiscating wealth from individuals, in violation of their moral right to decide for themselves how to use their money. An inevitable consequence is that government seizes wealth from many people who do not benefit from or approve of the government schools they are forced to finance.