Free-Market Education
Catering to constituencies
When my parents first heard of home education in 1981, there was almost no curriculum available to homeschool families. The major publishers of Christian school curricula wouldn’t sell to home educators. Other textbooks were not readily available, either. Most of approximately 15,000 children who were homeschooled in those early days had a curriculum cobbled together from library books, supplemental workbooks that one could purchase at the grocery store, and a lot of parental ingenuity and homemade worksheets produced on a typewriter.
Over forty years later, there are now an estimated three million currently homeschooled students. New homeschoolers (and veteran ones, too) are overwhelmed by the volume and variety of curriculum available. The large homeschool conferences have hundreds of vendors in their exhibit halls, and they represent only a fraction of the curriculum companies that offer homeschool materials. Many of these companies cater specifically to home educators with curriculum written by homeschool moms and dads - or even home education graduates. This abundance is because the free market is at work in home education. The government doesn’t subsidize it. The government, in most states, regulates it very little (in some states not at all).
Because parents are in charge of home education, and because they care about their children, parents choose curriculum that matches what their children need. Different programs may be selected for different siblings. Sometimes, a parent may change the math curriculum in the middle of the year because one book is not working for that child and they find something better. This does not happen in government schools - or even in most private schools. Because of tailored classes and parental tutoring, home schooled children, in general, thrive.
Are there a few children who slip through the homeschooling cracks and don’t do so well? Surely. But there are, and will be, children who slip through the cracks of every system of education. However, parents do a better job of making sure their children are educated than the government can or ever will. We need to restore the free market to education - and restore education to the free market. Are you willing to STEP OUT of government-funded and government-forced education? Are you willing to STEP OUT into truly free market education?