Digital Cowboy

It’s not easy to remain committed to the choice of home education. There is an organized, concerted effort to make it difficult. The primary opponents would make it completely illegal if they could and that alone says much about what drives them. But I’ve found that even those that nominally support the concept are often challengers simply by ignorance.

I’ve been asked often - and in many different contexts - why I’m so determined to shield my children from the government indoctrination camps. In fact, I often ask myself that question because I need to bolster my resolve in the face of a world that disagrees with me. Everywhere. All the time.

There are many, many reasons, but here’s the shortest, easiest answer:

I’m not raising employees. I’ve been given responsibility for two wonderful little people and I want them to be employers.

Here is the longer explanation of that statement:
I don’t want my children to ever need to work for someone else. I want them to learn business and trades (multiple) and skills (multiple) that will allow them to pursue their passions and create multiple income streams, hopefully of the passive variety. Those are the things I’m pursuing now. With God’s Blessing on “everything I set my hand to” it’s going well. But it took me way too many years to get here and, in my opinion, I’m just now at the starting point.

It’s a sappy cliche that all parents want their children to have “a better life” than they did. It’s also either not true or there are a whole lot of very, very ignorant parents. I suspect it’s the latter, it’s by design and it’s ultimately forced government schooling that is to blame.

Don’t misunderstand me - there is no shame in working for someone else. But it should be a temporary situation if it’s necessary at all. Selling nearly half of your waking hours to others for nearly half of your life is not “living.” It’s plum stupid. It’s also unnatural. We were created as sovereign beings and tasked with subduing the earth. For the last 150 years (or so) in this country, there has been an organized concerted effort to redirect us from that God-given directive into subservience and it’s done primarily, if not entirely, through compulsory government schooling.

There is no one in a government school that can teach you how to be an employer because there aren’t any there. Everyone who has ever wasted twelve or thirteen years in a government school and gone on to eventually become an employer did it in spite of that “education,” not because of it. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out; you can’t learn from someone what they don’t know. There is no one involved in government schooling, at any level, that is an employer.

It’s a machine; a headless monster. Everyone there is a victim of the system. No, you can’t reform it from within. No, you can’t fix it. It’s broken by design and it’s running smoothly, accomplishing its intended purpose.

That purpose is to condition its victims to quietly obey arbitrary authority and irrational rules. Sit down, shut up and do what you’re told. The teachers and administrators - no matter what their intentions - are just as much victims as the students. It is evil on a very basic level and it is the root of everything wrong with America.

If you intend to change my mind about this, you’ll need to show me the individual in charge in that mess. Be careful if you go seeking that, though. That “i” word is impermissible inside the machine.

In summary, home education to me is simply a return to the way God intended things to be and the way things were in this country at its start. My job, as I see it, is to teach my children how to prosper as sovereign individuals. The hardest part of that is explaining to them that the ever-growing government is a violent beast that hates them, not their friend.

If you disagree with me about any of this, I’ll smile and listen to your opinion with sympathy. It’s OK. Do what you feel is best for your children. My children will need employees just like I do.