The School Revolution (14 page)

T
he most important aspect of any program of education is the curriculum. Whether it is delivered in the form of books, online articles, YouTube videos, recitations, essay writing, term paper writing, public speaking, or classroom lectures, it is the content of the curriculum that is central.

As I have argued throughout this book, parents have the authority—meaning the legitimate power—to determine the content of their children’s education. They can delegate to specialists the actual instruction process. They have done this for thousands of years. There was a time when rich families hired tutors to educate their children in the home. As early as 1642, the Massachusetts
Bay Colony passed a requirement that towns provide schools to educate children in the Bible. In 1837 the State of Massachusetts created a Department of Education, and from that time on, parents made the decision whether to send their children to a tax-funded school or to private school. Alternatively, parents could teach the children at home.

Parents cannot evade the responsibility
of determining which curriculum best meets the needs of their children. The delegation of authority does not transfer authority away from the parents. It merely transfers the details of implementing that authority to a third party. But the third party answers to somebody—ultimately the parents or the state.

With the resurrection of homeschooling in America ever since the late 1970s,
parents have regained control over the content of their children’s education.
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They have become more familiar with the books and materials available for family education. They have learned more about what works in terms of teaching students skills. But as the student gets older, and the materials get more complex and more difficult, parents again face the problem of delegating to third parties
the responsibility for adopting a curriculum and a teaching methodology. Parents do not have great confidence in their own abilities once the child enters high school.

This is why parents must exercise great caution in deciding which curriculum to assign to their children. They may not be in a position to read all materials in the curriculum, but they should at
least trust the person who has assembled it. This is why competing curriculum materials are based heavily on trust. Parents trust other homeschooling parents when making evaluations of specific curriculums. They talk with other parents on homeschooling forums. They attend homeschooling conventions, where they can hear presentations from sellers of curriculum materials. They do not turn over their
children’s education to third parties without a careful investigation of the competing claims of the sellers of the materials.

We are seeing a proliferation of homeschool materials. This is positive. Parents have far greater degrees of choice today than they had even a decade ago. They can find material that better matches their goals for their children, their children’s abilities,
and their presuppositions about the way the world works, or at least should work. The fit between the curriculum and the child is much better today than it was a decade ago, let alone a generation ago.

I believe a program should target students in the top 20 percent. In other words, 80 percent of the students presently enrolled in classroom
environments in the United States should not be the targets of a homeschool program. The students who are targeted have to be self-disciplined. They have to be self-motivated. They should not be dependent on parental nagging to get them through the program. If the student is dependent upon parental nagging, the parent would be wise to choose a homeschool program other than the one I have put together.

By concentrating on the top 20 percent of students, I am concentrating on people who I expect to be leaders at some point in the future.
The entire curriculum is based on the development of leadership
. This has to be the top 20 percent of a cross section of kids who would otherwise be in a classroom. I am not trying to educate the top 1 percent. I am not even trying to educate the top
4 percent. The curriculum I have assembled is suitable for students in the top 4 percent, or even the top 1 percent, but they will get through it faster.

A homeschool curriculum, K–3, should be aimed at helping the teacher—presumably the mother but it could certainly be the father—impart the basics of self-learning to young children. The videos and other teaching materials
are therefore aimed at an adult teacher, not at the student. But sometime around fourth grade, the educational program shifts in the direction of self-instruction. More and more of the work is done by the student. The best way to do this is to require a daily writing assignment. The student has got to learn how to analyze what is read, and then put the pieces together in the form of a simple essay.
Students who write a weekly essay, or even a daily essay, learn the basics of analytical reasoning and writing before they reach high school. They begin to develop these skills quite early, but they become self-educated beginning about the sixth grade.

It is difficult to decide when to make the transition. Some students are ready in the fourth grade. Others are not ready until the fifth.
Some students are ready only in the sixth grade. Because I am targeting the top 20 percent, the program I have designed aims at making the transition to self-education at the beginning of the fourth grade. The fourth grade is not entirely based on the principle of self-education, but it moves in that direction by the end of the year. Then, in the fifth grade, the student begins to accept greater
responsibility for his own education. The curriculum is geared to helping a student make this transition.

With this in mind, I want to describe the curriculum that I have assembled. I want you to understand the logic of the curriculum, but I also want you to understand its technology.

One size does not fit all. Therefore, the ideal
high school curriculum should have four tracks. There should be one track for students who want to specialize in the social sciences and humanities. There should be a second track for students who want to go into natural science. The third track should be aimed at students who want to apprentice with a local businessman in high school and then turn this experience into a career. The fourth track
should be a fine arts track.
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The student would make the decision in his second year of high school to take one or another of the tracks. This is the equivalent of deciding on a major in college.

My curriculum will concentrate initially on the social sciences and humanities. I think there is a greater market among my readers for this than for the other tracks,
although the business track will also be popular. The curriculum will provide sufficient courses on mathematics and science to enable a graduate to get into a good college, if this is what the student wants to do. (Even better: earn a BA by distance learning at age eighteen.) A meaningful college course in physics requires the student to know calculus. This is why high school physics should be given
in the senior year, and only to students who have already had at least one year of calculus. The kind of physics taught in the typical high school is not really the equivalent of a college-level physics class. So students have to understand calculus before they take physics. The earlier courses in science should be aimed at either earth science or biology. Students taking these sciences do not
require an advanced math course to get a preliminary grounding. Chemistry falls somewhere in the middle.

With respect to starting a home-based business, my curriculum in the senior year is going to devote considerable time to the basics of running a business. Students interested in starting a business will be allowed to take courses in business math rather than calculus. They will be
given training in how to write effective advertising copy. This will be part of their English class in the senior year. This is an aspect of rhetoric. Nothing like this is taught in any high school I am aware of. At the end of the student’s sophomore year, he will be allowed to begin coursework in entrepreneurship. This is an aspect of business. Students going into business should have a more intense
understanding of economic theory than those majoring in the natural sciences or the fine arts.

Public high schools over the last generation have abandoned the teaching of history. They have substituted what they call social studies, which is geared to contemporary politics such as global warming, poverty, multiculturalism, gender politics,
and similar politically correct topics. People can major in these fields in college, but when they graduate, they are unemployable. I see no reason to substitute this kind of social science, which is basically contemporary politics, for a detailed study of Western civilization and American history.

This is why the curriculum that my staff is putting together requires each student to
take two years of Western civilization. Colleges a generation ago required students to take a one-year course in Western civ, but very few colleges require this today. With my program, at the end of his junior year, a student will have a better understanding of the history of Western civilization than 95 percent of all college graduates in the United States. If parents think this is an advantage,
they will adopt my curriculum.

This curriculum uses a teaching strategy not used in any high school and only by a handful of expensive private colleges. The curriculum is self-reinforcing. When the student takes the Western civilization course, he also takes a course in Western literature. So in his history course the student reads about the history of a particular civilization in a
particular time period, and in his English course he reads representative examples of the literature of that society in that same period. The student learns to recognize those aspects of the literature of a particular culture as manifesting the presuppositions that undergirded the entire society.

This way, a student begins to understand the interrelationship of literature, politics,
religion, economics, family life, and civil justice. He sees that there are connections among all these aspects of social life. He is able to assess these interrelationships. The course in history will not be pure abstraction. It will be reinforced by examples that provide evidence that a particular worldview of a particular society in a particular era was manifested in the literature of that era.

It is common in English classes for the English teacher, who majored in English, to teach literature in terms of the academic criteria of English departments. The teacher focuses on plot, mood, tone, and a lot of concepts understood only by people who majored in English. The typical student is not going to major in English; nor is he particularly interested in the subtleties of literary
creation, let alone literary criticism. He is interested in the plot insofar as it holds his attention. If it does not hold his attention, he is not interested in plot. Then he is surely uninterested in the techniques that the author used to create the plot.

The importance of literature in society can be very great. But its importance must be assessed in terms of the widely held presuppositions
of the people in that society regarding the five major points of social theory: God, man, law, causation, and time. To the extent that a piece of literature illustrates one or more of these fundamental categories of social theory, the student benefits from a careful reading of that piece of literature. He is able to fit this information into an overall perspective of what a particular
society in a particular period held as its fundamental tenets of faith.

At the end of the two-year course in Western civilization, a student should have a good understanding of the changes that have taken place in the thinking of large numbers of people in the West. Modern society is certainly not a complex mirror image of Greek society in 300
B.C.
Christianity has shaped the development
of Western civilization. So has the Enlightenment. There been many competing worldviews in the history of Western civilization, and different cultures in the West have adopted different aspects of these competing worldviews. A student at the end of this course will have a good understanding of how the various beliefs that were promoted by specific religions and movements have infiltrated modern
society and yet have been modified by rival positions.

My goal is to equip the student to be a good citizen, but more than this, to be a productive member of a society that is not fundamentally political. Greek society in 300
B.C.
was overwhelmingly political. So was Roman society. But this was not true of the Hebrews; nor was it true of the early church. Of far greater importance
were the family, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, economics, and land ownership.

In addition to courses in Western literature and in Western history, there will be courses in economics and government. Then there will be a one-year course in American history, which will be paralleled by a one-year course in the U.S. Constitution. I want students to have a detailed familiarity
with the Constitution, and with the political developments in Supreme Court decisions that have replaced the original intent of the framers of the Constitution and the voters who ratified it.

My curriculum will inoculate the student against the Keynesianism of the typical university. He will not enter college intellectually unarmed. He will have a good understanding of the history of
the United States, the history of Western civilization, the development of literature, economic development, and the growth of the welfare-warfare state. He will know the weaknesses of government intervention into the economy. He will not be taken in by the standard textbook accounts of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. He will have been given a thorough introduction to the libertarian principle of
nonintervention: the freedom philosophy of peace and prosperity. He will not only know the theory of nonintervention, but will be familiar with the outcomes of repeated violations of the principle of nonintervention by the federal government.