Education is pivotal to anyone’s success, especially when it comes to your children.
The more knowledge they acquire and learn how to apply, it sets them up for a high probability of success as they become adults.

With that being said, the institution that you allow to educate your kids is very important and must be selected with care.
If you want to lead your family effectively, then you have to be mindful of this.

One of my favorite quotes of all time is by Mark Twain, he said, “Don’t let school get in the way of your education.”
I thought that was very powerfully stated and it goes hand in hand with what we’re going to be talking about in this week’s episode.

I wanna explore this controversial topic of having your kids be Homeschooled vs going to Public School and let you decide which is best for your child?

We are talking about whether it’s better to Homeschool your kids vs sending them to Public School. Now I’m going to do my best to not be biased towards one or the other, but I will be honest with you right off the bat. I lean heavily towards Homeschooling and I’ll give you my reasons why.

At the end of the day, my job is to equip you with what you need to make a decision, so if you don’t agree with my reasons, that’s perfectly ok. I’m not claiming to be 100% right, but just know that whenever I make decisions that affect the well being of my family, they are always calculated decisions backed up by logic and reason. So don’t just get pissed and dismiss this just because a friend of a friend who you barely know told you that homeschooling is horrible. Do some research first.

Alright, so the way this is gonna go is I’m gonna break this down into 4 categories and we’re gonna explore how both the Homeschool and Public School systems tackle each.

1. Quality of Education

Most parents, when I was a kid, automatically viewed Public School as a good thing. With marketing phrases like, “don’t be a fool, stay in school” going around, I mean who could blame them? No one wanted their kid to be a “fool.” So immediately the qualification for being a “good kid” was directly correlated to how well you did in school.

If you got good grades, you were classified as a good kid and parents were quick to reward you for it. But let’s unpack this a bit, you see in Public School, that A is based on how good you comply with authority (aka doing what the teacher says even if what she says is stupid) and how good you are at memorizing. When you had a vocabulary test, you needed to remember that this word was associated with this definition and if you did not remember that, you failed the test. They taught you the “What” and told you to memorize it because that would make you a good student. But they never taught you the “how.” Think back to your schooling if you went to Public School, do you remember ever getting taught the most effective techniques for how to memorize things. Chances are they probably didn’t teach you that. They just put stuff in front of you and said, “hey memorize this because it’s gonna be on the test.”

The Quality of Education in the Public School system has been going down every generation. If you think back to how kids were taught before Public School was even a thing. It was done through apprenticeship and mentoring. And kids were taught in the home by their parents how to read, write, and arithmetic. Yeah they were probably not showing you complex mathematical formulas, but they taught you how to add and subtract shit so you can function in society. And if you expressed interest in a trade that your parents didn’t know how to do, guess what would happen? Let’s say your dad was a blacksmith and you wanted to be baker, he would take your ass to the baker’s house and say “hey Baker, can you teach my son how to become a baker.” A deal would be struck with a handshake and for a few hours a week, you’d go to the baker’s house to learn.

It wasn’t a memorization game, it was practical application of the knowledge acquired. There wasn’t a final, your final was the ability to actually bake something that people would wanna eat. Such a simple concept right? That was Homeschooling in it’s purest form.

In Public School on the other hand, they slowly got away from kinesthetic learning in which you had to actually apply the knowledge you were getting. On top of that, they’ve willfully dumbed down the metrics for success in school. There was a time when there was no such thing as A+ or A- it was just an A, that’s it. But little by little someone complained and they lowered the standard. And they did it again and again resulting in what we have now. Have you guys seen how they make elementary school kids do simple math problems nowadays? That shit is insane and confusing.

There was a time in Public School where they would pray or have the Bible incorporated into the curriculum. There was at least some moral foundations being set. When they would teach Creation and the Big Bang Theory, and let you work out the decision in your mind. Someone complained and got that out of schools. Now we are seeing the result of that in today’s youth.

The attention your child receives in a Public School setting vs a Homeschool setting also contributes to the quality. Have you ever babysat more than 2 kids? It’s not an easy task, no matter the age group. Yet we’re completely ok with 1 teacher to 30 students for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Think about that. How much attention is your kid actually gonna get? It’s a complete joke when you think about it, but ain’t no one laughing.

Public School will never come close to the quality of education you can get in a Homeschool environment.

2. Social Experience

One of the biggest arguments I always hear against Homeschooling your kids is that they will not get the experience of being social with other kids. You’ll hear people say, “I don’t wanna deprive them of being social with other kids and making friends.” At face value, to most people this makes sense and they go, “yeah, that’s a good point.” But I wanna ask you something, in order for you to be social, what do you do?

Normally you go out, either to a bar or restaurant, maybe a party. You plan some social setting to go to for the purpose of being social. Yeah you go to work, but you don’t spend the entire time socializing at work because you have to actually get work done. So this argument doesn’t really hold any water with me because even when kids are homeschooled, they still have social activities that they participate in. They still have to engage with the outside world in some capacity, it’s not like they’re completely secluded from the world at large. Just because they don’t have the traditional school experience, doesn’t automatically default them to being at a disadvantage socially.

When I was working for a tech company, I used to teach kids how to use tablets and computers. Occasionally, we would host community events for schools, like field trips or camps. I worked there for almost 10 years so I ran a lot of these and in my experience, the most well behaved and social kids were homeschooled. I kid you not, it always surprised me. When I had a large class from a neighboring school, most of them did not cooperate and were easily distracted. They also didn’t communicate very well and were extremely shy and soft spoken when you would ask them a question.

On the other hand, the homeschooled kids would always come in very calm and composed. They would shake your hand to greet you out of respect and actually look at you in the eyes. They communicated effectively and were not shy even when speaking in front of a group of other homeschooled kids. They were focused on the task at hand and we would always end up finishing the project sooner than the larger Public school classes. I mean it was a night and day difference.

You see, the reason this tends to happen is that kids that are Homeschooled tend to be accustomed to speaking with adults most of the time. Kids that are crammed into overpopulated classrooms tend to interact and speak with kids all day. Kids who vary in their communication levels and what happens is that these kids get used to just talking with kids. They rarely speak with adults, that’s how you end up with the quiet kid in class that never raises his or her hand when the teacher asks a question. On the playground during recess, that kid is probably really talkative amongst the other kids, but not when it comes to speaking with adults. They become shy and introverted because they’re not used to it.

You think about how you learn from older mentors. I know that as a teenager, when I would speak with my mentor/father figure, he would use words that I didn’t know. He would communicate in a way that made me wanna emulate it and in turn adopt a higher level of communication. I became more effective at communicating with people within his age group even as a teenager.

The other thing that comes into play is extracurricular activities. It’s kind of interesting how there’s a lot of communities out there that won’t let your kid participate in community sports like soccer or little league if they are not part of a neighboring public school. You see the same people that say that Homeschooled kids are deprived of the social experience are the ones that are ok with allowing this to happen. Which to me doesn’t really make sense.

Although, Homeschooling your child does come with the flexibility of you being able to take him or her to any extra curricular activity any day of the week. If your kid wants to do Karate or swimming lessons, they can make any class without having to worry about a public school schedule. You as the parent control their time, not the school, which is the way it should be.

Homeschooling your kids will not deprive them of a social experience, on the contrary, it has the potential to strengthen it and make them more effective communicators.

3. Worldview Influence

This is something that is becoming more and more present in modern days, but it’s something that’s been going on for a long time. There’s some people that jokingly refer to Public Schools as indoctrination camps and it is very true. This was evident even back when I was going to school.

Almost every teacher I had in Middle School and High School was a Democrat and every single one of them complained about Republicans in all of my classes. 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months out of the year, of pointing the finger at one political party with no factual evidence, just emotional outbursts. It was the year 2000, the election between Al Gore and George Bush. Now I’m not here to argue politics with you over who was the better presidential candidate, I just want you to pay attention to what happened in this situation objectively.

I remember my mom and dad getting home from the voting booth and as soon as they walked in, I asked them both, “who did you vote for?” My mom said, “Al Gore” and I replied, “good job mom, way to go.” Then I asked my dad, he said, “oh I voted for Bush.” I remember looking at him with such disgust like he had committed the ultimate sin. I got pissed and said to him, “how could you do that dad? Don’t you know that they’re the bad guys.” He said, “What? How do you know that? Listen son, my vote was simple. Al Gore is for abortion, George Bush is not, I’m hate abortion and I think it’s wrong to kill babies, so I went with Bush.”

Here’s the crazy part about this, I hated abortion too, I still do. I am against killing babies, so why was I pissed off? It was because I had been told what to believe in school. I had been taught what to think and the influence the teachers held over me was greater than that of my parents. So much so that it skewed my own fundamental beliefs without me questioning it or really understanding why. This is the problem with Public school, they focus on teaching you what to think, instead of how to think.

The quality of your education goes up when you are taught how to think, instead of what to think. It wasn’t until I started doing my own research and expanding my education to things outside of school that I really began to have independent thought. Some of you may listen to this and get stuck on the politics that I just brought up because you’re so triggered by this shit. If that’s you, you should really start asking yourself why? Why is there such an emotional impulse when these topics are brought up. You might be a victim of those indoctrination camps, just like I was.

For those of you that get it though and still have kids in Public School, I want you to think about the power of influence. You see, because school has always been seen as this “good” thing, you automatically assume that everyone there has your kid’s best interest at heart. Well I’m here to tell you that it’s more than likely not true. They could honestly care less about your kid. They care about the reputation of the school and the funding the school they can receive. It is an assembly line and the teachers they put in front of your kids are not thoroughly vetted. That’s why you find out about abuse or negative influence from these teachers and their peers.

If your kid spends 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, away from you being pumped with values and beliefs that go against yours. Whether it comes from the teacher or their peers, it doesn’t matter. The issue is that you are not the dominant influence in their life and you are willfully giving up that power. Then you wonder why when you get home after work, your kid won’t listen to you. When he or she starts exhibiting behaviors that go against your core values.

If you want to instill the same worldview that you have in your kids, don’t send them to Public School. Your home will never be completely at peace because everyone is operating by a different set of rules.

4. The Paper Trail

It always comes down to the money.
When Public Schools came into the picture, the Industrial Age was in full effect and there were a lot of factory jobs that needed filling. So they said, how we can we educate a mass population of people so that we could breed factory workers as quickly as possible. It was made for the purpose of being an assembly line to produce employees.

As time went on, women entered the workforce as well and there was no one at home with the kids anymore. Some of this was due to feminism and some due to necessity. During World War 2, so many of the men that went to war died and didn’t make it back, so mom had to go to work to make ends meet. Then with the rise of welfare and social programs that incentivized mom to not need dad in the home anymore. And for households with 2 parents, due to inflation and the cost of goods going up, it became almost impossible to live off a one income home. Public school ultimately became the day care, while mom and dad went to work. Throw in a horrible financial education in which the parents don’t know how to manage money, credit, investments, or even how to advance career wise to make more money, you have yourself a perfect cycle that continues to repeat itself.

Behind all of this is a paper trail. You have to come to question, who backs the Public Schools? Well it’s the State. The State funds them using our Taxpayer money. So in essence when you connect all the dots here. You allow for the government to take money out of your check every 2 weeks in order for them to build schools to baby sit your kids and indoctrinate them with ideologies that go against your core values and beliefs, which leads you as a parent to have less influence in your kid’s life. Almost ensuring that they grow up without your guidance and face a more difficult adult life.

Are you starting to get it? Some of you are, some of you have already tuned out, and some of you may be in shock right now to even find all this out.

Who funds the Homeschool programs? I’ll give you a hint, it’s still us, but the government ain’t managing that money. You see, with Homeschooling, you get to decide from the multitude of options out there, which curriculum aligns with your core values and beliefs. You get to vote with your dollars and you get to moderate what is being taught to your kids. I don’t know about you, but in a world where everyone is out to influence the mind of your child, it is my responsibility as a parent to control that. I believe that my children were God given gifts. They are not anyone else’s responsibility, but mine and my wife’s. You don’t have to agree with my position on this, but I do strongly encourage you to do your research.

If you have kids in public school, do yourself a favor and find out what they’re actually being taught? Go and meet their teachers, explore those teacher’s values and see if they align with yours. I can almost guarantee that you will be surprised at what you find.

And for those of you saying, “G, I do wanna homeschool my kids, we just can’t afford to live off one income.” Look man, I get it. Things are not getting any cheaper out there and it honestly seems like the middle class is being erased from existence here in the US. Which is absolutely horrible. But this is why I put out content every week and why I talk about Business on this channel. In order for you to make more money, you need to acquire high value skills, meaning stuff that the market out there will pay top dollar for. I don’t know what your particular skill set is, but if you’re engaging with this content, I know you have the ability to learn new skills.

I used to think that exact same way before and honestly most of the time it’s just a belief thing. Do you believe that you can acquire high value skills that can earn you more money and allow you the freedom to homeschool your kids? If the answer to that is “Yes” now you just gotta back it up with action and make it happen. But if you don’t even believe it’s possible and you’re putting up every excuse in the book, it’ll never happen.

I hate money, but I love having an abundance of options for me and my family. Unfortunately, money is the ultimate resource that provides that abundance of options. So it’s extremely important for you to become good at acquiring that resource and using it wisely.

In conclusion, between Homeschool and Public School, the best education you can provide your children has and always will be Homeschooling period.

Until next time my fellow Alpha Dad,
- G. Vidal