I’ve always been consistent on homeschooling issues; I’ve never thought that the public education system was any good.  In a conversation the other day with some people, they asked me about this, and I always hate answering the question because the essential elements aren’t very complimentary.  The person I was talking to said about themselves, “I’m not very smart, I barely made it through school myself, so I wouldn’t want to harm my kids by teaching them.  I would rather have a professional do it.”  I hate that conversation because it forces you to admit to how stupid most people are, which makes it hard to deal with them willingly.  I don’t have that confidence problem.  I think I can do everything, including working on my car, better than other people and feel better equipped to do it.  Especially teaching my kids.  I think the public education system was set up wrong from the start, and I’ve never been a fan, including in my own school days. I was friends with several honors-type students who were very high-IQ, genius-level students, and I watched how the school leeched off them.  There was nothing for the school to add to their education because all the people teaching those kids were stupid.  And you don’t want to hurt people’s feelings, but usually, people who choose to become school teachers aren’t the best and brightest; otherwise, they would try to make a go of things in the private sector, where they could make a lot of money.  The people who end up teaching are often like the person who was talking to me about public school —they aren’t the brightest our society has to offer.  Neither my wife nor my children finished their senior year of school; they graduated during their junior year.  They did graduate, but they never attended the ceremony, and none of them has ever looked back. 

Both of my children spent their senior years traveling Europe to finish their education, and we never sit around wishing they had done anything different.  If anything, we talk about wanting to homeschool them earlier.  A few times during their junior high years, we tried it, but family members really got in the way and were grotesquely unsupportive.  The experience was so bad that we pulled our kids out of school anyway and just finished their education online.  And that was twenty years ago.  There are many more options available now.  We had a close-knit family, so it was hard to ignore their opinions, and back then, those opinions mattered a lot more than they do today.  And, as always, the public school experience —the other kids, the employees, the choice of what to teach—was all constructed by stupid people so that kids can grow up to become more stupid people, and I can’t support that process. Instead, my view of education is that it is far more valuable than the public school system was designed to facilitate.  As I have always said, when John Dewey designed public education, it was made to teach communism.  Not how to teach kids how to think.  And I find it despicable.  I have tried to let other people change my mind, but over time, I have become even more firm in my positions because nobody has ever been able to, even though I have tried to give them the space to do so.  They have never been able to change my mind, even when given more than enough of a fair chance. 

During one of the previous No Lakota Tax campaigns, years ago, the standard teacher’s union complaint has always been classroom sizes, and that was their justification for needing more tax money to hire more teachers to reduce classroom sizes.  I said on the radio, on television, and in public forums that the reason was that the teachers were too lazy to teach a lot of kids, and that all that extra money was essentially to fund laziness.  So they got mad and challenged me to come into the school to teach a class myself so I could find out just how hard it was.  So I went to Lakota East and sat down in one of the classrooms to accept the challenge.  Kids and staff from Spark Magazine, which is a published magazine for the Lakota school system that goes out to a lot of people in a big district full of over 100,000 people, met me to propose the challenge, which they thought I would shy away from at the last minute.  I told them I was ready to teach not just one class, but four at once.  Bring four classrooms into the auditorium, and I would teach them all personally, any subject they wanted to cover, for as long as they could handle.  Now you have to understand that I work an average of 15 hours a day, most days of the week.  And my mind never stops working.  I have been married for more than 37 years and now have grandchildren.  This challenge was about 10 years ago, but I was pretty much the same as I am now.  Teaching a class is something I would call very easy. 

They chickened out because the teachers balked at the proposal.  They didn’t want me to make them look bad, and whenever there has been a public debate on the matter, they never hold up and are easily defeated.  And not to rub salt in the wound, but I have never met a person better equipped to teach any of my children or grandchildren anything, better than me.  And I know a lot of people.  I know a lot of people who think of themselves as brilliant.  And I would say none of them are better at teaching my children anything.  It’s lazy to drop a kid off at school and turn that vital task over to a professional.  So with all that in mind, remember, public schools were designed to teach kids the emerging communism of Karl Marx in those pre-Civil War days.  They were never intended to produce the next generation of geniuses.  And I expect my kids and my grandkids to be the best people they can be.  To elaborate on the point, I will put up some videos here of one of my grandsons and his dad, who have a weekly YouTube channel that I think is pretty neat.   It shows just how important it is to teach a child from a parent, and it’s so much better than the public school experience.  I think that my youngest grandson has a chance to be the next Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein.  The public school system does not make those types of people, and if it were effective, they certainly would.  So if we want people to live up to their full potential, you have to get them as far away from the public school system as possible.  And the truth is, most parents are too lazy to give their kids that chance.  And it’s a shame.  I feel sorry for every kid whose parent is too lazy to homeschool them.  My experience with it is that kids become so much better when they don’t have to endure the corrosive effects of being taught by grown adults to be dumb.  Because public school was designed by communists who wanted to suppress intellect, not expand it, and until we deal with that truth, we will continue to be very disappointed by the results.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707