Tag: Homeschooling

What We Are Fighting For: Adventures that show more than curiosity

I don’t do it often, but sometimes the occasion is right, which is undoubtedly the case here.  I recently did a little article on one of my daughters who had just started a line of coffee that complimented her art business.  While doing the video for that daughter, I talked a bit about my other daughter, who, at that time, was at Loch Ness with her family doing neat things.  Out of curiosity, many people have asked me about elements of my personal life, including my kids.  They must not know what to think about the kind of children I would have raised, expecting something outlandish to come from me.  So, there is a lot of curiosity about the type of people who would come out of my family, not to take anything away from their attributes as individuals.  But to say the least, I am proud of my kids.  Life isn’t always easy, but they handle themselves well and are good people.  I expect that out of them, but given the various doubts about how to have a good family and raise good kids, there are many curious people.  While those questions have been coming in, my oldest daughter returned from her trip to Scotland with her husband and their son (one of my grandsons), and they cut together a nice video of their trip.  And when I say that, I’d say it’s not just a regular home video of their many adventures, but done with a professional flair with the idea of maybe starting a YouTube travel channel kind of show.  They travel a lot, their 7th trip of the year, and spent two solid months on the road going to various places.  Their trip to Scotland, much of it shown in the video, was several weeks in November and was interesting enough to show off here so people could see a bit about my family in a nonpolitical setting to satisfy their curiosities. 

I like my family, and if given a choice, we often travel together.  We were with her on most of the seven trips I mentioned that my oldest daughter had been on this past year.  My wife and I took a few trips, especially regarding competitive shooting schedules.  I have another daughter and more grandkids often included in these trips.  I prefer to have them all come, including their dogs, lizards, and whatever else is part of our family.  Just before the trip to Scotland, we spent the end of September together in Florida at Disney World.  Before that, I had just returned from Japan, which followed several other weeks in places like Mammoth Cave and Land Between the Lakes.  With all that I write here, it’s a small part of my life, as there is always a lot going on, and everything moves quickly.  But I think the pace and the amount of things we all do together showed well in my daughter’s video on Scotland.  My son-in-law and my grandson even excitingly contributed to the video, illustrating what a pleasant, healthy family experience should look like.  When I watched the video, it reminded me of what is essential in all these adventures.  And I was proud of them for living outside the box and showing what a good life and family look like.  Which, as a parent, is all you want for your kids. 

All my grandchildren are homeschooled by their parents, my kids.  And on these trips my oldest daughter views as homeschool experiences.  Even though they were traveling, they still had school on the road.  When they travel in their RV within the states, they often set up a class for a few hours per day in a little room while on the road.  In that way, education is always the key to travel, learning many new things, and treating every day like a field trip to an exotic location.  So literally, as my youngest daughter was doing a video with me about her new line of coffee, my oldest was at Loch Ness touching the water there, as shown in the video, which puts a bit of continuity to the various conversations where little bits of my personal life spill out for the audience to see.  All this reminded me of how inferior the public school experience is compared to what we do as a family.  It always reminded me how little we value the public education graduation experience, as my kids spent their senior years in high school in Europe.  They graduated, of course, but they left school early to get to living life, which has always been essential for me.  They never missed that public school experience, which has carried over into adulthood.  They are unique people, and I would argue they are much better prepared for life than most people coming out of the public school experience.  Additionally, my wife was an honor student in school until she met me.  When we were dating, I told her how stupid the whole school experience was, and she graduated early, just like her daughters, without going to her formal graduation with the cap and gown ceremony.  On the day she was supposed to graduate, she and I were on a road trip, traveling very fast on our own journey during a romantic getaway. 

The point here is this: people assume that my position on things, especially very conservative politics, might produce little monsters of anti-compliance. Instead, I would say my approach to parenting made very thoughtful young people who know how to get around safely in the world.  And to get up in the morning, always looking to expand their intellects.  It’s not always apparent as kids go through their biological progression, but once things settle into their thirties, you see what neat people they often grow up to be.  And in the case of my kids on that Scotland trip, I am very proud of them for being good people in a big world, showing that they are in control and not being swept away by it.  Traveling in that style is no big deal for them, and I think people would be interested in their travel channel on YouTube.  We indeed take enough trips to make it enjoyable.  That was the first time she approached the subject as a travel vlog with full commentary.  Which I thought was very good. But it reminded me of the skills it takes to live such a life and how grateful I am that we did not listen to all the noisy people who tried to get us to raise our children like all the other poor kids running on the treadmill of public school and going through the ridiculous motions of college life.  My kids shown in that video have been married for around 15 years, which often shocks people.  They are good, solid people with good jobs, a good work ethic, a nice home, and the ability to create a functional family.  And it’s nice for me to see them doing good things.  And for the curious who wonder, it’s fun for them too. 

Rich Hoffman

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Chick-fil-A Gets It: Recruiting Homeschool Kids is the Wave of the Future

It’s not artificial intelligence that everyone should be worrying about. The question as to whether or not artificial intelligence will take over the world and surpass the human being is a far less severe problem than what history will show results from the attempted takeover of the Liberal World Order during Covid. Covid was a bioweapon meant to destroy cultures while leaving the infrastructure intact for the hostile agent that employed it. Destroy the people without destroying the actual assets. After three years, people just now admitted that Covid came from China, and our government is willing to say so. But that took too long.

Meanwhile, the social distancing policies, where the damage really came from, were created by the government to inflict on its populatios around the world and destroyed a great deal in the process. But in that effort, people discovered something I have been warning about for over thirty years, as the public schools were shut down, and people had to care for their children at home. Suddenly people didn’t have access to that free babysitting service, public education, and a substantial cultural revelation was exposed to people for perhaps the first time. No longer were there theories about what was going on in public schools, but in the vacuum of daily noise, parents were able to see it for themselves as the push to work from home and the confidence that a “new normal” would result from shutting down the public school system across America and that nobody was ever coming back anyway. But things had to return to normal, which left all the leftist radicals exposed to what we are seeing today, and that’s good in its own way. At least people now understand what a devastating concept public education is and what it has done to several generations of children.

My wife and I whenever we could homeschool our kids we did. It was enormously difficult, and we did not have family and community support. Some fractures within my family are still very strong today because things were said that could never be taken back. But the social pressure for my wife to go out and get a job, process our kids through the public education system, and allow the government to co-parent our kids was never in my plans. I couldn’t wait to get married to my wife at age 19 so that I could get off the grid of processed human beings and raise a traditional family of my own, essentially to show the rest of the world how stupid they were. And my wife and I are about to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary. We’ve done it the entire time as traditional families did; she was a strong, central figure housewife. We built our whole family around her. My job was to provide income and emotional stability, to change the oil in the cars, and fight off any bad guys that might stick their noses into our business. Her job was the traditional full-time, around-the-clock stable mom that everyone could count on seven days a week under any condition. And the results were that our way of life flourished during Covid because we weren’t dependent on the ridiculously stupid outside world.   And my kids made the decision very quickly to homeschool their kids because they were raised correctly as children themselves, and they wanted to provide that level of security to their children even as the world crumbled away into stupidity and dust. It was an inconvenient time when I met my wife; we were just starting out in life. But I knew when she was being pushed into a fashion model occupation by many forces and all she was talking about with me was being a housewife that I had found the perfect person to do what I wanted to do, which was raise a traditional family in the traditional American ways and spit in the face of a progressive society. My hatred for that society goes back to my youth, so by the time I was 19 years old, I was more than ready to swipe at the endeavor. 

After Covid failed to destroy our society, and the yearly homeschool conventions returned to Cincinnati each April, my kids take the day off and go to it to get supplies for the upcoming year. They have been homeschooling their children for two years now and never plan to return to the public school system. The results in their kids are just too dramatically positive. It’s hard work and takes supportive spouses, but the effort is clearly beneficial when you do a side-by-side comparison with other kids who have been processed through the public education system. And what’s interesting is to see how many other parents are figuring this out as well, by the amount of growth my kids have witnessed at the Cincinnati Homeschool Convention downtown from each year they have attended. It has grown a lot; there are many more homeschoolers than there used to be. But one thing they noticed this year, as opposed to years past, is that Chick-Fil-A was there recruiting workers, which said a lot to me. Of course, Chick-Fil-A would do that, they have such nice kids working at their stores, and people are always flocking to go there for a chicken sandwich. The company Chick-Fil-A recognizes the next-generation problem that the biggest challenge is in staffing with good, quality people. The kids coming out of public education are not as reliable and good as those homeschooled.

When we talk about the modern labor shortage, it’s not because there is a lack of applicants to fulfill an economy that does 19 trillion in GDP per year. Many jobs go unfulfilled, and artificial intelligence can hopefully help cover those employment gaps. The problem is that there aren’t enough quality candidates. Now, Chick-Fil-A has a good recruitment and training program that staffs their stores with good kids with fundamental Christian values, and that is what the customers want when buying a Chicken Sandwich. But to keep that recruitment up to their company standards, they are turning to homeschool conventions to recruit new employees for their stores, which is a very telling admission. This is one of the methods Chick-Fil-A uses to get better workers over their competitors. Going after homeschooled kids are going to be the wave of the future, as most corporations who listened to all the same dumb advice about embracing woke values are learning sequentially that the advice was terrible and they are going to have to change their behavior for the future. Companies looking for good employees will not care about their college education, what high school they attended, or whether that school won a national championship in football. They will care about whether or not the kids come from backgrounds where the parental structure was good; homeschooled kids would be a great bonus. And are the kids engaging, willing to work, and confident enough to continue learning as an asset of their corporation? Chick-Fil-A gets it, and the trends in the future of employee recruiting will be along those lines, throwing out all the previous measures entirely because they will historically be proven to be completely ineffective. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

God Bless Homeschoolers: Times have changed, and more people are turning away from the terrible public schools to save their children

I thought it was a waste of time when I went to public schools. I hated most of it. None of the relationships I formed in those school years meant anything to me. I always viewed public school as a massive social experiment, even in the early years, and thought of going there the same as going to prison. You weren’t allowed to think about what you wanted or do what you wanted, which always seemed wrong to me. So I never have been enthusiastic about public schools, and over the years, I have written millions and millions of words about why John Dewy was wrong about forming it from the beginning. I didn’t feel any different when my own kids went to public school. There was a time when my wife was very supportive, one of my kids was in the fourth grade, and the other was in third. My wife volunteered in everything that she could in both of those classrooms. She was one of the “moms” that the school treated almost like a teaching staff member. Everyone knew her, and she was beloved by all the kids. Well, in that fourth-grade class, the school had sent home a permission slip for teaching my daughter about sex by putting on a condom onto a plastic dildo, and of course, we said no. What followed was a complete mess; the school was so angry with us that the full force of their wrath was brought down on us. No longer was my wife welcome in the school. We got mad and fought back. It turned into a significant event in that the police union got involved, and it ended up in the mayor’s office. We ended up pulling our kids out of school for a year until we moved to a different district and started all over again somewhere else. 

That year of teaching our kids at home was one of the hardest in our entire 30-plus-year marriage. We had no family support for it, and the community was entirely against it. We lost all our friends over it, and even 20 years later, we never repaired those relationships. I was alright with the social castigation, but it was very difficult for my wife. It was just a year of homeschooling, but it cost her a lot because of the social pressure we experienced. That’s why it surprised me that both of my kids pulled their kids out of public school during the Covid pandemic, a government-made viral outbreak that they wanted to control through government-taught education. Because my education always involved elements of life outside of public school, and I had never accepted public education as a form of education that was of any value, it was easy for me to see what a stupid set-up it was with the whole Covid thing. My kids have now been homeschooling their kids for a lot longer than my wife, and I had. But they had a much different experience just over 20 years later. Instead of everyone telling them in society how wrong they were, they were getting admiration from their peers. Most people they interact with expressed a desire to do the same thing for their kids if they could afford to, which most can’t. And there are large homeschooling conventions now that didn’t exist in the 90s. The support system is much better than it used to be, which can be seen in some of the pictures in this article, as my kids just went to a large homeschooling convention in Cincinnati. 

Attitudes have changed a lot about public education. It’s certainly not that anybody hates education, quite the opposite. What is evident at an event like the Ohio Homeschool Convention is that people have learned not to accept the bad product that public school is. The concept that kids can learn what they need to in life by a government school is ridiculous and ill-conceived. Many people never thought to accept the question of it because they had no choice in the matter. Most everyone has to go to public schools, so they had to justify the terrible product because to admit otherwise would be personally harmful to their intellects. That was why we had such a violent experience when my wife and I did it. But despite what is projected from the media culture about public schools, attitudes have changed dramatically. Even people who I would think would be all into the public school experience with cheerleading and pom poms are telling my kids how much they admire them for putting their kids first and taking responsibility for their educations themselves. My kids take my grandchildren’s education very seriously, and I’m very proud of them. In my house, we read books, lots of them, education never stops, no matter if you are 7 or 70. I have smart kids, and they are helping my grandchildren unlock the treasures of their own brains, and it’s a beautiful thing to look at. They have chosen not to surrender their kids over to some scum bag government employee covered in tattoos and body piercings who don’t even know what sex they are. And my grandchildren aren’t even thinking about sex in school under the third and fourth grades. When my grandkids come home, there is a parent in the house to greet them, as they always should be. Turn your kids over to a daycare or a public school, then don’t complain when they turn out to be messed up adults. Those babysitting services are not replacements for a parent’s love, as Dewey and the government fully intended to destroy.

So like a lot of things that have come out of Covid, the media seemed surprised that public school enrollment is down as pandemic restrictions have been eased. Parents have seen enough, and those who can are not sending their kids back to those palaces of mental enslavement. What the political left never factored into their calculations about “the new normal” was that it wasn’t going to be the complete obedience that Klaus Schwab talks about in his books on a complete socialist takeover of all things in the world. Instead, the smart people not yet suckered into enslavement were never again going to trust the government, health officials, or a public school system to do anything with their kids. A lot of parents are going to change the way they do things. The violence toward my wife and me mentioned was their attempt to keep dissidents from escaping their control, and they tried everything to punish us, which was a horrible idea. A lot of unnecessary pain resulted, which could have been averted. But instead of getting more control over that period, they have essentially lost it all. People do not feel privileged to have a public school system like they used to even ten years ago. Now, it’s just a necessary evil because they are too busy to do the job themselves or don’t feel they know enough to teach their own kids. But with every teacher who comes on television and talks about gender neutrality and represents themselves as progressive disasters, there will be more parents who want to homeschool their children to keep them out of that government-designed disaster. And to my eyes, with the long game under consideration, that just might save America rather than destroy it, as Dewey always intended. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Great Option of Homeschooling: To see just how bad public schools are, walk the halls of Lakota

Saving Kids by Homeschooling Them

Just to let you know how bad it is, the pictures included here were taken in one of the 22 schools within my school district of Lakota.  As you’ll see, it’s all about Critical Race Theory, all the time with them.  So much so I would consider them a danger to any child.  I would never in a million years send any kid of mine to a public school these days.  If you want to know what’s wrong with public schools, take a walk through the halls of Lakota in Cincinnati, Ohio, and you’ll get a good idea.  I never thought they were any good, but now, they are just horrendous.  Ironically, just as revealing as those pictures were, I had the chance to meet up with some old friends at the Annie Oakley Wild West Show I’ve been involved in for over a few decades.  They have a swarm of kids I’ve watched grow up, and now they are all bloomed.  I only see them once a year, so it has been fascinating watching them grow, and I can only say that they are such intelligent and fully developed kids.  They are super nice kids, very gifted, socially extremely confident.  They don’t have that beat-down look on their faces that most children have these days, 22 and under.  Taking those kids out of the cesspool of public education has been great for them. The results show after looking at those pictures from the walls of Lakota schools, which is reflective of all public schools all over the country, it’s easy to see why parents are upset.  They have a right to be. But at least there is a silver lining I’ve known about but haven’t had much exposure to.  Like the kids I mentioned who have homeschooled their entire lives, more and more parents are taking advantage of that option.  My kids are a few of them, and they were over this week showing me the learning material they have for starting this school year, and I have to say, I was very impressed. 

This is what is in the Halls of Lakota Schools

I remember what it was like; as I told in the story above, public schools have been garbage for decades.  They weren’t very good when I was in school.  They were terrible when my kids were going to school, so much so that we homeschooled for one of their years, and in their last two years, they finished their courses online and graduated at home.  Both of my children graduated early and spent time in Europe learning about the world while their classmates from Lakota were still trying to get a date for the prom.  And as for today, I would say, if you love your children at all, do not send them to the garbage heap that is public school for the life of you.  It’s no accident at Lakota and many other schools that they have started All Day Kindergarten because that is all that government schools are to parents, a free babysitting service ran by radical progressive activists paid for by the taxpayers.  That is why they are also pushing pre-school options because parents have kids, but they need to get back to work.  So they drop their kids off at these government schools to raise because they need the free babysitting, then wonder 12 years later why their kids are all screwed up as young adults.  Well, it doesn’t have to be that way, and my kids love their kids, so they’ve been looking for options, and what they brought me to show me was some of the most wonderful homeschooling material I’ve ever seen.  There was a time when my wife and I homeschooled our kids because the public school at the time, Mason, wanted to teach sex education in the 4th grade by putting a condom on a cucumber.  Well, these were my kids; they were little and were never going to have an opportunity to need to learn to put a condom on a penis.  My kids were going to be little and learning as much as they could as long as I could fight off the evils of the world to let their childhoods be as good as possible.  The school freaked out when my wife and I wouldn’t sign the permission slip, and a fight ensued that got quite bad.  It resulted in us pulling our kids from school and homeschooling for a year, which at that time was one of the hardest things we had ever done.

CRT at Lakota Schools

It wasn’t the education that was hard; it was the social stigma.  I never cared, but it mattered to my wife.  We were in our 30s at the time, and we did not have the support of our parents.  For our parents and society in general, public school was about dances, school jackets, and class rings.  They were the kind of people who went to their class reunions at five and 10-year intervals.  The friends they made in public school lasted a lifetime.  It was like the movie Grease, the school was about friends and memories, and they hated that we were robbing our children of those great things.

They Have Groups for Everything, But American Appreciation at Lakota

Only, school had changed since their days, and they had no idea what was going on.  When the Department of Education was put in place by teacher union lobbying in 1979, I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade at the time.  I was able to watch firsthand how that old view of public education changed into a radical political cesspool controlled by labor unions and their leftist desires.  I hated school more and more each year I was there; it was stifling to creativity and involved too much group think.   By the time my kids went to school, it was worse.  Not in the first few years, but by the time they were trying to push off sex education to 4th graders, it had gotten out of control.  Most of the kids were going home to empty houses from the school’s logic, and the kids were having sex until the parents got home from their jobs.  But that wasn’t fair to the kids who went home to a loving parent or two and had good lives at home.  Those kids didn’t need to be destroyed by such education methods of social rendering at the expense of innocence.  So the only real option was to homeschool them, but back then, when my kids were of that age, there wasn’t great social support. 

The Future is Women, so think of all the Young White Boys, what are they Supposed to do?

Now that has changed, my kids will teach all their kids at home, and all their Instagram friends think it’s great.  Of course, they have parental support from us, but more than that, most of their friends are saying now that they wish they could afford to teach their kids at home instead of sending them to these terrible public schools.  The branding of public schools has gone south over the years.  Most adults who have kids wish they made enough money to either send their kids to private schools or take advantage of the tremendous network of homeschool resources available now.  They feel the same way the rest of us think about public schools, except they don’t have the option of staying home because they have jobs to teach their kids at home.  My kids have built their life around the matter, and I’m proud of them, even more so now that I’ve seen what kind of resources my grandchildren will have to work with. I’ve seen the results of homeschooled children.  Every kid in America should have such a chance at a good education.  But they just aren’t going to get it at these misrun government schools as they are today.  If you love your kid, you will not send them to any of them.  Because if there is anything genuinely equal in this world, it’s that public schools are all equally bad.  If the government runs them, they are terrible for your kid, and you should do everything you can to avoid those places at all costs.      

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business