The orders to stay at home with family are accomplishing a new experiment in home schooling, and it’s being fervently enforced by those who derided the president most, and for whom home schooling poses the greatest threat. Ironic, isn’t it?

The question remains whether a compliant and somnambulant populace will awaken enough to truly embrace the call, or if our culture has transformed us all into simple bots who do as they are bid by their overlords. Because attitude is the greatest weapon, the frontier of this battle is in home education. 

In recent weeks, we’ve witnessed adults complaining they don’t know how to educate their children. Is there anything quite so ridiculous? The mark of education is the ability to teach what has been learned, yet “educated” parents are stymied. What’s more, they seem incapable of identifying that patent absurdity, and many others (in the media, for instance) are nodding in sympathy. Of course, schools reinforce the general proposition that parents can’t teach their children – that’s just good job security for them.

If a high school graduate is unable to impart his knowledge to a third grader, he is not “educated.” If she lacks the ability or self-confidence to teach what she learned to her own child, she should certainly reconsider before condemning her children with those same feelings of inadequacy by enrolling them in the institution. But for generations our society has sacrificed our children on the altar of convenience or, perhaps worse, conformity. It seems we’ve completely forgotten Mom’s old admonition, Would you jump off a bridge if all your friends were doing it?

This nation was designed and built by home schoolers and entrepreneurs – people who embodied the “can do” attitude and then did it. They didn’t mope about, complaining about what they didn’t know how to do. They resolved themselves for a freedom unknown before in the world, and then fought the largest, strongest military force in the world, armed with pitchforks and intellect – a fervent dedication to their cause. They had no idea how to win. They simply recognized that their transcendent idea – self-government – meant they had to get out from under the lobster-back’s boot.

Today, the transcendence of the idea of America has not diminished, but it is a cyber-boot on our necks, and instead of military strength, we need intellectual fortitude for the battle. Our reserves are embarrassingly depleted by our years of training in following the school rules, raising our hands to speak, and not ever contradicting the teacher. We’ve been taught that an inability to reason is reasonable and that a passing grade in school should not impute any authentic expertise. We have been schooled to accept incompetency, especially from our “educational” institutions. In fact, it is now assumed. Witness the sympathetic agreement which meets the parents’ complaint, “I don’t know how to teach my children!” Look also to all the tutoring facilities in our strip malls, testifying to our schools’ shortcomings. 

We should be appalled that so many among us feel unprepared to teach their grade-school-aged children. It is an ominous statement about our school institutions at large, that their incredible, cataclysmic failings meet with our approval and reenlistment. We learned well the lesson to never criticize or question our school superiors.

 Education should be about learning something well enough to teach it. If you feel inept, it’s because you’ve only ever been schooled. The good news is, you can model more easily how to learn to your own children, now, making you the ideal candidate for home educator.

This is a clarion call for the parents of our future generations, to the American ideals of freedom and individual sovereignty. We must now release the lessons of inadequacy learned in school and embrace this new opportunity for intellectual advancement offered by an invisible foe.

COVID-19 has awakened the sleeping American mind.

Graphic credit: Pixabay

Sam Sorbo is a home education activist, actress, author, and radio talk show host working with the Texas Home School Coalition to promote Coronavirushomeschooling.com