Utterly Meaningless

Public Service Announcements?
Set them up like the Latter Day Saints commercials. Show two homeschooling dads with helmets on bicycles going door to door handing out copies of the Well-Trained Mind.

I think the best way to advance homeschooling is to loosen government restrictions. I live in Texas, where there are no restrictions, and homeschooling is flourishing.
So I would use the money to fund a political action committee to work in the states with restrictions on homeschooling.

Hire Van Halen to play my birthday party?

No wait, that is what you do with the reward money from stopping a robbery.

To advance Home Ed would be to remove the impediments to doing it. So I think the best use of the 1 million would be to use it to get homeschool restrictions removed where ever they exist. However, 1 mill really wouldn’t go that far. It’d probably be good for 1 overly regulated state, like NY.

What I would absolutely not do is any kind of campaign to promote home ed among the masses.

I think I would like to try to educate parents who, like myself sometimes, feel they lack the skills to continue to home educate through high school. That seems to be a big hurdle in our area. I don’t think there is enough awareness of just how easy it is to access resources to help teach skills that the parent may not possess knowledge of (like good grammar skills, lol)

That’s one thing, I guess. I’ll keep thinking…

As far as what it means to advance home education, I can define that better by citing what it *isn’t*. It isn’t pushing “friendlier” homeschool legislation, it isn’t showing the rest of the world how “good” home educated kids are doing on standardized tests, and it isn’t helping parents form social groups to show the world home educated kids don’t lack for socialization (what is *that* about anyway???).

Still thinking…

My first thought was a legal defense fund for those home schoolers the government (& relatives and neighbors) won’t leave the hell alone. But then I guess that wouldn’t technically advance home education.

Then I thought of a campaign that widely publicized the sad state of g-schools: every new fad that defines math as art and self-esteem as science; every teacher that seduces a student; every shooting, stabbing and handcuffed 5 year old. But then I hit on it. . .

Sponsor a homeschooling family to be an ambassador for homeschoolers to the nation. Send them to around the country on a 4 star tour of the country. They can wear “Unsocialized homeschooler” shirts while visiting our nation’s historical places and weird roadside attractions. I volunteer my family! 😉

Part of what bothers me about this question is the word “advance.” One usually talks of advancing a cause. Is home education a cause? ‘Cause (sorry) it doesn’t feel that way to me. A cause might be getting the government to recognize individual or parental freedoms. But $1M won’t go too far.

KWYM, Daryl. “Leave me alone and let me teach my kids my way” seems a very laid-back, non-activist attitude. BUT, that IS the agenda. How do you be actively laid-back, lol?!

The word advance bothered me too – thus my suggestion that the way to advance home ed is just to make it easier to do in those places where it is still difficult.

It’s a lifestyle, not a cause. Make it easier, but none of us should really care if anybody takes it up due to the effort to make it easier. More freedom is good, period.

I would start a company that provides home educators with resources such as books, visual aids, curriculums, teachers’ manuals, all the things you need (and more!) to provide your kids with a good education. (Yes, it would be a for-profit company, but so what?)

Then I would advertise the heck out of that company. On tv, the radio, the internet. And I would gear the advertising toward home educators.

This would do two things to “advance” home educating: One, it would make home educating seem more mainstream. Not that I personally care about being mainstream, but there may be people out there that have thought about doing it but were afraid because of ridicule or what-not. Secondly, and more importantly in my opinion, it would make home educating seem more accessible. Again, there may be people out there who want to do it but don’t know how to get started or where to turn for materials.

Mind you, I know you don’t have to spend a lot to homeschool. But this store would have something for everyone.

I guess the only danger of my plan would be that home educating could become the latest “thing”, and people who are not cut out for it may do it just to keep up with the Joneses, and make a royal mess out of things.

Good question.

I’m thinking one of two things:

1) Various methods of increasing public awereness of homeschooling

2) Political action committee. Lobbying representatives to ease restrictions. Issuing statements of support or non-support for candidates.

A million bucks wouldn’t really go far with either option, but you might be able to accomplish something on the state or local level.

Rob

One way to “advance homeschooling” is to unleash unschooling. Every time a kid learns because he WANTS to, we’ve made homeschooling easier and compelled attendance more irrelevant. So, if I had a million dollars:

I would invent Google and/or Wikipedeia so that “education” shrivels up as “life” becomes more fascinating. (Oops! That’s already been done.)

OK, then, I would invent blogs so that people (of all ages) could carry on fascinating intellectual discussions with people around the planet. (Rats! Also done.)

How about this: businesses want “trained workers,” so they pay taxes to the government to hire teachers to run classrooms full of coerced kids who sit there for 12 or 13 years. You could skip the middleman if you merged a job application database with online training materials. Those “training materials” could include anything from calculus to phonics (as long as the NEA didn’t notice).

So next time your daughter says, “I want to be a veterinarian when I grow up,” you say, “Really? Let’s go check out the “What Do I Do When I Grow Up” website to see what that takes!

A million bucks? (rubs hands together(but not greedily))…I’d develop a homeschool neighborhood with amenities of value to homeschoolers with homes across the spectrum of price ranges so nearly everyone could opt in. With the profits from the first one, I’d develop the second; and so on and so on.

Bonnie, I like what you said about using the money to educate parents as to the resources for homeschooling all the way through high school. I see so many parents give up homeschooling at the middle school or high school level and I keep wondering how/why their reasons for homeschooling in the first place suddenly got resolved.

Well, first I’d take a worldwide fact-finding trip …

I think we should assume that we’re not Republican congresspersons or staffers. No junkets allowed. 🙂

So I can’t build the homeschool train to nowhere with the funds wither?

But it’s for the children!

Scott, vo-tech already exists.

I’d spend it on PR. There’s still too many mainstream people who think we’re “weird”. If we get them on our side (and get some of them homeschooling) we’ll have a bigger lever to use on the various governmnet entities. You can’t beat public support.

I’d say “no thank you” and let them give it to someone else. I don’t want anyone having any kind of say or review over our homeschooling experience. It’s bad enough the government has that say, the government is what we’re trying to avoid!

I’d want to explore one or more of several possibilities centered around a general idea of helping adults (parents, family, informal pedagogues of all kinds).

I once looked into a Kumon franchise, but they were not keen on the idea of me opening the method up to adult learning. Maybe I’d start a chain dedicated to quickly and effectively (though “at your own pace”) training adults from a basic level to a high level of reading and mathematics proficiency.

Or else I’d start a service of consultant homeschool support staff–tutors–on the model of the best sort of temporary agencies. The tutors would be fully on the side of the parent and child rather than of the state or an arbitrary measure of whether the student is “educated.” Tutors could specialize in their areas of interest… why waste all the good engineers, musicians, chefs, writers, scientists just because they aren’t state-certified child indoctrinators? Tutors could work simultaneously with parent and child, or collaborate with more than one family on a mutual project.

Or else I’d invest the money in the precious metals commodities market and wait for the current public school disaster to implode, then use the enhanced sum to present homeschooling forcefully as the wholesome, effective, empowering solution that the desperate nation had really been thirsty for all through the desert of the failed public school experiment. 🙂 I’m being silly, but honestly, public schools can keep up this charade for only so much longer.

What sort of grant wasn’t specified; I assumed it was a foundation grant, not a government grant.

Agree with Bonnie and Scott – show the life and fun of unschooling, how it’s real education without any kind of schooling in the way. And as Scott points out, we do this for free already, no million dollar underwriting required. I got a terrific comment yesterday from a mom getting healthy after the lifelong coma of school:

“[What you describe with such delight] is something I can occasionally get a glimpse of and then it is tucked away somewhere because nobody is (except you now) out there telling me we’re doing just fine …

Yesterday we called in “well” and stayed home. It was awesome.”

So that’s what we COULD spend the money on – a “Call in Well!” campaign . . .

1$M doesn’t go very far. I’d use it for seed money to start a franchise of community learning centers that would assist and encoursge do-it-yourslf and co-op learning for all ages.

Each would be staffed with adults or teens to watch kids who don’t have a stay-at-home parent, and who would otherwise either be home-alone (and at risk of CPS “intervention”)or be shoveled into schools.

An ad campaign to show “normal” homeschoolers such as ourselves. 😉 kinda what Lioness said.