Winning with Homeschooling

Now, is the time for you to start homeschooling!

Homeschool Now USA
Nov 2 · 5 min read

My name is Robert Bortins, and I am the CEO of Classical Conversations a Classical, Christian Community of Homeschoolers.

The year I was born, President Regan’s education secretary, Terrel H. Bell warned,

“Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world….If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

In the last 36 years, we’ve been losing that war, but there is hope, there is a tried and true game plan. Bringing education back into the home. Homeschooling goal is to create a free people, to help students become adults who can identify and defend: Truth, Beauty and Goodness — three fundamental elements of Freedom.

My intent today is not to convince you that we need educational reform in our country, you can read, Neil Postman’s, Amusing Ourselves To Death, or any one of the former NY teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto’s, books. Frankly, education reform is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, it would be better if smart people like all of you were encouraging people to get to the life rafts.

We must be address, or the rest of the changes will have little long-term effect, the notion that we can serve two masters, that education is somehow a neutral moral endeavor.

Our country was founded on Judeo Christian beliefs and as we have drifted away from them, our country has blended in with the rest of the world, our exceptionalism’s shine has diminished as well as our freedom, although our potential has not, if we would just remove the chains we’ve put on ourselves and have allowed to be put on our children. That starts with the simple idea, that there are objective truths and they can be known. A radical statement in our modern world, that there is objective truth.

Freedom depends on truth, “and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”. (King James Version, John 8:32).

A system of education that doesn’t believe in objective truth, or thinks everyone has their own truth, by definition can’t make a free person, only a person who is slave to their emotions. A child who thinks 3 x 3 is 12 is not mathematically free, even if progressive educators will tell them that it is his own truth and he should preach it.

In homeschooling, we have our students read original documents, not opinions of what happened through the lens of progressive writers who mold the past to influence the future. Homeschooling is an education where you engage directly with the best thinkers through history, not through some interpretation of it.

We read Plato’s Republic and Aristotle and The Federalist Papers, read the writings between Hamilton and Burr, and read other countries constitutions, and not some slant on history.

When our founding fathers set up a Republic, not a democracy, they did so for a very specific reason. “A democracy is two wolves and sheep voting on what’s for dinner”. “A republic, if you can keep it”, as Benjamin Franklin said, requires a well-educated populace and one that is self-reliant.

An education that does not go back to original documents is no education at all, just propaganda.

Just think — World War II — was a fight against fascism and communism, which are both forms of socialism. That wasn’t that long ago, but today’s young people are enamored by those ideas, because “facts don’t matter” … there is no objective truth, just feelings.

If you want great programmers, teach logic and language. You want students who like and excel in STEM, start with the basics, STEM is secondary, when first things are put first, second things are not brought down, but lifted up. We’ve gone in 30 years from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to teaching remedial English in college. Just ask any college professor whose been around a while.

If you’ve seen the new congress woman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you will quickly see why modern education purposefully leaves out logic. She wouldn’t have so many followers if students had been taught to reason.

The glory of homeschooling is that virtually anyone can implement it. If you look at when America wasn’t burdened by over regulation, licensing laws, and government that tries to define and control all aspects of our lives, we find that they believed in freedom for the individual.

When schooling became outcome based, instead of journey based, we see a change in society away from freedom (journey) towards servanthood (results).

During the Industrial Revolution, education switched to a factory mode, to create factory workers. Our government schools continue to operate in this manner, segregating children by manufacture date, and moving them along the process as the bell tolls.

The United States went from being a colony of immigrants to the best educated populace in a few decades with 16–18-year-old teaching younger students in one room school houses and children spending most of their day with a variety of adults who were diligently practicing their craft.

Today, we see this modeled most by homeschoolers, who work as a family to educate and then go about their lives together. Interacting with a wide variety of adults in a wide variety of situations.

One of our recent graduates was in a college English class, and after the first paper, the professor said he needed to see everyone in his office, one on one, to discuss their disappointing papers. Of course, the first one to show up was a Classical Conversations’ grad, who the professor looked at and said, “Why are you here”? And she responded, “You told us to” and he replied, “I didn’t mean you, your paper was great”! A few weeks later she had been promoted to TA and given an “A” in his course.

Now, is the time for you to start homeschooling!


Help us spread the word on Homeschooling! Volunteer to help us teach our friends and neighbors about the benefits of homeschooling at https://homeschoolnowusa.com/

Homeschool Now USA

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Dedicated to unifying homeschoolers in a shared mission to promote homeschooling.

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