For the past two years, I’ve been covering the crisis in Education publicly, after over a decade of raising the alarm and trying raise awareness in the community where I live. During that time, parents, concerned teachers, grandparents, and even childless people unhappy about their tax dollars paying for sub-standard education, have asked me what we can do about it.
Common questions have been:
”What alternatives are there to woke public and private schools?”
”How do I know the resources I find online are good, or at least ‘unwoke?’”
”I want to teach, but I can’t keep doing it in these schools; how do I connect with parents who might want to hire me for a pod, micro school, or even homeschool classes?
”I might want to homeschool, but only if I can find other parents who would want to do it with me?
”Where do I even start to understand my options?”
”Do you know who might be interested in my education business idea?”
I’ve been on all the social media platforms, and even tried building a community on Locals to help parents and teachers answer these questions, but none of the options worked well. Twitter is too wide-open and politicized, and of course until recently, we could not speak openly about these issues for fear of being suspended and fired from our jobs.
Talking about our kids in public forums doesn’t feel right either, and scrolling or searching to find a topic someone posted about a week ago, or to see if anyone has ever talked about a question we have, doesn’t work well on social media sites. Even if we find it, and save it, our ability to vet the content for accuracy, or shared values is limited.
Social media isn’t well-suited to posting and storing great resources for evergreen content. They also don’t work well for in-depth discussions with other people, the kind you might want to leave, subscribe to, and come back to later.
I decided what we needed was a more traditional forum, so I built one.
The Reason We Learn website is now live, and in addition to finding information about me and the consulting and teaching services I offer, you can find the forum-base community I built for parents, teachers and concerned citizens to conduct research, meet new people, share ideas, answer questions, and store files and documentation as-needed.
This community is a mission-driven space that aims to preserve, protect, and defend liberty and enlightenment values by helping people committed to that mission build alternative education solutions for their individual children!
I truly believe we only fix education one child at a time, and the responsibility rests with each of us, not some silver-bullet political solution or program. That said, I don’t think we can operate as islands. The key to our success if our goal is to build is to work together, voluntarily, but towards a shared goal based on shared values.
My goal is that this forum will become a launching pad for relationships, projects, products, and micro-solutions for thousands of children all over America.
My request is that you join, invite your friends to join, and spend your 7-day free trial period sharing your hopes, dreams, fears, questions, ideas, and frustrations. Then we can all try to help each other find answers, get support, and ultimately, build the solutions our kids need and deserve. We can do better than we’ve been doing for them, and I hope this community becomes part of how we’ll do it!
One thing I have found curious about on line complaints about "education" is so little mention of CURIOSITY. Like kids cannot be self motivated if presented with the right material.
Another is the near total absence of mention of Project Gutenberg. I asked about half a dozen teachers at a high school about it and only one had heard of it.
The nuns never taught science at the grammar school my mother sent me to. I taught myself a bunch of science because of science fiction. The fiction told me what words and ideas to research.
In A Fall of Moondust, Arthur C Clarke used Plato's Allegory of the Cave to explain infrared perception compared to our normal perspective via visible light.
There is lots of old sci-fi in Project Gutenberg now:
Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper
The Servant Problem by Robert F. Young
Black Man's Burden & Border, Breed nor Birth by Mack Reynolds
Omnilingual by H Beam Piper
Deathworld by Harry Harrison
The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley