Guest Article: Homeschooling and the Libertarian Initiative (Part Three)

Exchange of experience, evaluation, socialization

Like any other free-market initiative, the methodology of private and home education defies rigorous mathematical analysis. Different schools and families may use different ways of educating children, and the differences may be due to a multitude of reasons, from family and institutional traditions, to the personal individuality of the teacher or child, to the specific goals and understandings of the school or family. While the methodology of public education—which is largely just the arbitrary fantasies of state bureaucrats, unrelated to either the market or the psychology of students—can be imposed by law on all public schools, the very nature of free education precludes such a centralized approach. But there must be some common factors and principles in education, just as there are some common factors and principles in entrepreneurship, even if each entrepreneur has his or her own distinctive style. How, then, can private initiative in education make knowledge of these common factors generally available, so that each family or school does not have to reinvent the wheel?

The answer can be found in the example of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is not an exact science. It involves certain technical skills, such as a certain level of mathematical ability to draw up a budget or basic accounting, but for the most part, entrepreneurship is determined by ethical and psychological factors: courage, perseverance, the ability to discover unfilled market niches, the ability to predict future demand, etc. Technical skills can be taught as a school subject. The rest is a matter of psychological attitude. The creation of this psychological attitude comes not from scientific or technical sources, but from sharing experience. It is no coincidence that biographies of successful entrepreneurs are among the bestsellers on the market; they create the necessary psychological attitude in their readers. After all, not all readers become entrepreneurs; but those who do often have previously been “apprentices” with an entrepreneur or have learned from studying the shared experience of those whose biographies have been published.

Similarly, private initiative in education will need not only textbooks and programs, but also books about education, such as philosophy of education or curriculum, or simply personal shared experiences of parents who educate their children at home. I remember how important such books were for my family when we began the education of our children. A small book that has long been out of print, Borg Hendrickson, How to Write a Low-Cost/No-Cost Curriculum for Your Home-School Child, was especially useful. The book of experiences of various families with homeschoolers, Nancy Lande, Homeschooling: A Patchwork of Days, also had a great influence on the formation of our school day; after all, in the absence of precise instructions, the experience of other families remains the only source of information. The publication of such books in Bulgarian will facilitate and support the decision of those parents who want to give a quality education to their children at home.

The grading system in public schools is hopelessly collectivist. It does not encourage real growth and in-depth knowledge; there is no possibility for the student or the teachers to slow down or change the learning process in order to learn a given topic. The school year is a kind of intellectual obstacle course: a certain number of obstacles must be jumped in a certain time. And by all the children at the same time. Some learn more slowly, some faster, some have natural interests in mathematics and science, some in literature, others in the humanities, but it does not matter; everyone is graded on some artificial criterion of whether they have memorized a certain number of words in each subject in the time set by the ministry. For students with faster intellectual abilities, this system is misleading because it rewards them without putting in maximum effort; for slower students, the grading system is discouraging because it punishes them for their inability to comply with the fantasies of educational officials. Ultimately, the result is a gray mass of non-individuals, each of whom is encouraged to fit into the collective, but not to follow their own pace, in their own field.

It is thus obvious why the assessment of knowledge in private education should be a particular concern of libertarians; every private initiative should make an effort to create assessment systems that promote the individual development of children, and thus give parents real information about the academic and professional progress of their children.

Finally: “What do we do about socialization?” Although this is the most common question asked by public school teachers about homeschooling, public schooling does not actually provide any socialization to children. Simply adding 30 children together within four walls is not socialization, nor are there any socialization programs in public schools. As has been repeatedly pointed out, in real life there is no such socialization of people of the same uniformed group locked in one place with a guard. (Except in prisons, of course.) In real life we interact with different people, from different cultures, and different age and professional groups. This real-life socialization cannot be achieved in public school; the only education that achieves it is individual education, where the child’s contacts include people of all ages, both within the family and among the family’s friends. A broader community is also needed, not only for sharing teaching and academic experience, but also for creating contacts that children will need in time in their professional and social realization.

Conclusion

This small change in the education law really opens a door for the libertarian community in Bulgaria. It gives us the opportunity to develop a market and create a product that is far better and cheaper than the state education system. It is also a challenge: will libertarians be able to prove to the Bulgarian public that they can not only talk about freedom, but also take advantage of it to create a better and more effective public order than that imposed by the state bureaucratic machine? This means that we have the opportunity, in an area that is currently in the center of public attention, to clearly demonstrate the superiority of private initiative.

This demonstration will not succeed if we simply let things go as they have been. The talents and skills of the libertarian community must be consciously directed toward creating a whole new marketplace of educational ideas, methods, and materials; and even a whole new atmosphere of thought that will educate the next generation of Bulgarian children in individual thinking, courage, entrepreneurship, and non-conformity with the crowd. The libertarian community has enough intellect and talent to create such a marketplace and such an atmosphere; it also has the skills to create a plethora of curricula and materials that will drive the state education system out of the marketplace and deprive it of political and social influence.

From now on, this intelligence, talent, and skills must be combined with initiative.

Because freedom is worth the effort.

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