By John Seiler

Public schools are a disaster, especially in California. Plummeting test scores, not enough kids going into math and science so we have to import workers in those areas, rising costs, violence, gangs, bullying, exploding pensions busting budgets.

But here’s an inspiring story:

“A mother who home-schools her ten children in Montgomery, Alabama, has opened up about how six of them began their college degrees by the age of 12.

“Those of the Harding siblings who have already graduated from college have gone on to become a doctor, an architect, a spacecraft designer and a master’s student. Another two — 12 and 14-years-old — are still finishing up their degrees….

“Hannah was the first to take her college entrance exams – at the young age of 12. ‘I didn’t expect to pass,’ the 24-yead-old told Today.com. ‘So I started crying, because I was thinking, “Now what?”‘

“She passed the exam and, at just 17, became Auburn University Montgomery’s youngest ever graduate, obtaining a BS in mathematics.”

This makes sense. Some of the greatest geniuses in history were home-schooled:

George Washington
Ben Franklin
James Madison
Thomas Jefferson
Patrick Henry
George Washington Carver
Leonardo da Vinci
St. Joan of Arc
Alexander Graham Bell
Thomas Edison
Mozart
John Philip Sousa

Parents

The whole family must be brilliant, right? Pop is a brain surgeon who moonlights as a constitutional law professor? Mom is a rocket scientist who, in her spare time, is world chess champion?

Nope. They’re just regular folks.

“But despite the Hardings’ incredible achievements at such young ages, their parents — Mona Lisa and Kip — insist they are a family of ‘average folks’ who simply find and cultivate their children’s passions early on….

“Still, despite the exceptional talents of her brood, Mona Lisa — who studied to become a nurse before staying at home to educate her kids — said: ‘I don’t have any brilliant children. I’m not brilliant.’…

“The mother-of-ten also explained that her husband, who flew helicopters in the army and didn’t graduate college until 25, is not brilliant either. ‘We’re just average folks,’ she insists….

“But the Harding children insist they are not geniuses. Instead, they credit their achievements to home-schooling, as well as a concentrated focus on their passions, which their parents taught them to hone in on from an early age.

“‘By the time you get down to number five, number six, they just think learning seems normal,’ Mona Lisa said of her children.”

How they do it

So, how do these average-intelligence parents raise smart kids?

“‘We find out what their passions are, what they really like to study, and we accelerate them gradually.’

“For Serenneh, that passion was medicine. The 22-year-old is currently on her way to becoming a Navy doctor – which will make her one of the youngest physicians in American history.

“Younger sister Rosannah, now 20, became a fully-fledged architect at the age of 18.

“And Heath, who graduated from Huntingdon College at 15, will have completed his master’s in computer science just after his 17th birthday.”

Emphasizing what the kids are interested in — what a concept!

Contrast that with the “one size fits all” curriculum imposed on kids in government schools — and in most private and parochial schools, too.

In the government schools, the curriculum is cooked up by distant bureaucrats and lawyers with the U.S. Supreme Court, lower courts, the U.S. Department of Education, the California Department of Education, the California Legislature and the teachers’ unions.

Parents have no say — except to pull their kids from these schools for scandal and teach them at home.

And if you teach your kids at home, they not only get an excellent academic education and can go to college at 12 or 15, they also avoid: gangs, bullying, drugs, government brainwashing propaganda.

Everybody else is behind

“‘It makes you wonder,’ Wesley Jimmerson, Seth’s college friend, mused. ‘Are they advanced, or are we just really behind?'”

Everybody else, of course is way behind. Here we are in the 21st century, in a highly advanced digital economy, and government schools still are run like factories, because they were set up that way in the industrial age 150 years ago. Do we still drive around in horses and buggies and run the economy on steam engines? Of course not. Then why do we run schools with antiquated methods?

“In fact, Mona Lisa and Kip are convinced that all children have the capacity to learn at the rate theirs have.

“The couple have written a book to illustrate their teaching method and launched a website detailing their unique approach.

“The book, called College By 12, is said to feature ‘lots of tips of how you can simplify your homeschooling’, as well as ‘testimonies of how God has worked in our lives’.”

Oops! They mentioned the G-word, banned five decades from government schools. Should we bring God back to the government schools, perhaps with a school-prayer amendment to the U.S. Constitution that conservatives always are backing. No. That’s playing the government’s game.

So what should be done?

First, get your own kids out of the government schools. Plan for next September.

Next, abolish the government schools entirely, including eliminating truancy laws, return the tax money to parents, and produce geniuses from homeschooling.

Commentary

FEB. 7, 2012

By JOHN SEILER

I’m enjoying the tiff between Gov. Jerry Brown and the other tax-increase forces in the state, in particular activist lawyer Molly Munger and the California Teachers Association. As Dan Walters notes today, Brown’s $7 billion tax hike still wouldn’t prevent cuts to K-12 schools. Munger’s $10 billion would prevent the cuts.

Munger’s initiative would increase income taxes on everyone. That is, everyone who pays income taxes in the first place. About half of Californians don’t.

California already suffers the most regressive income tax in the country. The 9.3 percent current “top” rate digs in at about $55,000 of income. (Technically, there’s also a 1 percentage point additional insane tax on million-dollar incomes to fund state mental health programs.)

Munger’s tax increase would jump that middle-class tax rate up an average of 1 percentage point, for a total tax of 10.3 percent. I hope she qualifies the ballot measure and spends her entire fortune on promoting it. (Molly: Spend all your money on this. Do it for the children.)

There’s no way her tax will pass. And Brown’s tax increase will fail, too, as will the CTA’s tax increase.

Let’s put them all on the ballot. The teachers unions also should spend all their coffers trying to pass these tax increases. Indeed, they should borrow $100 million more to pass them. (Unions: Spend all your money on this. Do it for the children.)

People are starting to wake up to how crummy California’s schools really are. And pouring more money on them won’t improve anything.

Factory Schools

Some people even are realizing that the whole public school paradigm, of warehousing kids in buildings that resemble factories or even prisons, is something from the machine age of a century ago. You put raw materials (steel, plastic, children) into one end of the factory, and out of the other end off the assembly line rolls a “product” (a car, or a high-school graduate sufficiently indoctrinated).

Look at the picture at the top. It’s of Century High School in Santa Ana. And check out the aerial view at the right. It sure looks like a factory — or a prison. It’s sealed off from the surrounding neighborhood. The entrances and exits are closely controlled. It serves institutional food.

But this is the Internet Age, where everything is being dispersed into decentralized networks. As you read this, do you know where the data for CalWatchDog.com is comes from before it gets to your computer or smart phone or iPad? I sure don’t, even though I’m the managing editor. It could be in California, or another state, or another country, or all of them. The Internet is decentralized. “Packets” of information are shifted around depending on protocols that only the top nerds understand.

Now, consider the name of Munger’s tax-increase movement: “Our Children, Our Future.”

“Our” children? It’s like we’re in some 1930s Soviet collective, where everyone is making the same bolt for the same state-run factory.

No, they’re not “our” children, Molly. Children belong to their parents until the kids turn 18.

And by saying they’re “our” children, she’s still imposing the 1930s-style, top-down, factor/prison model of schooling.

What we need are decentralized, dispersed, networked schools — beginning with the ultimate decentralization, home schools.

Even the liberal Newsweek/Daily Beast magazine has figured this out. It writes, “When Tera and Eric Schreiber’s oldest child was about to start kindergarten, the couple toured the high-achieving public elementary school a block away from their home in an affluent Seattle neighborhood near the University of Washington. It was ‘a great neighborhood school,’ Tera says. They also applied to a private school, and Daisy was accepted. But in the end they chose a third path: no school at all.”

Yes! The best school is no school.

Doing Better