🌱 Personalized Learning and Plant-Based Diets
Just as "weird" and "crunchy" vegans have shape-sifted into sexy, savvy influencers, homeschooling is becoming the new coolest way to school.
"In the beginning, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot." - Mark Twain
Something big is happening in education.
The homeschooling population has tripled since pre-pandemic levels, and grown 5x for Black families. More and more minorities are choosing to opt out of traditional education and take learning into their own hands.
Even families who never would have dreamed of homeschooling are starting to seriously consider this option.
As the movement grows more mainstream, there are more opportunities for socialization, more tools emerging to support parent-driven learning (curriculum, apps, classes, tutors), and more sophisticated local networks emerging where families share skills, resources and support.
The face of homeschooling is changing
The faces we used see highlighted in homeschooling yesterday were fringe groups: hippies, anti-vaxxers, and extremely religious families. (And to be clear, I don’t condemn these fringe groups, but feel these groups are vital to the health of a democracy that encourages intellectual freedom and diversity of thought).
Today, they’re increasingly techies, teachers, entrepreneurs and artists.
Black families have a long history of homeschooling, but now they’re increasingly being featured in the media as trailblazers in the movement.
🌱 As a vegetarian my whole life, I think there’s an analogy to be made here….and a hint to what’s happening.
Twenty-years ago when I moved to Paris, there was one vegetarian restaurant in the entire city which served soggy quiche. Today, there are Michelin-starred “plant-based” restaurants all over Europe, in big cities and even small towns.
Once considered the annoying choice, plant-based diets are quickly becoming the sexier, healthier choice.
Rather than focusing on going cold turkey on meat (no pun initially intended), plant-based branding has focused on adding more plants into the diet. Super fit celebrities and influencers are adopting plant-based diets to look better and/or help the planet - and their fans are following suit.
Alain Passard, considered one of the world’s greatest chefs, shocked the world by making Arpège plant-based in 2001, with over 500 varieties of vegetables. They’ve since started incorporating meat back in the menu, but it nevertheless paved the way for plant-based cuisine to be a real player in the fine dining space.
What does this have to do with homeschooling?
Homeschooling has a long history and was the primary method of education for many families throughout history. However, in the United States, homeschooling became less common during the 19th and early 20th centuries with the rise of compulsory education laws and the establishment of public schools.
First, they were radical
As homeschooling became increasingly less common, it’s natural that families who started to homeschool in the mid to late 20th century did so for radical reasons. To make a choice that ran so counter-culture required highly compelling reasons. Moreover, people who chose to homeschool were more naturally comfortable being at odd with the status quo. This could be because they were part of a small group with strong views, because they were already used to being ostracized, or because they were just programmed that way (I do believe there are those of us who are just born more comfortable being different).
They homeschooled because of radical, deeply held views, such as extreme religious beliefs or on the secular side - because they had strong views about self-directed learning and children’s rights.
The radical movement grew
In 1981, John Holt published “Teach Your Own,” a book largely credited with sparking a new modern movement of homeschoolers passionate about what they saw as the educational superiority of homeschooling, through it’s focus on conceptual understanding, creativity and self-directed learning. These early homeschoolers courageously plowed forward when friends, family and social workers tried to question their actions. They took a lot of risks to pave the path forward.
Then, the desperate joined in
The next wave of homeschoolers were desperate, and as our school system declined and become increasingly standardized due to a variety of interests with very little motivation to serve families or teachers, primarily policymakers and corporations (curriculum makers, testing companies and charter schools), this desperate segment grew bigger.
Kids with disabilities had no place at school
Children with developmental, physical and cognitive challenges had very little room to thrive in this environment. Very few standardized curricula worked for kids on the spectrum, with dyslexia, sensory processing or other learning or behavioral challenges. Since nearly 20% of students have been diagnosed with a learning disability, this meant that school wasn’t working for a full 20% of students. Kids who weren’t behind but just doing OK got ignored. Children who were immunocompromised could not participate in crowded school environments (a problem we saw exacerbated by Covid-19)
The “geeks and the freaks” were ostracized
Children who were a little unique or just more vulnerable were subject to bullying, sometimes so severe that parents pulled them out of school. As schools become larger, and teacher to student ratios increased, the culture of cliques, and the bullying that went along with that, also grew. A high student:teacher ratio meant the there were fewer adults to guide social interactions. The eclectic, the wonderful, the passionate, the geniuses, the eccentric had no place in this world of football stars and cheerleaders. Rather than a delicious cornucopia of intellectual exchange and thought diversity, school became a place of American cheese and Wonder Bread thinkers.
The affluent and the “gifted” brought money and resources to the movement
For better or for worse, affluent families (the private school/ elite tutor demographic) have also started to opt out. Since high-income families are more likely to get a gifted diagnosis, well-educated families with gifted kids and resources started to get disturbed that their gifted kids were bored and underperforming in school.
Underachievement is not uncommon among gifted students. In the worst case, when the environment is not adequately challenging, they start tuning out. Sometimes, they get stuck in a perfectionist mindset, afraid to fail within a grades-based system. At best, they still don’t have the resources o help them reach their full potential.
Affluent families with kids diagnosed as “gifted,” began to wake up to the fact that they could easily do the education part themselves by hiring tutors and signing their kids up for extracurriculars - and joined homeschooling communities which were going and becoming more vibrant and diverse as the homeschooling population continued to surge.
While there is tension tension between the wealthy outsourcing families and early DIY adopters (mostly highly creative, resourceful, lower and middle-income families) who couldn’t afford the same resources, they started to learn to get along. With wealthier families joining this movement, more resources started to emerge to support the families pouring into the homeschooling movement - as companies began to race to fill the demand, not only in homeschooling, but in families personalizing learning as a supplement to school.
Then, Covid-19 hit and no one had a place at school.
Our inflexible school system instantly broke with the onset of the pandemic. Every pre-existing problem with education was exacerbated (inequity, risk of disease, lack of quality socialization, lack of personalization, lack of parent involvement, non-stimulating coursework, limited special services, meals and childcare, and poor access to tech to support learning).
Due to the regional allocation of funding, families in lower-income areas have been hardest hit by the decline of the school system. Their schools receive far less funding than schools in higher-income areas. This has a spiral-down effect, as families with resources joined private schools or left these areas to pursue “better schools” for their kids.
Decades of research and federal data reports reveal a widening gap between rich and poor schools in terms of funding and resources, exacerbating educational inequities, with the wealthiest districts outspending the rest, and poverty rates and school segregation by income playing significant roles in academic achievement gaps.
Marginalized populations started realizing they could opt out of this system that continued to disenfranchise and empower their kids to thrive.
They could get a world-class education, drawing on all the new resources that have emerged to support homeschooling families (many free), and create their own, at a fraction of the cost of private school.
The total homeschooling population has tripled since pre-pandemic levels and the the Black homeschooling population has grown five times. While Black families have a long history of successful homeschooling, this added more fuel to the movement.
As homeschooling has grown, it has started to become more normalized.
Along with homeschooling, more and more families have been bringing greater personalization to their children’s learning. Educational spending has grown 20% as parents have begun to use educational apps, participate in after school activities and hire tutors to accelerate or enhance their children’s learning. A one-size-fits-all school isn’t enough. And parents realize that even if they send their child to a regular school, it’s essential to their success that they bring in other tools to enhance their learning.
Personalization + Parent Involvement are the new “cool”
A vegan diet means no meat, but plant-based means more vegetables and less meat. Sometimes people start with plant-based, and then gradually become vegan.
Homeschooling means no school, but modular learning means more personalization and less standardization. Sometimes people start personalizing their children’s learning intentionally in the summer, or start teaching them a curriculum, and gradually add more and more elements until they realize they don’t need to send them to a brick and mortar school at all. Or they choose to continue with school as a module in their child’s education that also consists of educational apps, tutors, extracurriculars and skill share.
Modular learning does NOT necessarily = No school
Just like a “plant-based diet” doesn’t mean “no meat,” (but it can) perhaps “modular learning doesn’t have to mean “no school,” but more personalization and more parent and community involvement in learning. And families can also encourage their schools to adopt more personalized learning in the classroom through outside tutors, skill-sharing and learning apps.
More personalization means intentionally choosing the right learning mediums for each child (whether that’s project-based, videos, apps, nature-based learning, or a combination).
More personalization also means a more holistic education that takes care of the child’s social-emotional needs, along with their academic learning. People are realizing that academic development does not happen on an island, but rather social-emotional development and physical health work in harmony to optimize learning. They are also realizing that soft skills, like entrepreneurship, creativity and learning how to learn are equally, if not more important than hard skills like multiplication, how to write a research paper or memorize formulas for chemistry class.
More personalization means bringing in more accountability, nuanced measuring of skills and even micro-credentialing.
More personalization means families taking power back over their children’s education. It means parents are raising their children, rather than outsourcing that to a third party.
Homeschoolers are still ridiculed.
With no basis for their argument, people can simply make a claim that because they met one lonely homeschooler, all homeschoolers are weird and anti-social.
Because they met one weird homeschooler, that all homeschoolers are weird. And this, in spite of the fact, possibly ignoring it, that perhaps it is because that child was a bit odd and eccentric that they were tortured in a traditional school environment where different = bad.
We’re still at a point where homeschooling is being violently opposed.
The level of anger people have about homeschooling is astronomical compared to private school, even though there is far less legislation around private schooling. Homeschoolers have to send reports and take mandatory assessments, sometimes even undergo evaluations by certified teachers. After a private school is formed, all they have to do is take attendance.
The left has been consistently opposed to school choice, with almost no room for compromise by adding more accountability, thereby preventing families with less resources from benefiting from personalization, leaving the option for personalization to families with means to pay. NOT FAIR!
On the flip-side, school choice often passes with zero accountability, making it possible for families to use tax dollars to pay for trips to Disney and curriculum with hate-speech and factual inaccuracies. I think progressives are missing out on a huge opportunity here…
This outrage gives me hope
In my opinion, the reason we are seeing this level of outrage towards homeschooling is because people sense something BIG is coming. And change is scary.
While the idea of homeschooling might feel radical, if we stop for a moment and think about it, it actually makes a ton of sense. If we can customize every child’s education, social and childcare experience to meet their unique needs and help them fill their potential, why not do it?
Is a child sitting at a desk 6 hours a day doing worksheets and listening to lectures the best way for them to learn?
Is what they are learning in school today relevant?
Has everything in education changed with the boom in educational apps, access to tutors and information at our fingertips. Doesn’t it follow that everything in childhood education should be changing too?
I think that in the next 5-10 years we’re going to see a huge transformation as we move from an era where homeschooling, like veganism is deemed radical, to an era where modular learning (specifically parent-involvement in education and holistic personalization of each child’s education), like a plant-based diet will start to be embraces as the best way to bring an exceptional education to every child, and raise a happy healthy child with the skills to excel in a rapidly changing world.