Thinking Seriously About Home Schooling and Funding Affordable Family Formation

Who has an offer to the home schooling mothers?

A friend of mine who homeschools her four kids has a Ph.D. and works from home in suburban Houston. Another new friend of mine homeschools her four kids. She also has a Ph.D. and she lives on a family farm in Australia.

Both of them faced tremendous backlash from their colleagues for daring to be mothers despite their high powered degrees. There are lots of women with advanced degrees and kids. The difference is the number of children and electing to stay home with the kids and homeschool.

And neither is the sort of religious fundamentalist that one pictures homeschooling her kids. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

Aren’t we all better off if smart mothers have smart kids? What businesses are working to tap into these high IQ moms? Shockingly “moms” seem to be one of the few categories it’s okay to discriminate against.

The cost to homeschool seems to be declining just as the costs to stay in public school increases markedly. Whereas homeschooling used to be a niche thing for odd ducks with strong religious views it is interesting how many highly intelligent people are opting out and staying out even as the pandemic wanes.

How soon before homeschooling mothers sequence their own children and get reports on their kids? If my company Traitwell has something to say about it, well, that future is already here.

A libertarian mother who homeschooled her five kids told me that she never thought that homeschooling would take off as it has. She fully expected to be jailed at some point as is often the case in Europe. (Increasingly German Christian homeschoolers are petitioning the US for asylum.)

However one feels about critical race theory or “don’t say gay” bills it’s understandable if you don’t want your kids to be a guinea big for someone else’s social programs or pathologies. That which is public will necessarily be politicized and often for the worse.

I’ve come to believe that a lot of these social issues are really about the extremes of either party trying to dictate their particular way of life. We used to be a live-and-let live society but that’s breaking down. Life grows ever more polarized. This is a shame because most of us just want to live fairly quiet lives. To the activists, though, a victory is everything and so they invest considerable resources in capturing public policy. Oftentimes these activists have compelling cases but we ought not organize society around its fringe elements.

How we handle these divisions isn’t immediately clear but what is clear is that many of the people positioned to help solve them don’t seem up to the task. We used to solve a lot of the problems via federalism but social media and cable television has nationalized many of these issues.

Worse yet, the teachers seem to be getter dumber. A teacher’s WORDSUM score from the General Social Survey is roughly equivalent to a teacher’s IQ.

Now it could well be the case that teacher profession is getting dumber right as the society is benefiting tremendously from smart women entering the labor force. Yesterday’s teacher, nurse, or secretary is today’s CEO, doctor, or stock broker, thanks in large measure to permissive laws on abortion and access to cheap birth control.

But it’s also true that women in those high-powered careers tend to delay having children and this is societally ruinous overtime, especially as intelligence is largely heritable. These women move to the cities which are also sort of “IQ shredders.”

Oftentimes these women are told that they can freeze their eggs and indeed some employers offer this procedure as a kind of employment perk. It’s even sold in feminist terms.

But when time comes to have kids, it’s not exactly easy. The demand for reproductive services is intense. Fertility treatments are not as effective as one might wish. You can see this tragedy in the shortage of surrogates available.

Of course many nation states are subsidizing IVF though such a policy remains unlikely in the United States.

At least for the moment.

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But whereas single childless women move to the city, it seems that women who want to have kids are moving to the suburbs or exurbs. Indeed a recent report on real estate trends suggests as much.

There are other options that are a bit more natural and holistic than subsidizing IVF — to help gainfully employ mothers by promoting homeschooling and work from home and to provide financial incentives to highly intelligent mothers to have children. These policies are beyond this post but worth considering at length elsewhere.

This requires radically rethinking education.

The first friend of mine studied a lot of the literature from ed schools and built this helpful graph based upon the work of my other friend, Roland Fryer.

She focused on Fryer’s meta-analysis, “The Production of Human Capital in Developed Countries: Evidence from 196 Randomized Field Experiments.”

We’re often told that “diversity” is important to education but that can’t possibly be the whole story. The best education seems to be self-directed — autodidacts chief among them — and the reason so many pay for one-on-one instruction is that it clearly works.

Aristocrats understood this phenomenon and a helpful article describes what’s happened since compulsory education: a broad decline in genius.

I share the David Brin assessment that Americans are in general highly educated relative to other countries and so I don’t think that Americans are dumber, per se.

But for the top students I don’t think American education much works. As our economy is increasingly winner-take-all we might do well to invest in the winners so that they can bring about the needed innovations. We have to then encourage the smart kids to take care of everybody else but that’s a topic for another time.

I believe that there is a concerted effort to deny these rather obvious effect sizes by a self-interested educational industrial complex which believes that the solution to the question of “are the children learning?” is always more money. This is a grift masquerading as a form of enlightenment.

Of course, there are other things here that we also aren’t allowed to look at too closely.

Many of the women who homeschool tend to have children early. And yes, there are political consequences for this sort of thing as a chart reveals.

Would it be too cynical to think that perhaps one of the reasons there are efforts to limit homeschooling is that it might lead to more Trumpists?

Well, If that’s the case, a recent analysis suggests that Trump lost a share of the home school vote and that caused him to lose the 2020 election.

My own mother is about to retire after a second career as a teacher. When she’s finally out of the public school system I’ll happily report other observations I’ve seen but until then…