Today is Sunday, November 24 and this is William Michael of the classical liberal arts academy. Today, I would like to talk to home schooling parents, and I’ll admit that what I’d like to talk about is pretty radical. In fact, to some it may be scandalous, depending on how you look at what I say and whether you actually receive what I say in the context of how I say it. But I think it’s important to have an understanding of education and home schooling that I have in order for our children to succeed, and for us as as homeschooling parents, to succeed in the work that we’ve undertaken in homeschooling. As a homeschooling father, and when I say homeschooling father, I mean that I am the director of a school, a home school, that is registered with my State Department of Education. Our home school is called the William C Michael Academy. That’s how it’s registered with the state, and this is separate from the classical liberal arts academy. I’m talking about our actual home school.
But our home school is registered with the state of North Carolina, and I’m listed as the administrator of our home school. It is recognized as a legitimate school on the records in the state of North Carolina, I have the authority as the administrator of this school to give my children high school diplomas and to give them transcripts for their high school studies, which list the courses that they’ve studied, and I have the authority also to assign grades for those courses. I directly control everything that my children need to prepare a college application. I give them the diploma, I produce the transcript, I assign the grades. And when you think about this, it becomes clear that I have the power, as a home schooling Father, to put my children into college. I can put my children into college. Now that sounds crazy, I’m sure, but it’s true.
It’s 100% true. I can give my son a high school transcript that lists all of the required or recommended courses for high school study, and I can give him A’s, maybe some B’s, maybe an occasional C in those courses, and leave him with a 3.7 3.8 GPA that I am absolutely certain will gain him admission to a selective University. I have the power as a homeschooling father to put my kids in college. Now, when you think about that, it seems pretty wild. How could the state or how could, how could universities, give that power to parents, to homeschooling parents. How is that possible? When I think of what kids go through in high school, think about the high school, all of the administration, the facilities, the office, staff, the faculty, all of these people and resources and administrative policies and procedures and tests and exams and on and on and on.
How can it be possible that home schooling can be so simple and that a homeschooling parent can simply prove. Print out the transcript and say there. That’s all you need for college admission. It’s pretty wild. I can do that for any of my children. And to be perfectly honest, to be perfectly honest, no one will ever check. No one will ever check.
No one will confirm that my children have studied the subjects that are listed on their transcript, no one will check. The college admissions office will not check. No one will confirm that if I put pre calculus on my son’s transcript and give him an A no one will confirm that he has successfully studied pre calculus. No one will check or confirm if I say that my son has studied high school physics and earned an A no one will check I and the reason why I say this is that this is how fake and corrupt the modern universities Are. College admission is not serious. The college admissions staff members that review applications, they’re not serious. They’re not checking to see that students have actually mastered the subjects of a high school education.
They’re looking for statistics and numbers. They’re looking for numbers. That’s what they’re looking for. Let me explain. If you go to a college admissions page, sometimes they’ll have a link to a section that says a quick glance, or fast facts, or about the college, and they’ll have a list of some some simple facts, some basic information about the college. They’ll list how many students applied, how many students were admitted, what the admission rate was, what the average SAT score was, what the average GPA was of admitted students and so on. Those numbers are important for advertising.
Those numbers are important for rankings for the colleges. So if a college wants to be recognized as selective, it has to limit the percentage of students that are admitted. If it wants to be ranked as selective, it can’t afford to admit a student with a low SAT score, because that will bring the school’s averages down. It can’t afford to admit a student with a lower high school GPA, because that will bring the fast facts down. And so I would argue, based on my experience with college admission, I would argue that so long as a student’s statistics don’t bring the college’s numbers down, the student will get admitted. The student will get admitted. That’s how shallow I believe college admission has become, as long as there are no red flags and the numbers look good, the student will be admitted.
And the reason why that’s so ridiculous is because those numbers are all in the home school parents control. Now, some might throw their hands up at that and say, What in the world this is so ridiculous. How can, how can home school parents be allowed to just make up these numbers for their kids? And at first I would say that that I’m I’m exaggerating a bit in the sense that parents would just make those numbers up, that parents would just print out transcripts and. Just put all A’s on them and do that for a student who really hasn’t done anything. I’m exaggerating when I say that, but at the same time, this is really what modern schools do. They just make it look more complicated.
We when we look at schools, we look at what public schools claim to teach, the curriculum content. We look at all these different things the schools do. We tend to imagine that what the schools do is different than what they actually do. We imagine that these numbers, if you ask a student, what’s your GPA in this and the kid says, Oh, I have a 3.6 GPA. We imagine that that’s some kind of standardized measure that means something when it’s not we have no idea in any objective sense, what it means when any student tells us that he has a 3.6 GPA, except for one thing, when we hear that a kid has a 3.6 GPA, it communicates only one thing, that that kid generally stayed out of trouble and was approved of by the adults who were involved in his education. That’s really all that the GPA says that’s all that it means. It means that he did his work, stayed out of trouble and was generally approved of or liked by the people involved in his education.
That’s all that. It means I was a school teacher, private school teacher, and it’s very clear when you’re a teacher that there are kids who are good students and good kids, and there are kids who are bad students and bad kids, and the school program is is basically created to penalize the bad kids and to reward the good kids. The system is created by teachers. It’s all subjective. It’s all artificial. If you were to ask how many grades there are for this course, I would say as many as I end up putting in the grade book, as many assignments as I end up making for the course, that’s how many they will be. I determine what’s on the quizzes and the tests, what’s required for the assignments.
I determine what grades to give the students, and no one really has any clue whether those grades are fair or unfair. It’s all subjective. It’s all subjective. I could choose as a teacher to be strict and penalize a student for doing something wrong, and I can choose to just overlook it for another student and not mark it wrong. I could choose to give a student a D instead of a deserved F. I could choose to give a student an a instead of a B. The grading was always subjective.
I create the assignments, I create, the grading activities, I give the grades, I make all the policies as the school teacher, it’s all subjective, but when we hear that the education of a home school student may also be subjective, everyone pretends that there’s some sort of scandal, when it’s really just the same thing as we find In modern schools, the grades of a home school student signify that the student was generally well behaved, got his work done and was approved of by the people involved in his education. That’s it. So there’s a there’s a subjective element to all of this schooling and record keeping and grades and transcripts, it’s it’s almost entirely subjective, and we’ve got to admit that the same is true whether we talk about a home school kid or a kid in school. Now the reason why we we. Think that that’s not true is because in school, a kid is just one of many. We think that a home school student is going to be favored by his parents, and they’re going to inflate his numbers, inflate his grades, to try and make him look good. And we imagine that teachers would never do that, but teachers certainly do that.
In fact, whole schools do that. And I can give you a very simple example of how this is done in modern schools that there’s no explanation for, and it’s the use of curved grading. If you’ve ever taken a math course or a science course, you’ve probably experienced the curving of grades, which is just grade inflation. There’s no such thing as curving grades. It’s just changing the grades to make the kids look more successful. The kids are graded not according to some kind of objective scoring rubric or standard, but they’re they’re scored relative to their classmates, and as long as the whole group goes down together, they all end up in a good place. You can finish your college calculus course with a D average and end up with a B minus all anyone sees is the b minus.
No one has any idea what your actual scores were on your calculus assignments. And the same thing happens in high school. Grades are always inflated. Grades are always adjusted, because most of education, most of schooling, is entirely subjective. Think about the college admission process a little further. Think about what’s what’s required on a college admission and how much of it is objective. They ask for a transcript the grades of which are all subjective. They used to ask for SAT scores, but that’s no longer required.
In fact, none of my children. I’ve got five adult children going on six. Four of them have applied and been admitted to college. None of them have taken an SAT, none of them. So what used to be an objective element of a student’s records is no longer even part of the admissions equation, and this was very significant back in the day, back when I was in school, if, if you had a high SAT score, you were attractive to a selective college, And there was only one way to get a high SAT score. It was to go and do well on the SAT to prepare for it and actually do well. And that frustrated a lot of students, because it was very easy for students to get good grades.
All of the teachers pet type students would get as and B’s, but then when the time for the S A T came, they wouldn’t necessarily do well. My My wife was one of those students. My wife was an A student, teacher’s pet all through high school, but she only scored 1000 on the S A T, objectively, she was not a strong student, but subjectively, she had the grades to be admitted to Rutgers University. She had a three point, something, GPA, and a good enough score on the SAT. Her subjective academic record got her admitted, even though her objective academic record suggested that she wasn’t a very strong student, which was actually true, she was a good student, but not strong. Me, on the other hand, I had the opposite experience. I got low grades in high school because I was a punk who really had no understanding of what school was even for coming from a working class family, but I was intellectually gifted. First time I took the SAT. I scored 1321, of the highest scores in my school. But I had a 2.3 GPA because I didn’t care about school.
I never read a book in high school, I was I was intelligent, I was resourceful, I was strong intellectually, but I wasn’t good at school. My teachers didn’t like me and I didn’t like them. My teachers told me when it was time to prepare college applications, I had teachers say no when I asked for letter of recommendation, just tell me no, because I was a punk. And so for me, my objective academic record was strong and my subjective record was weak, and I was denied admission to Rutgers University on my first attempt. So think about it. What does it tell us about admission? Is admission concerned primarily with the objective record or with the subjective record?
It was always more concerned with the subjective record, and we see that manifest today, where the SAT is no longer even required. So we see that really college admission. It’s sort of an inside game where the people involved in education subjectively recommend their chosen students for admission to the next level. And what everyone looks at is the subjective academic record. So we’ve got the GPA, which is all subjective, the transcript subjective sat has been taken out of the way, which was objective. Now we go back to the application and we want letters of recommendation, all subjective. Then we may go to other things, like extracurricular activities, leadership experience, where children were chosen for leadership roles, to be the captain of the team or to be the president of the club. Again, subjective qualifications, and we see that this is what education is really about.
This is what college admission is really about it’s very subjective. And so if you, as a homeschooling parent, decide, because you’re just so smart and so strict, so objective, if you choose to make your children’s records objective, and you think that it’s not right to make them subjective. All you’re doing is penalizing your children. And I talk about this with parents all the time. Most homeschool students, most homeschool students, are penalized by their parents for being homeschool students when the parents have it in their control to give their own subjective evaluation of their children studies in the same way that modern schools do, the parents choose to not Do that and rather crack down on their kids and allow only force for objective academic criteria, and they penalize their kids. The kids look like losers. If you look at the kids transcripts, the kids will get no credit for courses that they haven’t demonstrated objective mastery of and what I ask homeschooling parents is, have all of the kids in the local public high school who are going to be getting diplomas, who are going to have transcripts with those courses listed on their transcript.
Have all of those kids earned those courses and grades on their transcripts by means of objective, absolute standards of achievement? And the answer is, absolutely not, absolutely not. Those kids are going to end up with A’s and B’s on their transcript for courses like pre calculus and physics and chemistry, and if you were to give any of them an objective, standardized Subject Test, to which, by the way, no high school students are ever. Objected if you were, however, to give an objective test, do you think that they would all get A’s and B’s on those tests? Of course not. We all know that. But that’s not what school is actually about.
The only people who pretend that that’s what school is about are home school parents who are penalizing their kids, you should be thinking about the local high school or maybe about your own high school experience, and the fact that you got a high school diploma and you had a course on your transcript with a certain grade, and just ask yourself, how objectively did you earn that grade? Did you earn that grade by objectively demonstrating mastery of that subject, or just by going to school, staying out of trouble and turning in your work. I’ll bet that the answer is that you just stayed out of trouble, went to school, turned in your work, and ended up with a good grade, because that’s how schooling works. That’s how schooling works, and we can’t penalize our kids for homeschooling and saying no, in my home school, there will be no subjective evaluate. That’s just penalizing home school kids. Now what I’d like you to think about is think about when your child’s home school records are completed and submitted, and you’ve just been, you know, the strictest, most objective evaluator, and you’ve given your child only the courses that he has actually studied From beginning to end, top to bottom, and earned objective scores for so he’s got a very light transcript, because you’ve only included things that he’s demonstrated mastery in. Everything else is left off, all of the history books that he’s read, all the literature that he’s read, movies. He’s watched all of the different activities, all of his participation in the life of the church, sacramental life.
None of that is represented on his transcript, only the things that you feel with your strict, strict objective standards, only the things that you think he has objectively demonstrated mastery in. That’s the only thing that gets on his transcript, and you submit that to the college now put yourself in the in the seat of this college admissions representative who is opening up all of these applications from high school kids full transcripts as and bs all over the place, college recommendation letters from Teachers, all subjective evaluation, all subjective records and achievements filled with all kinds of stuff, all kinds of courses and grades and reference letters and so on. And then here comes your kids application from Mama, super strict, objective overlord with almost nothing listed. And imagine what that admissions rep thinks when he or she looks at that application. The standards are so low in modern education, and your child looks like he doesn’t even accomplish those low standards. What a loser. Look at this. Kids losing empty application.
What a loser. The kid doesn’t know anything about health. The kid never did any physical education. Doesn’t do any exercise or anything. There’s no phys ed listed on this transcript. Never took a health class. The kid doesn’t know anything about modern natural science, nothing.
He doesn’t know any math. He’s he’s never opened a math book because there’s no math courses listed. So does he not know any math? And if he, if he doesn’t know math, there was a kid in the local high school who sat in the back. High school math class, never paid attention, hardly ever studied, if ever, never did the work. Had F’s and D’s on his assignments, and then the course grades were curved, and he ended up with a C in pre calculus or algebra two. So he’s got a C in pre calculus, and your kids got no pre calculus course on his transcript. What a loser this kid must be.
He can’t even, can’t even do the basic stuff that the school kids do. And so you can see how your child’s records from the perspective of the college admissions person who lives in the world of modern, subjective school records, your child just looks like a spaz. How can you not have a normal high school transcript? Oh, well, because we didn’t think that Tommy mastered so we didn’t put it. You think all the kids who got high school diplomas had demonstrated objective mastery of their high school subjects? Or, as I said before, do you think they just went to school, turned stuff in and did whatever they could to get by. That’s what the kids did.
They’ve all got all of the courses on their transcript, and you managing your kids studies for what you call the glory of God. Have a kid who looks like a spaz looks like he’s done nothing compared to these high school kids. And that’s that’s the effect of thinking wrongly unrealistically about education. As a homeschool parent, I and again, to be audacious here, when you when you learn that the colleges are not even going to require an essay T there’s going to be no objective measurement of the children’s academic aptitude. That’s what the SAT used to represent. The SAT stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test, and it was a predictor of college readiness, of college success. I would argue it’s actually a good predictor of that.
But the colleges don’t even require that anymore. So we we’re living in a time where education has become entirely subjective. Yes, you can say it’s corrupt. You can say it’s not how it should be. But why in the world are you spitefully punishing your kids by making them accountable to an imaginary, fantasy, objective standard of learning that you’re basically inventing, rather than distinguishing real learning, which you can be as objective as you want with from schooling which is artificial and cultural and relative, subjective and so on. Why are Christian people penalizing their kids in a time when kids who grow up in homeschooling families should have the greatest advantages, the greatest advantages. Now let me, let me share a little bit of practical personal testimony.
My wife and I have been homeschooling here in North Carolina for over 20 years, our oldest child, Jonathan, is 24 years old right now. Just finished college. Is an officer in the military, full time, salary officer life. He’s already he’s already living as an independent adult at 24 went to college, went into no problems with anything. Our kids have chosen to go in the military, most of them. We’ve had one daughter not interested in the military, who applied directly to college. I put their I gave them diplomas at 18, I put their transcripts together, and when it came time to actually determine grades for their transcripts, I didn’t just consult some objective source and copy the numbers what I did as their.
My administrator was I thought about their achievements, what they studied, what they didn’t study, and I compared it to what a modern high school student would have done and studied and I assigned them a grade on their transcript that was subjective and relative to what I believe was normal for high school students. If there was a subject that I knew my one of my kids really didn’t study, I would give I would not give them an F for that subject, because kids in modern high schools have C’s in courses that they did not study, just because they went to school and got credit for attendance, and they turned in assignments and turned in tests where they could guess half the answers. So if my son didn’t study a course very thoroughly. I didn’t leave it off his transcript or give him an F, as if he would have taken one of those high school tests and got a zero, because that’s not true. I would give him a C for those courses. I would give the kids grades based on where I felt they were relative to other kids coming out of school at their age, their transcripts were entirely subjective. My sons at age 1718, were in tip top military shape, so I gave them all A’s for physical education.
They worked out and trained and knew all about nutrition. They were all physically ready for military service. That’s an A for phys ed. All four years, my kids know all kinds of information about world history, military history, American history, on and on and on. They know far, far more than I did when I was in high school and I was in honors classes I didn’t know anything compared to what they know about history. And even though their history studies weren’t necessarily objective and formal, because I know that my sons have so much historical knowledge, I would give them A’s for their high school history courses, because I knew there were no high school students who could compare with them in terms of history knowledge, and so I made them subjective academic transcripts, considering the fact that this transcript serves only one purpose, which is To represent their academic status to someone who’s evaluating it for admission to some institution relative to their peers. That’s all that the transcript is for.
Now, there is an objective element. There are objective elements, but we’ve got to be careful not to introduce artificial ones of our own making. For example, for each of my kids who has wanted to join the military, they’ve had to take the Military Entrance Exam, which is called the ASVAB, as V, A, B. They’ve had to take the ASVAB, which is sort of a general knowledge and skills test, but it extends beyond high school studies. It goes into other areas too, like mechanical skills and things like that. Once one of my children scores highly on the ASVAB test, there will never be a question raised concerning their transcripts, because the objective test is considered to verify whatever is on that transcript, my kids have all scored very highly on their military entrance tests, and so they’ve never ever had a question about their Transcripts, and then they’ve gone on to be successful in college and in the military and so all of this question of their records and their their paperwork is all irrelevant. No one asks.
Moreover, now that my. Elder children have successfully proven the quality of their education. My younger children get a free pass because everything is already affirmed. The military has already seen kids come out of my home school and go on to success in ROTC. They’ve already seen them go score highly on ASVAB tests. They see them scoring highly on their fitness tests in the military, they’ve seen them graduate from college and go and successfully complete officer training courses that established reputation now is far more important than any school criteria, and that was always true. It’s not only true now. It was true in the beginning, because there’s a fact of whether our kids are actually prepared for adult life and whether they’re not, as I mentioned before, there are some home school kids who are not being well prepared for adult life, and there’s nothing that their parents can do to try to cover that up.
There are other kids who are being well prepared for adult life whose artificial academic records might not show that, but they’re smart, they’re resourceful, they’re well behaved, they’re skillful, they’re going to have no problem in adult life. They’re loved by their parents. They’re raised in a good family, they’re honest people. They’re going to be fine as adults, they enjoy all of the advantages of Christian family life, and their parents need to be careful not to penalize them when it’s time for a transcript, because in the long run, it’s not going to be significant. But if the transcript is handled badly, it can actually penalize the child and cause him trouble. That really wasn’t just if we think about what the transcript is. So that’s a very tricky issue that I think many homeschool parents get wrong, and I think that’s one of the reasons why they panic and why they they aren’t able to pursue classical Catholic education because they start to fear this stupid paperwork because they don’t think of it intelligently. And let me just say, if you struggle with this stuff as a parent, if you don’t know how you should think about academic paperwork and things like that.
You need to get counsel before you screw up your kids life. You need to get counsel. You need to ask for help and ask for advice. Because you may be imagining that other families, successful families, with successful kids, you may imagine that they’re doing things that they’re not actually doing, and it’s just your own misunderstanding that’s causing all of the chaos. You may look at a kid who’s 17 years old, perfectly healthy, perfectly happy, perfectly prepared for adult life, and yet you’ve got this academic record that’s going to make him look like a criminal, and the kid’s whole problem is that his parents have some wacky view of what schooling and transcripts are about, and He may be denied opportunities that he is entirely quite qualified for because of the parents wacky ideas about schooling and school records, their desire to show show themselves to be some kind of strict objective drill sergeants, when That’s got nothing to do with what academic records are about. So my advice to home school parents is, before you get into that phase, before you start making consequential decisions in education and start thinking, Oh, this is too this is too difficult. The kids are doing terribly.
We’re not doing I strongly recommend you talk to successful families and ask them for their advice, because they’re probably going to tell you that what you’re doing is really not necessary. It’s not how it works. Your May. Making a big stink about nothing and actually causing the problems. And let me give you a couple of red flags that I see when I talk to parents, a couple red flags. And I’ll give you a recent example, because I just had a consultation where some of these red flags were present. The first red flag is that even though I’ve been through these things successfully, and the parents know that I’ve been through them successfully, they have no intention of listening to any advice.
They have no intention of doing anything other than what they’ve already made up their mind to do. That’s the first red flag. And I feel bad for those kids, because those kids are going to be dragged through who knows what for no reason. For no reason. That’s the first thing I can tell when parents are not actually asking for advice to follow, but they’re just looking for it’s like they’re looking to check the box so that they can say that they sought counsel even though they ignored it all. I don’t know why they do that, but they do that. And when you see parents not willing to listen to the advice of experienced parents who have already done these things, that’s Red flag number one.
Red flag number two, the parents will have their kids home for schooling. They’ll be interested in providing their education, but they but they’ll neglect it, and the kids will not get much accomplished, even though kids in school are also not getting much accomplished. But the parents will then begin to imagine that their kids are far, far behind the school kids. And so what they’ll do is they’ll say, Okay, I’ve got to get the kids schooling under control, because we haven’t been keeping our schedule. We haven’t been getting schoolwork done. So what we’re going to do is restart everything. We’re going to start from the beginning. We’re going to go back to the beginning and Restart Now.
This idea of constantly restarting is a red flag that shows that there’s a parent who’s got this idea of having some kind of objective standard for education, like we’ve got to make sure we learn everything. We’ve got to make sure we check all the boxes. We got to make sure we master all the lessons. But they don’t actually live a disciplined life like that. They don’t live a life that actually manifests a concern for objective achievement. The only time they act like that is when they judge the children. The only time that the parents hold themselves to some kind of strict standard is when they’re judging their children’s studies.
If the mother was strict, they would have kept the homeschool schedule and actually have achieved the things that she claims she wants to achieve. They would have actually had that objective achievement, because their mother would have actually kept her objective schedule, but she doesn’t, because she makes up subjective excuses for not keeping that schedule, because she knows that life is really subjective and relative, and so she judges the kids hypocritically, and then when it’s time to quote, unquote, fix things, she orders her new planners, and she she orders all her new scheduling supplies and school supplies and stuff. She she talks about all of her new plans, makes New Year’s resolutions, and then has the kids start back at lesson one, and they go through a couple weeks, and she’s off the schedule again, and then the kids aren’t achieving very much. And what does she do after Easter? She says, oh, you know what? Things got out of control because the, you know, I was pregnant, or because the babies were sick, or because grandma got sick, and we had to go visit our grandparents for two weeks, and we got off the schedule, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is all normal, but what is her response? We’re going to start all over back.
We’re going to start at lesson one, and we’re going to do everything right. And they just do this again and again and again constantly talk. About restarting everything. And so what happens is this goes on year after year, and we’ve got these kids who are now in the parents mind, a parent who knows nothing about schooling doesn’t listen to advice from people who do know about schooling this this mother now has it in her head that, because she really hasn’t done well with schooling for the past two years, that the kids current grade level is that two year previous grade level. So we never really did third grade so now, even though it’s two years later, we’re going to label our kid as third grader because he’s never objectively finished third grade. He never objectively completed the third grade work. So we’re now going to we’re going to place him back in third grade, even though he’s 12 years old.
We’re going to put him in third grade, because we’re going to go back to where we left off and start fresh. And they continue to do this until the kids are adults. They continue to do this. We’ll have parents with 21 year old sons who have never received a high school diploma because they’ve never satisfied some imaginary, objective requirement that mommy has made up. And there were 1000 ways where those kids could have completed the high school requirements in the simplest ways and just moved on if they would have had some some advice from experienced school administrators, but they don’t, and so now they’ve got a 21 kids sitting at home with no high school diploma, waiting for mommy to go to lead him through high school biology. And this is common, and they’re always starting over, always starting fresh, always with all this talk about making sure that they check every box and complete the objective requirements, they go back and go back and go back and they do this forever for no reason. Now, one of the reasons for an experienced school administrator.
One of the reasons why this is so stupid is because the parents don’t understand that the heist that grades in school repeat. So for example, first grade students are introduced to lots of new content, lots of new skills. First grade is difficult. Second grade is largely a review of first grade. Second grade, for most kids, is easy. Third grade is another difficult year, lots of new stuff. Fourth grade another review year. Fourth grade is usually pretty easy.
Fifth grade, another new year, usually pretty difficult. Sixth grade usually review year pretty, pretty easy. And so it doesn’t make any sense if a kid misses third grade to hold him back in third grade rather than let him start fourth grade, because fourth grade is largely a review of third grade. It’s designed like that on purpose, but the parents don’t know what they’re doing, and so they make judgments in total ignorance. And this is really just bad decision making. It says this is why if, if you would read the book of Proverbs, it tells you that you should seek counsel and not just do what seems right to yourself. That’s actually arrogant.
If they would talk to someone with experience, they would have this explained, and the kids would be able to move on, and everything would be fine, but they won’t. They won’t. You’ll have this mother and father who sit there and just spitefully pretend to commit to some kind of academic standard that they really have no practical interest in fulfilling, and they’ll just penalize their kids and penalize them and penalize them and penalize them for no reason, for no reason. Now here’s what parents should do, and I’ll give you some advice. As an experienced administrator, let’s say you’ve got an 11 year old son and you have not done well with homeschooling. You haven’t been keeping a schedule, you haven’t been completing the the subjects that you should be completing for his age level based on his studies. And that’s a whole other subject. But let’s just, let’s just assume you know what I’m talking about.
You. You haven’t been doing well with homeschooling. The kids haven’t learned much. They’ve got obvious gaps. They’ve got obviously things that they haven’t studied that they should have studied. For example, third grade kids learn division and math. Our kids are clueless with math, so you’ve got to fix this problem. What should you do?
And I forget how old I said the kid, but let’s, let’s say 10 years old, right? So you say, well, at 10 years old, he should be in fourth grade. He should be in fourth grade. He’s 10 years old. So here’s what you should do. You should immediately give him a third grade standardized test. Immediately give him the third grade standardized test, let him take it and get a score.
You now have completed third grade, and you have your standardized test and your score for third grade. It may be a terrible score. He may be in the third percentile out of 10. He may have a score, an overall composite score, of 25 it doesn’t matter. Third grade is officially over. He’s got a 25 on his third grade standardized test. No one cares what that score is.
No one cares. The important thing is that you’ve now closed that door and you can move forward. The results of that standardized test will show you the greatest strengths and weaknesses, greatest weaknesses, I should say, you now need to focus on those weaknesses. You need to focus on those things that he scored lowest in because at the end of the present school year, no matter what you’re going to give him the fourth grade standardized test, you as a parent, need to hold yourself accountable and give your kids the grade level standardized tests Every spring, and not let yourself off the hook by just dodging the standardized tests. When parents do that, you see, what they do is they they allow themselves to neglect the work of homeschooling, and then they don’t administer the test, so they’re not accountable to any objective measure, any standardized measure. Give the test every single spring, it’s better for a kid to complete a grade with a low standardized test score than to have his parents screw around with having him starting over all the time and walking around when he goes to the grocery store, and the cashier says, What grade are you in? Tommy?
And he’s got to stand there like some kind of goon and can’t answer a simple question, because his parents have his whole educational life upside down for no reason, where he should say, Well, you know, I’m 10 years old. I’m in fourth grade. Obviously, that’s all the that’s all the lady was asking. That’s all she was asking. She wasn’t asking for this complicated mess of an answer from home, school, never, never land. She was asking a very simple question. She could have asked, How old are you Tommy?
And he would have said, 10. He wouldn’t have looked at his mom and said, how old my mom did you give me credit for? For year nine? Or am I still eight? But when it comes to school, we’re all clueless, whereas the kid should just say, Oh, I’m in fourth grade. But what is she going to do? Is she going to pull out a standardized test and test his math skills.
She’s a cashier at the at the grocery store. All of this home school weirdness is the parents fault, and it can be easily fixed by by making one simple correction. And here it is. Stop acting like a weirdo. Stop acting like a weirdo. This school stuff is not complicated. Stop making it all weird.
At the end of the year, whatever grade your child’s age says he should be in, give him that standardized test and it’s over. If he gets a low score, that’s your fault. Don’t penalize the kid for it. Get the low score and fix it. If you’re upset by the low score, fix it. But hold yourself accountable to annual standardized testing when you get the standardized test score, stick it in a filing cabinet and you’re done. If the kids ask, What grade are you in? He can be normal and say, I’m in fourth grade, and no one will care.
But stop all of this foolishness in the name of education, where people who just don’t know what they’re doing, don’t know what they’re talking about and are doing things that are actual. Really harmful to the kids that again, are totally unnecessary. I hope that you can hear my criticism but understand my optimism. What I’m telling you is these problems that people imagine themselves to have are caused by bad thinking. They’re not real problems. You have to learn to just stop thinking in a way that’s wrong and that whole problem will vanish. So if you’ve, if you’re want to, if you’re in this situation right now, and you’ve got your homeschooling is screwy, and your kids are all over the place, and you feel like you’ve been you’ve messed all this up, and you don’t say we’re going to go back and start from No no, listen to my advice. Give your kids their previous it’s November now.
Give your kids the standardized tests they should have taken last May or June. Give them those standardized tests. You can do it right through the classical liberal arts academy. You can order our standardized tests. You can take them online, complete them, get your scores, and it’s done. And the kids are grade level because every single kid in the local public school is not scoring 99 on his standardized tests. You don’t have to score 99th percentile to complete third grade, take the test, get a score, stick it in a file and move on.
Don’t start over again. That that’s, that’s, that’s like fake, fake objective standards. If you were so strict and objective, you would not be behind in the first place. Stop doing that. So take last year’s standardized test right now. You can, you can order it from the Academy website. It costs 30 bucks.
You get a practice test and the full grade level composite test. Get that set up right now, complete the kids test from from last year, and it’s done. You have a score. You get results for each different subject area. You can see where the weaknesses are. Focus on moving forward. It’s not important put your kids at their current age based grade level, and don’t screw around with that stuff.
The kids should be able to say, I’m 10 years old. I’m in fourth grade. It’s that simple. In public schools, every kid who is 10 years old is in fourth grade. That’s the first thing you should do this year, focus on his current grade level, fourth grade. If you say, Well, I don’t know if he’s ready for fourth grade. It’s hard. So what help him work on his current grade level and do the best you can.
And next spring, give him his current grade level standardized test. And whatever the score is, that’s what it is. Focus on the weaknesses, what things are weak. And then the next year, commit to the next grade level. It’s that simple. You can you can easily catch up and get ahead, if you avoid doing the same stupid things over again, and just keep making the problem worse, if you just get back on track at grade level and help the kids, help the kids at their grade level. You’ll catch up. You.
I mean, think about it. You’re a home schooling family. You have the whole entire year to work on schooling. You have all day and all night. You don’t have from eight in the morning to three o’clock Monday to Friday, just for the school. You have the whole day, all week, every week, for the whole year. Stop making excuses if the kids need help with their studies.
Stop screwing around and help the kids with their studies, because the problem is not going to go away. It’s very easy to fix. The kids in modern schools are not doing a lot of work. You know that they’re not doing a lot of work. You can easily help your kids catch up, but you’ve got to move forward. So that’s my advice. Now, when the parents turn around and don’t do what I tell them, that’s another red flag and I can see it.
I’ll tell the parents to do that. I’ll say, give the kids the previous year’s standardized test right now. I don’t care what month of the year it is, give them last year’s test right now, and it’s done. And then I’ll see them go on our website. And what will they do? They’ll order the standardized. Test from two years before. So instead of getting a third grade test, they’ll order the second grade test, and you just see they don’t listen to advice, and this is why they’re in their situation in the first place, and why other families are not in their situation.
You it, but we’ve got to learn, if we’re homeschooling parents, we’ve got to learn to distinguish between all of this artificial, subjective, modern school stuff. We’ve got to know how to handle this stuff, and we’ve got to separate that from our more perfect, objective Christian educational goals, which are totally separate and have nothing to do with this modern school stuff. We’ve got to learn how to handle these modern things realistically and keep it separate from our Christian goals that we have for our kids education. So if you’re one of these parents whose kids are behind with Homeschool, you feel like they’re behind, my advice to you is immediately complete the previous year’s standardized test for their grade and never look back, just move forward and work on the current year grade level. Now in the classical liberal arts academy, we obviously focus on classical Catholic studies, but we also provide for a whole K to 12 program, and we provide everything that kids need use the stuff, use the grade levels that don’t, don’t, start making all these decisions and say, No, well, I think we should go back to second grade. You’re going to be doing that forever. You’re going to do that forever. You’re never going to move forward.
And plus, when we talk about K to 12 studies, these are just studies that are part of this artificial modern school system. It’s not real education. If you’re going to worry about something, worry about Bible study, worry about catechism, worry about moral philosophy, those are things you should be worried about. But don’t worry about third grade math. Just get the stuff done. So that’s my advice, and as I said, I have I’m an experienced homeschooling father. I’ve already placed four of my home school graduates into college. One is already finished, graduated with honors, with a degree in criminal justice, went on to Officer Training School in the military, and is now living comfortably as a 24 year old independent man. My second child is she’s finishing her last year as an ROTC cadet studying political science.
She’s going to be in the same place. My oldest son is within a year or two. You know, straight A student, successful home schooled, went right into college. I think she’s got a 3.9 GPA in college. My third child, successfully admitted to college, currently a junior. I think he’s, he’s taking some time off for military deployment, my next child was actually not interested in going to college. My daughter, Mary, not interested to going to college, wanted to work full time instead, but still, after high school, submitted an application and was admitted to the university. My point is, getting the kids through their modern school requirements, getting them into college is easy.
Please stop fussing and making a big deal out of what is ridiculously simple. Stop making modern education seem like it’s difficult because it’s not. You’ve got real Christian educational concerns to deal with. Stop making grade level nonsense a headache. Stop making it a distraction. Stop making your kids feel like goons because they can’t even answer a question of what grade they’re in, because they’ve got this wacky homeschool life where they don’t even know what grade they’re in. Stop all this nonsense. Let the grade level stuff be simple.
Do what I’ve told you to do. If you choose not to, you’re on your own. But I’ve already been through this. I can already tell you how to work through each step from experience, and I’m willing to do so, but you’ve got to take some advice, because that’s not the hard part. It’s actually very easy, and as a home schooling parent, you have. Many advantages to give to your children, and instead, you’re penalizing them because you don’t know what you’re doing. And that’s that’s not to criticize your judgment as a parent.
That’s to criticize your activity when it comes to all of this modern school stuff, because honestly, talking as a Christian homeschooling parent to other Christian homeschooling parents, that stuff is not complicated. Stop letting that distract your family. If you’d like to talk about that more, I invite you to get in touch. Just contact me by email, but I’ve already provided some advice, and I hope to see parents get over this, because we’ve got real Christian education to do. We’ve got real classical Catholic studies to work through, and I hate seeing families so distracted and stressed and anxious about this modern school nonsense, which is all subjective and artificial. Let’s get this stuff out of the way so we can actually focus on real studies. I hope that’s helpful.
God bless you.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
