The School Revolution (15 page)

It is not good enough to be aware of the history of Western civilization and the United States, including
constitutional development. The student must also be able to express himself effectively. This requires weekly writing assignments. These writing assignments will begin in the fourth grade. By the time the student reaches high school, he will be able to express himself on paper and on-screen. Second, there will be considerable attention given to public speaking. Even though mine is an online
curriculum, students will get training in public speaking. For every course, he will be required to post videos on their own YouTube channels. Each will be required to set up a blog, either on Blogger or WordPress.

In other words, the student will become familiar with the techniques and technology of communication and persuasion. This is extremely important for students who go into
business, or who expect to have influence locally in the community. A student who can write clearly and rapidly, outline a speech, and deliver it in front of an audience has a tremendous competitive advantage over almost every high school graduate, and the vast majority of college graduates.

One aspect of my curriculum has a ninth-grade focus. There will be a course on time management,
goal-setting, and study habits. There will be another course on fundamentals of leadership. All students will be required to take these courses when they begin high school. There are courses on speed-reading and typing. Students will be encouraged to continue with these two courses throughout their careers. If a student can type rapidly and accurately, and read rapidly and accurately, he will
have a tremendous advantage over the vast majority of Americans.

My goal is to add a high school year every eight months. I will add a year upward, and I will also add years at the bottom. I plan to offer courses on how to teach young children to read and write. These courses will be offered free of charge to the general public. In fact, the entire curriculum will be free of charge
up until the sixth grade. I want to make certain that my site provides basic education to any family, anywhere in the world. I want to maximize the number of people who benefit from this program. This is going to take several years to develop, but that is my goal for kindergarten through fifth grade education.

At the high school level, things get more rigorous. At that level, the site
will be closed to the general public. Only paying families will gain access to it. I want to train a generation of leaders, and I intend to do so by means of a rigorous curriculum that rests on the freedom philosophy. It is a philosophy of
self-government
.

So far, I have discussed the content of the curriculum. Now I want to talk about the technology.

Some students need audio instruction. To give them this, each high school class will make use of video screencasts. A screencast integrates a presentation program such as PowerPoint with audio instruction. The student can follow each presentation by means of an outline, and the instructor fills in the outline by means of a lecture. Each screencast will be about
twenty-five minutes. Then there will be a reading assignment, generally in primary sources in history, but also tied to extracts from Wikipedia and summaries of textbooks.

The courses will have a “four-one” structure: four lessons will present new material, and one lesson will review that material. This way, the student is forced to go back over material that has already been covered,
because otherwise he will not remember much of it.

There will be a weekly writing assignment for each course, on the fifth day of the weekly presentation. Presumably, this will be a Friday for most students. Students will watch a summary screencast of the week’s four lessons, and then will write a 250-word paper. This is for each course. If students do not get this done on Friday, then
they will have to work on Saturday to do it.

Students will begin training in public speaking. They will be required to prepare short videos to be posted to their YouTube channels. The student will verbally summarize what he wrote in an essay for another course. He will not read the essay; he will summarize it, so that someone who has not read it will have a good overall understanding
of what is said in it.

Because students will be required to post their essays on their blogs, and to post their videos on their YouTube channels, they will feel the pressure to do a good job. Students do not want to go public without preparation. In the early years, this is going to take a lot of extra time.

Most of us know that the best way to learn something new is to teach
it. So students will be encouraged to interact with one another on forums for each of their courses. If a student cannot figure something out, he can go online and ask for assistance. Other students will respond to his questions by preparing a screencast and posting it on their YouTube channels and then posting a link to it on the forum. This will enable students to develop their teaching skills.

I would like to see students in the natural sciences and mathematics create blogs that will include lists of frequently asked questions. They can create videos that will help other students get these questions answered.

Students’ blogs and YouTube channels can be used to deal with any truant officer who might insist on evidence that the student is actually learning something.
Truant officers are not used to seeing comprehensive websites by students, backed up by videos posted on the students’ YouTube channels.

If a student develops a blog with hundreds of pages of essays, plus links to videos, he will have a tremendous asset when it comes time to go looking for a job. How many job applicants have this kind of publicly available evidence of their competence?
An employer will know that the student is capable in the two crucial areas: written communication and verbal communication. He will also know that the student is capable technically with two of the most important means of communication, namely, YouTube videos and blogs. The student will go to the top of the pile of job applicants.

Parents will be able to see an improvement in their
children’s ability to write and appear in educational videos. The ability to pass true-false exams does not give students a particular advantage after graduation. In contrast, the ability to write an essay and then produce an instructional video is highly sought after in the field of business.

My curriculum is organized in terms of these assumptions:

1. A curriculum must be integrated and coherent. 
   
2. There must be a common theme: the freedom philosophy. 
   
3. The best methodology is self-instruction. 
   
4. Courses should reinforce each other. 
   
5. Students must learn to write and to speak in public. 
   

If this sounds like something you would be
interested in as an adult, you should consider signing up as a student. You will get the education you deserved when you were a teenager, but that was not available at the time. You will also be able to interact with your children, if they are being instructed by means of my curriculum. Most adults probably will not want to go through all the courses, but some of them will be interesting, especially
the course on leadership, and maybe the course on how to start a small business, as well as courses in basic economics. Some adults will want to take the history courses, too.

If you are interested in learning more about this program, send an email to:

Here are some things
to remember from part 3:

Maybe you are a parent of a teenager. If so, you are concerned about the content and structure of the education your child is receiving.

If you are a homeschool parent, you know there is a wide variety of curriculum materials out there, and they vary in quality considerably, from course to course. You want your child to have the best materials available,
but the materials have got to be interesting enough to get your child to commit to mastering them. The materials should not be too far over your child’s head. You also do not want them to be so easy that your child gains no skill in mastering more difficult material. You want to prepare your child for life, and for college. You want your child to be ready to walk onto a college campus and
not get ground up by the Keynesian liberalism that is dominant on the campus.

In other words, you want to do a responsible job when selecting a curriculum for your children. You have to act on their behalf. You may be interested at this point in learning about the curriculum I am putting together. It may be exactly what you have been looking for. On the other hand, it may not be. You
do not know yet, but you are in a position to find out.

Maybe you do not have children still in school. Maybe you are a grandparent, and your grandchildren are already in school or will be in a few years. You may want to find out more about my curriculum, or about other online programs.

What I am proposing will not work well where children are not self-disciplined. They also
had better be future-oriented. But they do not have to have high IQs. They do have to have a commitment to overcoming challenges. They must also be able to overcome the usual temptations we all face, but that teenagers especially face. It is easy to take ethical shortcuts. It is easy to quit. It is easy to complain endlessly until somebody over us finally tells us to quit.

A self-disciplined
teenager will probably be a self-disciplined adult. Someone who is future-oriented when he is a teenager will probably be future-oriented when he is an adult. When he learns the basics of self-education, a teenager is in a position to advance his career and also advance his calling in ways that his contemporaries are not. If a teenager has a sense of the battle of ideas we are in today,
and he is willing to make an initial commitment to enter that battle as an ideological warrior, he is likely to make contributions on some ideological battlefield over the next sixty or seventy years. The world will be better off because of his contributions.

This is a win-win situation. Parents do not have to bankrupt themselves for a college education that can be purchased a lot cheaper
than the general public suspects. Their children are immunized early against the Keynesian liberalism of the modern university. Maybe the children do not even set foot on the university campus. They can still earn an accredited degree that would grant them the same benefits as the majority of college degrees.

A teenager who gets involved in a program like this is going to have an enormous
head start over his peers. His peers may be as smart, and they may even be equally self-disciplined academically, but they are not going to be exposed to a curriculum that is as internally consistent, focused on the history of Western civilization, dedicated to the principle of restricting the state, equally dedicated to the principle of self-government, and taught by experts.

Smart
students are going to be successful if they are ethically grounded. They will do well, no matter which curriculum they use. This is why the ethical environment of the educational program is so important. Very smart students can find themselves in an ethical crisis, and their brains may not get them out of it. We are warned from an early age that “if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”

Parents who control their children’s educational environment are in a much stronger position to increase the likelihood of their children’s academic success than parents who turn their children over to a school system seeking to satisfy the state’s Department of Public Instruction. The moral environment is far more important than the academic environment. But parents are in a position
today to get both: a reliable moral environment and a superior academic program. This is because they can keep their children home and assign homeschool materials to them. If they get these materials online, the costs are reasonable. If their children use CLEP and DSST exams to test out of the first two years of college before they graduate from high school, the parents will be so far ahead of the
curve financially that the expenses associated with homeschooling will be chump change by comparison.

Parents will be ahead, and the students will also be ahead. The students will graduate from college at least two years early, thereby getting into the labor force two years earlier. Not every student who signs up for my curriculum will be able to do this. I think a lot of them can,
and at least they will be encouraged to try.

There will be far more choices in a decade than there are today. The number of comprehensive curriculum programs will multiply. As more students who have been homeschooled go into the production of homeschool materials, there is going to be a flood of high-quality materials. We are only in the initial stages of an educational revolution.
The best is yet to come.

But that will be then, and this is now. What are you going to do now? What is best for your children and grandchildren now? What is the best deal you can get immediately on a curriculum you approve of?

My program is in the initial phase. I do not know when you are reading this. The program will expand year by year from the ninth grade through the
twelfth. It will also expand upward, from kindergarten through the ninth grade. It is going to take some years to finish the program, but it is coming.

If you know somebody who might be helped, loan out a copy of this book. Ask to get it back in a week. Tell the borrower that you will be happy to talk about it. This book may offer an immediate solution to somebody who is facing a major
problem in educating his teenagers. This book could be a lifesaver for some parent. It could also be a lifesaver for some student. Lend it out, get it back, and lend it out again.