“Oh, ‘tanstaafl.’ Means ~’There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.’ And isn’t,” I added, pointing to a FREE LUNCH sign across room, “or these drinks would cost half as much. Was reminding her that anything free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless.”
“An interesting philosophy.”
“Not philosophy, fact. One way or other, what you get, you pay for.”
-excerpt from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
Free Public Education
My nation has a free public education system. And by free, I mean paid for by tax dollars, which means it is not technically free. It also means whatever agency or group handles the funneling of said tax dollars into our education system very likely has more clout than the taxpayers when it comes to policy-making, curriculum choosing, and other ways those hard-taxed dollars are used.
And this is a problem inasmuch as too few of our officials know what a child is, much less what is good for one. Most of their time seems to be spent in an abstract political universe with only brief forays into reality.
And thus, the sorry phrase, good enough for government work now applies to the shaping and curation of many young minds across the USA. The word tanstaafl pops into my mind most often alongside thoughts of the American free public education.
A Brief History of Public Education in America
It wasn’t always this way. In the early agrarian years of this nation, children most often learned incredible amounts of information just by living and working alongside their parents. Survival was the reward, and I’d argue it was a better one than a paper degree. But that’s another topic.
In the earliest days, wealthy families often had tutors while poorer families taught their own kids what they needed to survive and run the family business or farm. The farther from a town or village one’s family lived, the less likely one was to have access to formal education of any sort.
Formal education was pretty haphazard, seasonal, and utterly dependent on a wide variety of factors foreign to the modern lifestyle. Basic math and reading were often taught at home through the normal course of life – items bought or sold in town, the reading of the Scriptures, and keeping up letter correspondence with family and friends far away.
By the 18th century, towns and villages might have a small common school – often doubling as the church meeting place on Sunday and as often staffed by either a preacher (if the town was lucky enough to have one in residence), itinerant teachers, or just someone who was willing, whether or not he or she were trained. These early schools were often tuition-based or funded by the generosity of the townspeople, though not always in dollars and cents. A parent might provide housing for the teacher, and bartering for goods & services flourished in those days.
It wasn’t until the 1830s that a more systematic public education system began to form. Even then, it barely resembled our modern schools. There were no minimum ages, children came if and when they could, and training in morality was seen as an imperative to producing good citizens along with an almost-secondary focus on the “Three R’s” of reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic.
Factory Model Learning
By and large, our current educational model was shaped by the assembly-line mentality of the industrial revolution. Today, its shape is maintained more by politics than by professors. Ask any public-school teacher today, and he or she will tell you how much time is spent collecting data points on students, preparing for standardized tests, trying to enforce discipline without tools, tweaking lesson plans for IEPs, and so on.
The complaint I hear most from my teacher friends is that they don’t get to actually teach. They’re too busy dealing with the latest policies and trying to find the kids lost in the cracks of the ever-fluctuating standards.
Tanstaafl. You get what you pay for, and I can tell you first-hand that you are NOT paying to adequately compensate the teachers who now have more hoops to jump through than a circus lion. The public school system of today is profoundly broken, and it is not the fault of the teachers. Most of them are like the children of Israel in Egypt, being told to churn out the same number of bricks and supply their own materials to make them with – or else.
So the taskmasters and the foremen of the people went out and said to the people, “Thus says Pharaoh, ‘I will not give you straw. Go and get your straw yourselves wherever you can find it, but your work will not be reduced in the least.’ ”
Exodus 5:10-11
Now What?
In the post-COVID19 world, more and more people are choosing to homeschool. Private school is simply not always affordable. And if I may be frank? Neither is public school. There are always extras – sports fees, supply fees, keeping-up-with-the-joneses fees. Not to mention the non-financial costs of policies driven more by adult political games than by concern for the wellbeing of human children.
When the world closed in 2020, more and more parents saw that their kids learned as much or more at home than they did spending several hours a day in a classroom full of cell phones and weary teachers staggering under the weight of the “thou shalt” agendas of the modern educational system.
This is not the world I began homeschooling in, but it is the one we live in today. And please hear me when I say: I don’t believe everyone is called to homeschool, nor do I believe everyone should. But if you find yourself thinking about homeschooling, please allow me the privilege of sharing the journey with you. I am planning on several posts to share what I learned in my years of homeschooling.
Stay Tuned
Stay tuned, and you’ll get the benefit of hearing what I did wrong and what I learned through those mistakes. You’ll also get to see where God led me to do something right quite despite myself. I hope you’ll be encouraged, challenged, and maybe even entertained. But most of all, I hope to honor God by taking what He has given me and pouring it into the generations coming up next.
How many posts will I write? Well, that depends. It depends on varying time demands, health considerations, family financial needs, and things like that; but mostly it depends on whether or not my scribblings prove helpful to others. Because what I learn, experience, feel, or endure was never meant for me alone. It is meant to be shared so that you may be strengthened and God glorified.
So I invite you to “listen in” as I recap this section of the race I’ve run, and I sincerely hope it helps!
For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.
2 Corinthians 1:5-7
References
/https://www.americanboard.org/blog/11-facts-about-the-history-of-education-in-america
Running the Race 
Great overview, Heather.
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Thanks, Mitch!
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As a previous home school mom and educator, I’m totally with you on this! Don’t get me started on how messed up our current system is – even in many private schools. 😦
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I hear you. I worked in a private school after my homeschool days were done. Since I left, they have taken questionable policies and made them worse. As a result, they are losing many of their best & brightest teachers.
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