Home Schooling

The Dissident Dad – Free Your Mind, Part 2

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Last week, I chose to take on a different tack and put together a list of 50 things to try instead of, or in addition to, going straight to college. It’s a lengthy list, so only the first 25 were posted last week. Here is the rest of the list:

26) Volunteer at a Zoo: Zoos contain a great wealth of information, and they’re an awesome place to volunteer. You get to meet other animal lovers, learn how animals are cared for (like bears and lions), and possibly even get to take part in their care yourself. It’s something very few people get to do!

27) Write Songs: Lyrically, songs take a bit of work. You’re working with both a beat and verbal flow, which requires a strong grasp of the English language (or another) and fitting things together. This makes it a strong creative outlet, and could even lead to a job writing lyrics for others.

28) Learn to Drive Race Cars: Most of us have had that desire to get behind the wheel of a race car and take it around the track. Or even just go on a drag strip. Learning how to drive a car in these extreme conditions requires great hand-eye coordination, and fast reflexes. But if you master it, you could actually get sponsored to drive cars!

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The Dissident Dad – Free Your Mind

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I was wiping off the dust from an old book that I read when I was just 15 years old. I thought I had lost it, but while cleaning out my garage, I discovered it at the bottom of a box, like buried treasure. This specific book changed my life. It was the key to everything my brain had told me was right, but I had never seen it in written words. The book was “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” by Robert Kiyosaki. First self-published in 1997, somehow I got lucky and a friend who was in his 30s gave it to me as a gift.

Upon opening up this book that I hadn’t touched in 18 years, written in my handwriting was “free your mind.” It was a statement of faith I had declared to myself as a young man.

Since last fall, I’ve been writing Dissident Dad posts weekly, focusing on my personal struggle to raise 3 children in an environment where the America we were all told about and learned to love is completely in the past. It’s a totally foreign nation to anyone residing in the current police state run by an insane group of oligarchs, multinational corporations and lunatics in D.C.

Today, I want to change it up a bit and reach out to any young adults reading this post, or perhaps parents who are raising teenagers. With daily stories about college-aged kids being overwhelmed with debt and irrelevant degrees for today’s economy, I wanted to put together a list of 50 alternatives to going to college.

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The Dissident Dad – I Recently Spanked My Son and I Feel Like a Hypocrite

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Screen Shot 2015-03-18 at 10.21.56 AMI felt like shit. After more than 13 months without spanking my children, after taking my time to apologize to them for doing so in the past and even writing an article about why I am against it; on February 27th, I slapped my son on the backside out of anger.

It had been building up all week — frustration over a lack of respect from my 5-year-old son — and I finally lost it. After dumping water out of the bath tub, I asked him not to do that anymore, sternly raising my voice on my last request. He looked me in the eyes, scooped up a cup of water, and dumped it out right on the floor. I was livid. I took him out and dried him off with a towel, and nearly ended the matter peacefully. But I was so mad at the deliberate disrespect, I bent him over my knee and slapped his bottom. Instantly I felt horrible. I violated our relationship… I had struck my son. I had done exactly what I hated and wanted to banish from our lives – violence as a threat in order to alter a person’s behavior.

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The Dissident Dad — Raising Children in an Increasingly Obsolete System

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Screen Shot 2015-03-11 at 12.19.03 PMSixteen years ago, fresh out of high school, I remember forking over $3,800 to take a Carlton Sheets real estate coaching program. I desperately wanted to learn about buying real estate in order to make a living without going to college. Just months out of high school, at age 18, I bought my first rental property. However, it had nothing to do with the Carlton Sheets coaching program. Well, at least not the expensive portion I bought. The real value that helped me was a $99 packet of DVDs that was included. Through these videos and my own actions, I was able to acquire over a million dollars in real estate by age 22 with very little money.

At age 19, I took my one and only college class, “Real Estate Principles”, where I sat in a room with a hundred other kids and listened to dozens of lectures by our instructor. This will always go down as the biggest waste of time in my adult life.

For today’s kids, this type of education is an even greater misallocation of time and capital, because the unconventional means of education is 50x more efficient than it was fifteen years ago. And the best part: it usually costs you nothing.

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Death, Destruction, & Playtime

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Screen Shot 2014-09-25 at 11.06.40 AMIt’s hard to know what’s normal sometimes. As an unfortunate son of empire, my life, my own memories as a child, were corrupted at a young age. As such, knowing what should be acceptable behavior while raising my own kids can be challenging.

Yesterday, my 4 year old son was playing with another young boy at his house, while in another room speaking with their father, I could see in the distance the two boys flying some type of fighter jet while bombing a lego city and train station.

At first glance, this is normal right? I mean we all played with GI-Joe’s, green army men, and jet fighters when we were kids.

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Wisconsin Middle School Forces Children to Play “Cross the Line” Game – Asks Kids if Parents are Alcoholics

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Just in case you had any lingering doubt about the uselessness of many U.S. public schools, I bring to you Marinette Middle School. Yes, the administrators of this school thought it would be a fantastic idea to gather sixth graders around and ask them in front of all their classmates questions like; if their parents are alcoholics, … Read more

Guest Post: A Connecticut Family’s Battle Against The State

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This past Thursday, I became aware of a very troubling bill being proposed in the state of Connecticut, which prompted me to write the post: Are “Mandatory Mental Health Assessments” for Children Coming to Connecticut?  Upon reading it, a money manager in Connecticut who I have gotten to know over the years wrote me an email.  I was so impressed by his passion and writing skills I asked him to compose a “Guest Post” for the site; something I rarely do.  What follows are the impassioned words of a father, husband and concerned citizen.  Enjoy.

Soon after my wife and I got married in 2008, a pregnancy prompted family members to ask us about our plans for educating our kids.  The official response was one of uncertainty, but between the two of us we knew that we preferred homeschooling.   

I suspect all parents have a line in the sand when it comes to public schools.  The line gets crossed when the safety level, education quality, peer influences, or espoused morals and values of the local government school deteriorate to so base a level, that as parents you realize that sending your kids there would be tantamount to dereliction of duty, gross negligence, wholesale surrender, etc. 

The line might be located in different places for different parents depending on their own values and the conviction with which their values are held, but all parents have a line.  Both parents work?  Can’t afford private school?   Not qualified for homeschooling?  It doesn’t matter, if the school down the road crossed the line you’d pull your kid out and you’d find a way to make it work.  If you haven’t pulled your kid out yet, it just mean that the local school hasn’t crossed the line. 

We live in CT and I am homeschooling my three boys because upon surveying the options, we decided to opt-out out of 10,000 “mandatory” things that get done to kids at government schools in exchange for a “free” education.  Do it ourselves, we thought.  If we threw a fraction of the money at lessons and tutors that other families throw at tuition, we’d have a fighting chance of doing an even better job than the private school alternative.  And best of all, we would enjoy the liberty of doing it our way, watching our kids walk in the way of goodness and excellence, without being exasperated as we beat back all the menacing influences that foist themselves upon kids at government schools.  In short, we would opt-out.  Not for the sake of rebelling, but for the sake of still standing a chance at getting a taste of the pursuit of happiness that our present vestiges of liberty still permit. 

No more.  If CT gets their way, and Bill 374 becomes law, my family’s private pursuit of happiness will be allowed only if it wins the approval or disapproval of the State’s mental health inspection teams. 

The justification of Bill 374 is innocent enough; pass this bill to allow the State to perform mental health evaluations on adolescents, so that the State can prevent another Sandy Hook tragedy by intervening in the lives of troubled adolescents before it’s too late.  In reality, this bill lays the groundwork for much more. 

First, note that Bill 374 does not exempt home-schooled children; in fact, it singles them out and specifically requires them too to get periodic evaluations and inspections.  Parental consent is not determined to be relevant. 

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