“There are a lot of kids out there who are really smothered by the traditional education system, and that makes me very sad. I want as many of these children as possible to have a thriving and vibrant childhood that sets them up for lifelong success” – Hannah Frankman

In the latest episode of the Founder Views podcast, Kosta Panagoulias interviews Hannah Frankman about homeschooling, other alternative educational systems, and some FAQs of parents who want to homeschool their kids and are trying to figure out where to start.

The post-COVID era has seen a lot of parents questioning the traditional public school system, and a rise in curiosity regarding available alternatives. rebelEducator was built to help answer these sorts of questions.

Hannah and Kosta deep dive into what the structure(s) of homeschooling looks like, how the logistics work, and the advantages/disadvantages of homeschooling your kids.

Hannah uses her own homeschooling journey as an example to illuminate the most common problems faced by homeschooling parents, and discusses potential solutions.

This podcast covers the basics of homeschooling in a comprehensive but succinct way, with the hope of being a primer for parents just getting started.

This conversation covered:

• Hannah’s background (1:16)
• Hannah’s experience growing up homeschooled (4:30)
• What the logistics of homeschooling actually look like (9:30)
• The structure (and the absence thereof!) of education in a homeschooling curriculum (14:10)
• Is following a set curriculum contradictory to homeschooling? (16:07)
• The role of Hannah’s parents in her education and their background (19:13)
• The most valuable part of being homeschooled for Hannah (24:38)
• The art of exposing your kids to different subjects without sounding coercive (30:10)
• What’s wrong with the current public school system (35:33)
• Specific weaknesses that kids going through a traditional education often end up inheriting (40:00)
• Building a social life without going to a traditional school (44:48)
• Teaching socializing skills when homeschooling (52:55)
• Problems arising from learning a computer, and how to balance these problems (1:00:50)
• Things parents should be considering when exploring alternative education options (1:17:06)
• The rebelEducator project (1:21:40)
• Is it possible (and strategies!) for parents to be working full time and homeschool their kids simultaneously (1:24:31)
• A final message for parents still on the fence about alternative schooling (1:28:40)

Resources:

Hannah mentions the following resources in this episode:

1. The Teaching Company: Hannah learned a lot of her higher school curriculum from courses from The Teaching Company. (Also known as The Great Courses). The Teaching Company has lectures from some of the best professors in every subject and topic of interest, and is a great resource for online learning from the flexibility of your home.
2. Dumbing Us Down: Hannah recommends reading this book for those who want to learn about the problems regarding traditional public schooling systems. John Taylor Gatto, the author, was a highly acclaimed public school teacher who won the best teacher award for the state of New York before abruptly resigning from teaching. In this book, he illustrates his main criticisms of the public education system.
3. Prenda: Hannah recommends this microschool as an alternative to parents who are short on time to homeschool their kids while also working full time jobs.

Noteworthy quotes

“In another life, I would probably be a Ph.D. student right now. I was that academic.” – (Referring to her love for academia), Hannah Frankman (14:35)

“That’s one of the distinctions between a true unscooling experience and traditional schooling. The kid’s at the forefront. Whatever the kid wants, that’s where you should be driving the experience towards. I wanted college, so I followed a similar-to-school academic curriculum.” -Hannah Frankman (17:29)

“There’s a pretty broad spectrum for how you can teach your kids at home, and I think it really comes down to what the kid wants. If the kid has no interest in academics, and wants to do something different entirely then why would you care about the college standards?” – Hannah Frankman (18:52)

“I never lost my love for learning, which a lot of people do. A lot of people lose their sense of curiosity and their innate passion for learning because it just gets smothered by all of the coercion and all of the have-to-dos. You start to associate learning at all with this very unpleasant, resistance-filled, coercive process.”-Hannah Frankman (25:40)

“You have to trust a child’s inner compass, and you have to teach them how to trust it. You have to reinforce that they can trust it. That’s far more important than any specific subjects that they might miss out on. When your curiosity is properly nurtured, it serves as a true compass that will illuminate the things you want to spend your time on”(On figuring out what your kid is interested in without sounding suggestive or coercive)-Hannah Frankman  (31:00)

“The whole idea of one-size-fits-all education is so fundamentally flawed. It’s such a broken idea, and it makes me laugh when people talk about school reform. It’s not that we can make some tweaks to the system and it will be fine, the entire system is flawed. The assumptions that it is based on are inaccurate. We have to go way back, to the fundamentals of what education is supposed to be, to fix this.” -Hannah Frankman (34:47)

“Our education system is designed to produce factory workers. It’s built like a factory, and designed to mass produce, in the same way that a factory mass produces, all the individual units you need to fill all the individual boxes that make up society. All of these units have to be fairly consistent, and fairly similar, and they all have to understand how to follow rules properly in order to have a system functioning properly. And so school is a factory that’s producing factory workers, now shifted to corporate workers, and it really has no bearing whatsoever on the individual.” -Hannah Frankman (37:27)

“I learned a lot of lessons about being comfortable by myself. And a lot of lessons about being more committed to the things I’m interested in. This is really important because I think if I had been in the public school system, I wouldn’t have developed that. I wouldn’t be as interesting as I am now, I would be very average because that’s what I would need to make a bunch of friends.”(On the challenges of and lessons from not having a very large social life because of being homeschooled)- Hannah Frankman  (50:30)

“I would consider your lack of expertise on homeschooling as a feature, not a bug. Because your kids will see you figuring this out, and they get to watch you learning how to teach them, and in that process they are learning how to learn on a deeper, more meta-level. What you’re teaching them by not having all the answers and figuring it out is that it’s okay not to know everything when you start.” -Hannah Frankman (1:30:30)

You can find the full episode on YouTube.