Dear Reader,

A Brazilian judge recently sentenced two parents to prison for “intellectually neglecting” their daughters.

From that description, you might assume the girls could barely read…

Or that their parents had locked them away with no education at all.

But the daughters reportedly speak multiple languages and are accomplished pianists.

So what exactly had their parents neglected?

According to the ruling, their home curriculum failed to include state-required material on “gender, sex education, tolerance, and diversity.”

In other words, it was not that the girls were not being educated…

It was that they were not being indoctrinated.

Now, this happened in Brazil.

American parents are not generally being sent to prison for homeschooling.

But the instinct behind that ruling is hardly foreign to us.

Our government still claims enormous authority over where children spend their days…

What qualifies as an approved education…

And which ideas must appear in the curriculum.

This raises a deeper question:

Why is the state so invested in schooling children in the first place?

Because remember:

Schooling Is Not the Same as Education

We have been trained to treat these two words as though they mean the same thing.

They do not.

Schooling means passing through an approved institution.

Education – at least in my view – means developing the knowledge, judgment and practical ability to live independently.

A child can spend thirteen years in school and still know little about debt, taxes, investing, or business.

Another can learn at home, online or through apprenticeships – and finish years ahead.

One followed the approved process.

But which one was actually educated?

Three years ago, I published a video explaining where the modern public-school model came from – and why my wife and I chose to homeschool our children.

You can watch it here:

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Some of the statistics in that video are now a little dated.

But the core argument has not changed.

The Modern School System Was Built To Standardize Large Numbers of People At Once

For most of human history, children did not spend thirteen years separated into age groups inside state-run institutions.

They learned from parents, extended family, churches, craftsmen, and the daily work required to keep a household alive.

Mass compulsory schooling is the historical anomaly – not homeschooling.

In the nineteenth century, American reformers studied the Prussian education system, with its centralized administration, trained teachers, and uniform methods of instruction.

They brought many of those ideas home.

Whatever their stated intentions, the system they helped build was exceptionally well suited to industrial America.

Factories needed workers who could arrive at a fixed time, follow instructions, accept a hierarchy, and perform repetitive tasks.

Schools trained children to move when a bell rang.

Authority determined when they could speak, eat or leave the room.

Tests rewarded their ability to remember the approved answer and repeat it on command.

The Prussians wanted loyal citizens who could serve the state.

Industrial America needed reliable workers who could serve corporations.

The same basic machinery could produce both.

That same model would later become equally useful for producing the ideal modern citizen – the worker and taxpayer.

Once the Sixteenth Amendment established the modern federal income-tax system, workers became a recurring source of government revenue.

And today, the federal government is extraordinarily dependent on that revenue.

In fiscal year 2025, Washington collected $5.2 trillion.

Individual income taxes supplied $2.7 trillion – more than half of the total.

Payroll taxes contributed another $1.7 trillion.

Together, those two sources generated roughly 85 cents of every federal revenue dollar.

Because employee wages are easy to report, withhold, and tax, the government has a powerful incentive to keep as many people as possible earning them for as long as possible.

So the school system continues pointing children toward one approved path:

Get good grades. Earn approved credentials. Find a job.

Then keep working and paying taxes for the next forty or fifty years.

Teach people about ownership, investing, and business, and some will become less dependent on wages – or leave the labor market early.

That is good for them…

But less useful to a government whose revenue depends heavily on continued earnings.

Even the Federal Reserve operates under a mandate to promote “maximum employment.”

We are told this is about prosperity.

But look at it from the government’s side of the ledger.

More employment means more paychecks – which means more taxable income.

The polite phrase is maximum employment.

A less polite phrase might be maximum tax slavery.

Look at What Schools Leave Out

The most revealing part of a curriculum may be what it consistently leaves out.

Students spend thousands of hours in classrooms, yet many graduate without understanding taxes, debt, investing, inflation, or basic accounting.

The problem is that the system often teaches enough to make someone employable…

Without teaching enough to make that person independent.

This is finally beginning to change.

In 2022, only seventeen states guaranteed high school students a standalone personal-finance course.

By July 2026, that number had risen to thirty.

That is progress.

But it also shows how long practical financial education was treated as optional.

And perhaps that trade-off would be easier to defend if the system were producing outstanding academic results.

But it is not.

In 2024, average reading scores for fourth- and eighth-grade students remained five points below 2019 levels.

Four in ten fourth graders did not meet even the test’s basic reading benchmark.

There was some improvement in fourth-grade mathematics, but the lowest-performing students saw little benefit. Eighth-grade mathematics scores were essentially unchanged from 2022.

Meanwhile, public-school spending reached a record $17,619 per pupil. Total expenditures approached $1 trillion.

More money. More technology.

Yet reading scores continue moving in the wrong direction.

So it is no surprise that more parents are looking elsewhere.

The latest federal household survey found that 5.2% of children received academic instruction at home during the 2022–23 school year, up from 3.7% before the pandemic.

That’s over a 40% increase – and that figure is probably higher now.

But the System is Incentivized to Keep You Trapped

Most states tie school funding to enrollment or attendance.

So every child who leaves can eventually mean lost revenue.

That helps explain why homeschooling, charter schools, and private-school choice provoke so much resistance…

With some on the left saying that doing so is “promoting inequality” and even “threatening democracy”.

But your child does not exist to fund a school district.

The school district exists to educate your child.

And the truth is that competition actually improves public school outcomes.

Research from Florida and North Carolina found that greater competition from private-school scholarships and charter schools improved public-school performance.

So choice does not only benefit the families who leave.

It can also force the schools they leave behind to improve.

But the real question is not simply which model produces higher test scores.

It is who gets to decide what an education should produce.

When my wife and I chose homeschooling, we accepted 100% responsibility for the outcome. If it ever stopped serving our children, we would change course.

Because the goal was never simply to keep them out of school.

It was to make sure they received an education.

Educated – or Merely Schooled?

An education should teach a child to read, write, and reason critically.

It should help them understand history, recognize incentives, manage money, and solve problems without waiting for instructions.

They should know how to create value and support themselves.

The goal is not to make children hostile to employment.

A good job can be useful and fulfilling.

The goal is to make employment a choice rather than the only life they can imagine.

That education may come from a public school, a private school, homeschooling, tutors, online courses, or some combination of them.

The important question is not which institution the child passed through.

It is what kind of person came out the other side.

The Brazilian government looked at multilingual young pianists and called them intellectually neglected because their curriculum did not conform.

America has not gone that far.