The Market Rebellion
Rumor has it that well over a million kids in the US now attend “microschools”. This word encompasses many shapes and sizes of programs, but they are all certainly innovative and entrepreneurial ventures very often created to address a specific educational lack felt by a parent or teacher. Some people would define the term to include larger hybrid schools of hundreds of kids, and some would not. While I would not, the fact remains that millions of kids now attend a new ‘breed’ of school programs that were dreamt up by creative entrepreneurs.
If millions of kids and hundreds of thousands of teachers are feeling a gap in their local offerings and decades of attempts at changing the government system haven’t worked very well, I think we can call that a small ‘rebellion’. (You know, of the Star Wars type.)
Why is this happening? We don’t quite have an emperor and soldiers ruling with fear.
A remarkable number of founders are parents or teachers of special education kids. That tells us something about a massive gap.
Many others are teachers who couldn't teach the way they knew was best because it didn't follow protocol. That tells us something too.
Others are parents of typical kids who knew their kids would never thrive or who wanted their kids to learn something different than the system was prescribing.
It’s not just one group joining ‘the rebellion’, there is diversity.
When they operate outside the prescribed system, educators are able to free up their creativity and respond to what kids actually need.
Sometimes this is for special education kids: kids with disorders, gifted kids, kids with learning disabilities. A teacher with 6-10 kids in her home or a small classroom able to work on her own terms and directly with parents is almost guaranteed to be able to serve these kids better than the government system.
Sometimes this is for typical kids and typical teachers. Maybe grade levels need to vanish so the kids can just learn to read and write and do arithmetic with no label attached to how fast or slow it happens or whether they master each subject at the same pace.
Or maybe the kids need to move while they learn, or they need to read whatever they are interested in, or they need to build things, or take things apart, or come up with their own projects, or get outside into nature, or have free play multiple times a day.
Micro and hybrid and homeschools are all over the country now and of course the system doesn’t usually like them much. From accusations of ‘taking’ money from the system to philosophical accusations that free markets reward selfish capitalists, the prevailing system is sometimes downright hostile.
But most of these rebels aren’t selfish capitalist trying to get rich. They aren’t even trying to take down the system half the time. Caring people see a need, want to do work they love and do it well, and so they create a solution. It’s free markets at their best.
These entrepreneurs deserve the reward of a job and the ability to make a living. In a market economy, there is, not a perfect, but a pretty good, intrinsic accountability to the people being served by merit of the very fact that they get to choose.
What’s wrong with that?
