All around we see the signs and ads telling us that the government-run, tax-funded schools are gearing up to start the 2025-2026 school year. Some very early in August, others (as in Rapid City, SD and its colonial possessions in the “Area School District”) the middle of August (at least, after Rally if not after the summer heat breaks). Well before the traditional post-Labor Day seasonal schools.
The Blaze and other news (yes, and gossip) outlets are looking back to pre-Beer Flu Pandemic Panic days and note a very good trend. At least from the point of view of lovers of liberty.
According to the National Home Education Research Institute, there were 3.1 million homeschooled K-12 students in the 2021-2022 school year, up from 2.5 million in spring 2019. Forbes indicated last year that estimates put the number of American homeschooled students at nearly 4 million kids nationwide. As multiple states do not require notification when parents decide to educate their children at home, the number might be much higher.
Today, there is good evidence that home schooling and virtual schooling numbers are double the pre-Panic numbers: as many as 5 million. Especially when you look at micro-schools and even forms of “unschooling” across the nation.
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The Price of Liberty 
The sickening state of modern media
Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, American media was dominated by the Big Three television networks, and a few national magazines.
ABC, NBC, and CBS are still with us. Most of the old national magazines are gone or bizarrely changed into odd parodies of their original incarnation: Time, Life, Newsweek, US News and World Report, Saturday Evening Post, and a few others. Some would add Grit, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and even Playboy. One major one, though, was Reader’s Digest.
(We realize that younger readers may not recognize many of these.)
All these magazines had a very profound impact on American culture, society, and politics in the quarter-century after World War Two. It is claimed that they influenced public opinion and policy, and that they “reflected the cultural and social changes” of the era. The reality seems to be darker: yes, they influenced opinion and policy, but the publications actually created many (or most) of the changes in society and culture.
For most values of liberty and freedom, many changes were for the worse. And for bad, not good, a lot of what these hardcopy publications (with circulation numbers in the millions) was false. Lies and twisted truth that pushed those changes.
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