The Tuttle Twins Freedom Blog

Happy Wednesday! I have a question for you. When you were a child, was it considered a good trait to be self-reliant, independent, and capable? I know that when I was a kid—I grew up in the eighties and early nineties—parents and leaders in school, church, and the community considered these traits to be good and noble. It was pretty generally accepted that these were among the traits everyone would want to nurture and develop in themselves. Kids were often encouraged to figure things out without the help of an adult. In fact, we were praised when we solved our own problems or figured out our own ways to get things done. I look back to movies like The Goonies, and The Sandlot and I totally relate to the freedom that those kids had to make trouble, cause problems, and then find their way through it with little to no

The weekend is once again upon us, but before I check out for some family time I wanted to share something with you that I just stumbled upon. All the images I’m including were taken from the Fullerton School District Facebook page. Fulton School District is located just outside Anaheim, California, and I’d encourage you to visit their page and read the captions on these photos, and their plan for reopening. These photos were staged as a way to inform parents of the changes that are being implemented for this upcoming school year. They said, “We are working on a plan to return to school safely based on local and state guidelines. These photos represent some conceptual ideas based on the known guidance.” Do you remember last month when I wrote about the insane CDC recommended guidelines that essentially would turn schools into prisons? I got several emails in response

Happy Wednesday! Did you have a chance to catch the homeschool debate featuring Harvard’s resident anti-education-choicer, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Cato’s Kerry McDonald on Monday? Kerry did a fantastic job laying out a solid argument in favor of education choice. If you missed it (or if you just want to watch again because it was awesome) you can find it here. I was thinking earlier about how much we are living in a culture of “woke activism.” In response to the tragic death of George Floyd a few weeks ago we saw the world rise up in support of recognizing and ending police brutality, but as the weeks have passed and the language has evolved, we have seen a focus shift from police brutality to race, and even further in some cases to equating problems with race and police brutality to… capitalism? I’ve seen several social media posts by accounts with

Happy Friday everyone! I wanted to shoot an email out before we head into the weekend to let you know about an awesome development in the ongoing Harvard anti-school choice drama. If you remember, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet sent incredulous waves through the homeschool and education-choice communities last month when she suggested that homeschool could be dangerous and that a presumptive ban should be placed on it as a supposed protection to children. Bartholet said, “From the beginning of compulsory education in this country, we have thought of the government as having some right to educate children so that they become active, productive participants in the larger society.” She continued, “But it’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints,” She pulls no punches when she asserts that homeschool poses a risk to the

Happy Friday! Did you see the new employment numbers today? There’s some pretty encouraging data—although I share the sentiments of others when I say that we should never have had to wait so long and watch things get so bad before we saw this turn for the better. One commentator said it well: “I don’t know whether to be happy or furious about this jobs report. To me it is absolute proof that this whole nightmare of the last three months was utterly pointless—a ghastly intervention imposed via violence. Now we have a bit of freedom and look what freedom can do.” I was talking with my kids the other day about the effect that these lockdowns have had on small businesses. Did you know that just in the state of New York more than 100,000 businesses have been forced into permanent closure because of the COVID-19 related lockdowns? Governor

I hope this note finds everyone healthy and safe. (I wish I could add “free” to the list, but…) I thought that this week I’d be writing about the continuing trend that we are seeing in parents surveyed saying that they’re seriously considering homeschooling when the lockdowns end, or maybe about how The Tuttle Twins and the Road to Surfdom is a great read for a family taking a beach vacation. I’d jotted down thoughts on what we had learned over the last several months, and how we could try to avoid making some of the same mistakes the next time something new and unexpected gave us all a scare, and thought maybe I’d talk about that. But then—in what we are all beginning to simply accept as “2020”—the world was thrown into commotion again in the past few days, and we once more have serious and important things to