Both the American and Soviet governments knew that building up their respective political systems, their economic prowess, and their international influence required first, as historian David Raleigh writes, “educating the builders.” As a result, soon after the Second World War, American governments and educational experts begawan unprecedented effort to direct the reform of schooling at every level across the country. Doing this, however, required dramatically increasing government and expert (especially administrative) control over schools, privileging this over parental rights and influence. … from roughly 1920 to 1945, the leading lights of American education had wished not only to mold society through schools but also to require that teachers exert tremendous personal effort to adapt to the local needs of their classrooms (as they saw them), even to the point of writing textbooks to suit their own students. In other words, while schools had been moving toward expert control in those heyday years of progressive education and teacher professionalization, they did so with a profound respect for the importance of school and community ties and of teacher autonomy. The much more radical transformation from local to large control that occurred in the 1950s and ‘60s was a different thing altogether. This change was born not out of a lack of interest in local influence but out of a pressing fear that without a nationally overseen education, the next generation of Americans would not be able to defeat the Communists as their parents had defeated the Nazis. And now the transfer of power from ‘lay citizens to elite decision makers in government,’ as Joseph Murray has written, was moving forward far more rapidly.

the family is the primary educational delivery system. … In fact, John Holt responded to the Reader’s Digest article with a letter encouraging the Moores to take their criticisms even further. Many readers, both famous and less so, agreed that the home and family were the best available setting for alternative education. And so parents, not teachers, would have to lead the way.

… we can say with some confidence that while the desire to educate children religiously played a (sometimes highly important) part in a large number of homeschoolers’ decisions to homeschool in the early twenty-first century, the overall motivation of homeschoolers as a group was almost certainly not primarily religious and has grown to be less so over time. As numerous of the NHES (National Household Education Survey) reports have repeated, ‘parents homeschool their children for many reasons that are often unique to their family situation.’ Thus, although a majority of homeschoolers were religious—as were a majority of Americans overall, let us not forget—religiosity did not define homeschooling whether in motivation or demography.

Perhaps most intriguing is data form the ACT college entrance exam on homeschooler performance. The ACT released a report in 2020 that made composite scores from public schoolers, private schoolers, and homeschoolers available over the previous two decades. The ACT’s main finding was that between 2005 and 2019, homeschoolers’ composite ACT score was significantly above that of public schoolers (and slightly below that of private schoolers): homeschoolers’ average scores have been consistently higher than those for public school students. While private school students scored even higher than homeschoolers, the difference between homeschooled and private-schooled kids was much smaller than between public-school children and homeschoolers.

Quiet, anonymous, and often complicitous, lawbreaking and disobedience may well be the historically preferred mode of political action for peasant and subaltern classes, for whom open defiance is too dangerous. For two centuries from roughly 1650 to 1850, poaching (of wood, game, fish, kindling, fodder) from Crown or private lands was the most popular crime in England. By “popular” I mean both the most frequent and most heartily approved of by the commoners. Since the rural population had never accepted the claim of the Crown or the nobility to “the free gifts of nature” in forests, streams, and open lands (heath, moor, open pasture), they violated those property rights en masse repeatedly, enough to make the elite claim to property rights in many areas a dead letter. And yet, this conflict over property rights was conducted surreptitiously from below with virtually no public declaration of war. It is as if villagers had managed, de facto, defiantly to exercise their presumed right to such lands without ever making a formal claim. It was often remarked that the local complicity was such that gamekeepers could rarely find any villager who would serve as state’s witness. [Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism, page 11]

It’s only with abstraction that the trouble begins; only when connections become impersonal and automatic; when the owners and operators of internet systems reject the responsibility of standing behind the material they transmit and, especially, promote.

The standard view of housing markets holds that the flexibility of local housing supply— shaped by factors like geography and regulation—strongly affects the response of house prices, house quantities and population to rising housing demand. However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth predicts the same growth in house prices, housing quantity, and population regardless of a city’s estimated housing supply elasticity. We find the same pattern when we expand the sample to 1980 to 2020, use different elasticity measures, and when we instrument for local housing demand. Using a general demand-and-supply framework, we show that our findings imply that constrained housing supply is relatively unimportant in explaining differences in rising house prices among U.S. cities. These results challenge the prevailing view of local housing and labor markets and suggest that easing housing supply constraints may not yield the anticipated improvements in housing affordability.