Choice Is the Way Forward: Welcome to Learning Liberty
A new podcast presenting better learning options for better lives
Imagine growing up on a farm in the 1800s. Your meals likely consisted of whatever you could raise yourself and offered little variety from day to day or year to year. Now imagine you are transported to a modern grocery store. The sheer volume of options and varieties would probably cause you to reassess how you look at and make decisions about food. No longer are you tied to what your single plot of land can yield; instead, you have access to the combined food options and productivity of the world and thus can choose among options to find those that work best for you and your family.
Need something that is gluten free? What about grass-fed beef? Bananas year round? Each is only as far as the local grocery store, and even the pickiest of eaters and those with severe dietary restrictions have numerous options available to them.
Of course, most of us today take for granted the culinary options available to us because we have always had access to them, but imagine for a moment a different scenario. In this vision, everyone in your town or state votes on a smaller group of people who will decide what foods the major grocery stores will carry. Is it likely that your family’s dietary needs would be met as well as they currently are? Might you wonder why your neighbors have any say in what food is available to you and your family? Could such a system lead to worse outcomes and less satisfaction in your family? Do you think your children would look forward to eating in such a system?
Thankfully, that hellacious vision is merely fiction, but it is an apt analogy for the education system in which we find ourselves—a system that, by its very structure and incentives, cannot meet the needs of most students and substitutes coercion and standardization for choice and individualization.
I have detailed the numerous issues with this system in previous articles, but most people do not need convincing of the myriad problems of this arrangement; they understand them all too well because of their and/or their children’s own experiences therein.
The barrier for most of us, then, becomes one of knowledge and action: What other options do I have, and what can I do? Even in the wake of rapid declines in public-school enrollment around the country, fully 85% of students still attend such schools, many of whom do not wish to be there but whose parents may not know of other viable options or think such options are out of reach or less fulfilling than the current system.
Although I think articles on these topics are important, I know that the voices of those involved with these nontraditional learning options are far more powerful.
Thus, I bring you the Learning Liberty podcast.
My goal every week is to connect you with those voices—teachers, parents, students, entrepreneurs, and advocates who work in, learn in, found, and study these exciting learning options each day. Through my interviews with these people, I hope to bring you the inside story of the changing face of education to equip you with the knowledge to take action for the educational betterment of yourself and your family.
In much the same way that we critically examine and choose the foods we feed ourselves and our families for our physical diets, we can and should learn about the bevy of learning options and approaches available to us and scrupulously inspect those options to find the best learning “diets” for ourselves and our children.
It is my hope that I can expose you to some of these exciting options through Learning Liberty, and I think you will be as amazed by the panoply of approaches already out there as the 19th-century farmer would be by today’s grocery stores. Truly, now is a remarkable time in learning, and I am eager to grow my own knowledge alongside you.
So, I hope you will join me on this journey into true educational choice so that we can together find better learning options for better lives (yes, that’s a shameless use of the show’s tagline).
If this sounds like something that interests you, then please support the show and my work by subscribing on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Rumble. You can also make a financial contribution via Patreon and find all the subscription links at the show’s website, LearningLiberty.net.
But perhaps just as importantly, I hope you will spread the word and share the podcast with your friends and anyone you know who could benefit from learning about what choice in education looks like and how to find it.
I also welcome any comments, questions, or suggestions, especially if you know of a particular learning option that you would like me to feature. Please get in touch via Substack or the contact form on my website.
For many years, I taught students information they did not really want and that they mostly would not use. Through Learning Liberty, I cannot change that past, but I can influence future learning by presenting and spotlighting the approaches to education that are as diverse as the students to whom they cater.
In the end, it is my hope that we can ensure that no parent or student needs to say “I wish there were a learning option for…” when one, two, or seven of those very options exist a street or a town or a click away. We need only learn about them.
Let’s get started.
Take a look at my recent interview with Brettani Shannon of Options for Education to see what Learning Liberty is all about:
Great concept here, and much needed. Better, non-traditional education is "low hanging fruit" for parents who want their kids to escape the current paradigm and grow into more capable adults.