FORT LIGONIER, Pennsylvania — It is 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and there are several parents with children of a variety of ages walking along this frontier fort’s glorious position, high on a hill. The fort, 267 years ago, afforded the British the ability to see enemies coming from all directions.
The parents are letting the children walk along the trenches, stare at the imposing, sharpened wooden stakes, and touch the ancient cannons and artillery batteries that fill the inside perimeter; they are also staring in awe as they enter the reconstructed buildings that include a general’s headquarters, a makeshift hospital, and barracks, all the while asking dozens of questions about what happened here.
And that leads to another question, of why it matters today.
“We offer a very special homeschool day in the spring and in the fall, and then we offer a ‘Why America is Free’ program in the winter,” explained Julie Donovan, the head of marketing at the rebuilt fort, which includes an eye-popping museum filled with some of the best 18th-century artifacts available to the public.
Donovan said that in the past decade, the growth of parents bringing their children to experience American history firsthand has been robust. “The demand has been just outstanding,” she explained. “If the kids don’t live nearby, we offer an online experience that brings them into the experience of what happened here because without what happened here, there is no American Revolution.”
For generations, western Pennsylvania children were taught by their teachers that George Washington slept here a lot.
He slept where the Point State Park is in downtown Pittsburgh. He slept where Kennywood Amusement Park is today in West Mifflin. He also slept on an island along the Allegheny River in the dead of winter, after he fell into the turbulent, icy waters while attempting to cross with his frontier guide, Christopher Gist.
Most of the time Washington spent sleeping around here, it was on a rocky bed of dirt or leaves, with one eye open while he held a firearm.
Schools taught the children and physically took them to all of those places on field trips, so they could show them firsthand. They were able to walk the same steps as the men and women who sacrificed all to form our country.
The schools also took several generations to the H.J. Heinz Plant to show schoolchildren an example of how hard the men and women worked to separate, dice, boil, cook, and then can or bottle the food that we ate. There were also trips to the Jones and Laughlin Steel plant, so we could see what went into making the roads and bridges that connected us to each other, as well as the homes we lived in and the churches at which we worshiped.
By the time my children were school age, those types of hands-on experiences had fallen out of favor. From my point of view, it gave my children a very limited understanding of all of the nuances that led to the American Revolution, the math and calculus that went into running a lathe at a machine shop, and the scientific knowledge required to study the stars at the local observatory.
So, I took them myself to Jumonville Glen to see where the French and Indian War began. They went to manufacturing plants such as Homer Laughlin, to see how skilled artisans made things. They looked at the night sky through the telescopes at the Allegheny Observatory.
The education system is fraying at the seams, and the problem began long before the pandemic or the heated discussions over critical race theory. This should be remembered now, as so many parents are awakening to the power that teachers unions and school boards wield over their children’s education.
How your children learn and what they learn in the public school system is an accumulation of both national and local politics, social justice activism, and cultural influences the impact of which began in the late 1970s.
This is why many parents have turned to homeschooling to give them a more balanced education. In March, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that during the pandemic, the percentage of households homeschooling children had doubled, from 5.4% to 11.1%.
Monthly polling conducted by EdChoice, which began in March 2020, shows that during the pandemic, as school boards, teachers unions, and politics played an outsize role in whether or not their children’s school opened, parents’ attitudes toward homeschooling changed dramatically. As of this past April, the survey showed that 64% of parents have a more favorable view of homeschooling due to the pandemic.
Not everyone can homeschool their children. But everyone can take action to give their children hands-on experiences, no matter where they live. No matter where you live, there is history that happened there.
And the more hands-on you are as a parent, the more you can balance out inequities in your child’s education. Often, your child is told only one side of the story, and we all know history is multilayered. The richer the experience is, the more they can relate and associate it with yesterday and today.
Bethany Mandel, an American author and writer who homeschools her children, said the beauty of the curriculum is the connectivity they can experience with then and now. “We were in Williamsburg, in the art museum, and we had studied Paul Revere previously when we noticed his name on a couple of the pieces of silver in their silver exhibit.”
Mandel said the children put the pieces together of him both being this talented artist and then recalled, word-for-word, the last stanza of the famous poem about his midnight ride, experiences separated by five months of learning.
“That connection was so meaningful, and they carried it with them and remembered it because it was a three-dimensional thing,” she said. “It wasn’t something that we just read in a textbook. It was real and tangible, and it stuck with them.”
Mandel tries to make most of her family’s location in the mid-Atlantic to visit, experience, and learn from the facilities and battlefields within driving distance. So far, their curriculum has been enhanced by trips to Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown.
“This coming year, we’re also going to do Valley Forge, and we’re going to go to Monticello for homeschool days in September.”
Brandon Darby, managing director of Breitbart Texas, homeschools his daughter far from the sites of Colonial America. Where he lives, the opportunities are different. He can show her the firsthand remnants of American frontier history. “You can immerse yourself in so many things at the Ranching Heritage Center here in our region,” he said.
The railroad depot, frontier homesteads, and the early schoolhouse bring up a million different offshoots of the curriculum, as well as millions of questions from his daughter. “Like, when did this happen? Why were people here? What was going on in the country at the time that made people willing to come here, even though there were Comanches, and what made them willing to live in sod houses?”
Not all parents can homeschool, but they can all supplement their education with hands-on experiences at historical sites, far away or nearby. They can bring their children to see science firsthand in action at a local observatory. They can see math applied at a construction site. They can learn without the lens of politics or activism distorting facts. Hands-on experiences give our children an honest view of how we benefit from those who came before us, as well as learn from the mistakes they made along the way.
