(Mises)—Socialist Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” describes the slow and gradual intellectual capture of a society through its influential and powerful institutions, including the church, media, the arts, corporations, schools, and universities, eventually leading to full infiltration.
It takes little awareness to realize that these strategies have succeeded. In the United States, all of Gramsci’s institutions are now socialist in their politics and collectivist in their ethics.
To freedom-minded individuals, arguably the most critical of Gramsci’s institutions are the schools. The greater the extent that children can gain appropriate skills of reason and moral instruction in their formative years—avoiding collectivist indoctrination—the better equipped they will be to defend themselves from a culture that has evolved sharply leftward. However, how can this be achieved if the schools themselves are already captured?
Homeschooling is a solution to childhood indoctrination by a group of people who, in the main, despise parents and their children. Teaching critical race theory, collectivism, and pornography to children is their way of showing it. As Michael Malice often says, “These people want you dead, but they’ll settle for your submission.” Parents shouldn’t offer it.
Academic Outcomes in Traditional versus Homeschool Environments
An analysis of the desirability of traditional schooling should start with an evaluation of its efficacy. A concrete goal of primary and secondary schooling is academic competence as measured by standardized testing, so how do traditionally schooled students perform on this measure?
The results are pathetic. As of a few years ago, fifteen-year-old American students taking the Programme for International Student Assessment ranked at or near the world average for science and reading and well below the world average for mathematics. This has been the case for decades, with essentially no improvement in that time.
In the meantime, homeschooled students are excelling, scoring 12 and 22 percentile points higher than private and public-school students respectively on standardized academic achievement tests. This is the case across race and income demographics. A 2015 study showed black homeschool students scoring 23 to 42 percentile points above black public school students.
These results should not be surprising. Traditional schooling, with its rigid one-size-fits-all approach, is oppressive to the intellect and especially harmful to gifted children, who must stifle their natural drive in favor of group conformity.
For the left-wing academic establishment, this forced mediocrity is a feature, not a bug. By instilling boredom and dulling the senses, students are primed to accept the premises of collectivist ethics and receive any instruction—no matter how absurd—as authoritative.
Homeschooling, on the other hand, prioritizes individuals and their personal potential. Far from stifling children’s natural gifts, such instruction enhances them. Freed from mindless conformity, children can pursue their lessons and interests in an environment that is receptive and natural, instead of rigid and artificial.
Hold On to Your Kids—Social Skills and Happiness
As a complement to academic achievement, homeschooling tends to produce well-rounded children compared to traditional schooling. While diminished social skills are often noted by opponents—without evidence—as a drawback to homeschooling, the facts show the opposite.
A 2006 study used a fifty-five-item Social Skills Rating Scale to gather data on children’s overall social skills, including individual categories of cooperation, assertion, responsibility, and self-control.
The Social Skills Rating Scale indicated that homeschooled students demonstrated above-average social skills and overall scores that were 15 percent higher than the traditionally schooled, including higher scores in each of the individual categories.
Within traditional schools, on the other hand, children are subjected to the relatively modern and harmful phenomenon of peer orientation. From Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté’s book Hold on to Your Kids: “Peer orientation refers to the tendency of children and youth to look to their peers for direction: for their sense of right and wrong, codes of conduct, and their very identity. Peer orientation undermines family cohesion, sabotages healthy development, and fosters an aggressive and prematurely sexualized youth culture.”
Leftist inculcation and moral stultification from teachers are hardly necessary when peer orientation, including social media, does the work for them. Today, children and teens suffer from high rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide. Fortunately for homeschoolers, that fate is largely avoided.
Value > Cost
In recent years, homeschooling has grown faster than any other form of education, as shown by Figure 1. This is true across races, incomes, and locations within the US. Many parents switched to homeschooling due to concerns with traditional schools’ practices during the covid panic, including mandatory mask wearing.
Despite this growth, the proportion of K–12 students in the US that are homeschooled is still relatively small, at roughly 5 percent. That figure may increase further if the benefits associated with homeschooling are more widely known and the difficulties more clearly addressed.
In this context, parents may feel that separating from the pack and homeschooling their children are too much of a challenge, specifically with regard to logistics and the perceived inability to manage a child’s homeschooling in combination with their own professional responsibilities.
As Thomas Sowell has observed, in a society with limited resources, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Parents pulling their children from traditional schools into homeschooling are indeed looking at a higher degree of involvement and effort in their children’s lives. This might entail a temporary reduction in work hours, income, and social life. In exchange, they receive the peace of mind that comes from knowing that they refused to give over their pride and joy to a system that wishes to dehumanize them. Ultimately, what’s gained is the distinct sense of attachment and pride that comes with raising a productive, accomplished, and truly confident child equipped to succeed in the real world.
Overcoming Inaction
Significant inertia is leaving the vast majority of parents tied to traditional schooling, which has proven to be an obsolete and harmful system. Bureaucrats, labor unions, and ghoulish university professors speaking out against homeschooling—even proposing a nationwide ban—do so because they believe other people’s children are their property. Those who think this way have earned contempt, not the privilege of teaching the next generation. Parents would do well to bring that responsibility back into the home.
About the Author
Artis Shepherd is the Founder and Managing Partner of a private equity firm based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and previously worked for a sovereign wealth fund in the Middle East overseeing their hospitality investments in Europe, Africa, and Asia. He has a BS in Computer/Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from the University of Chicago (Booth) Graduate School of Business. He publishes content at MTSObserver.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
