Choosing how you will educate your children is probably the biggest decision you will ever make for their happiness, their knowledge and their approach to life. "Rise Above School" is a tool to help you make this critical decision. It takes a candid and thorough look at what school is and does and explains the opportunities available through home education (i.e., homeschooling.) Jeffrey Till explains his views on schooling and education through the lens of years of study on the topic and from his own experiences home educating his own three children. The table of contents: CONTENTS Introduction1 Why you should rescue your children from school3 Making the decision is really, really hard6 The Complete Case for Home Education11 What do you want to be when you grow up?48 Having empathy for your children is critical62 My personal path to home education66 Talking about home education72 How to get started76 Conclusion82 Appendix: Media resources and acknowledgements 84 The Introduction: Introduction This book isn't about the act of home education, but rather making the decision to take your children out of school and begin home education. In my experience, learning about homeschooling was fairly straightforward and knowing the downside of public schooling was fairly intuitive, but taking my kids out of school was still a very challenging decision that took me about year to make. The biggest obstacles turned out to be that I was schooled myself and had a very hard time imagining not using public schools since they are everybody's default 'state of nature'. I also couldn't adequately develop empathy for my own children when it came to what they were enduring in public school and nor thought about what school would ultimately do to them. This book is to help inform the decision process to leave school and free your children to learn at home. What you do once you get those kids out of school is a topic for another book and luckily there are plenty. I chose the title "Rise Above School" because that's what children do when they opt out. The school and culture like to use the term "dropping out" to suggest that leaving school is a failure of the student somehow. We must abandon this victim language once and for all. School is not a nice place to succeed in, it is something that should be rejected, tossed to history's landfill and left to die. Ideally, we use the term "home education" instead of "homeschooling" because the later implies replicating "school" at home, which isn't desirable. Only school can be school. Instead, we want to foster intrinsic-inspired learning at home. This said, "homeschooling" is common vernacular and I use it interchangeably in this book to mean "home education." The initial basis of this book was several articles and podcasts I created at my blog site found at http: //www.fivehundredyears.org. As the articles came, common themes emerged and it seemed natural to put them together under one cover. As background, I've self-studied education, public schooling and home education for two to three years now. I unschool my three young children. I'm an entrepreneur and a husband. I'm an advocate for home education and ending public school. And I'm a radical for peace and prosperity. If you are new to home education ideas or new to even thinking about public school itself, I commend you for trying to learn more, regardless of what you decide. Despite education being the most important decision families ever make for their children, most people don't think about it for even five minutes. The choice you are making involves committing your children to 13 years of school, representing about 15,000 hours of work, all of which can set the direction of your children's entire lives. Put the time in to research, analyze and process this 15,000-hour whopper of a decision. Please.