Let’s say that you and your family having been taking the advice provided here by Mr. Rawles and are squared away for the Crunch—you’ve got your bullets, beans, and band-aids, all piled high in a structurally reinforced home out in the middle of nowhere. You’ve got just about every survivalist book ever printed, plus the tools and skills you’ll need to provide for yourself and your family. You also, of course, have the basic life skills that you’ll need to simply stay alive—things like shooting, tracking, cooking, and first aid.
Have you thought, however, about the education of your children? Public schools, private schools, and universities will likely close their doors. And even if any remain open, the education they provide would be of questionable value when society is falling apart. Clearly, the most important things for children to know will be the things that survivalist parents have been teaching them for a long time—skills like shooting, cooking, sewing, and first aid—and none of those are taught sufficiently well in the typical school.
But will children really need to learn anything else during the Crunch? After all, what is the value of “book learning” when you’re far from civilization, simply trying to survive? Does it really matter who wrote A Tale of Two Cities? Of what importance is learning to tell the difference between it’s and its or good and well? And who cares about calculating the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle?
Actually, all of that is important. The three R’s (reading, [w]riting, and [a]rithmetic) will always be of value, no matter how bad things get, as will a variety of other subjects. Why? Because in all except the most horrific SHTF scenarios, people move out of their bunkers after several years and again begin to interact with their neighbors, first just to barter, and later to gather socially. Society eventually rebuilds, and as it does so, leaders are needed to fill the gap—people who are able to communicate effectively and think critically about the problems they face. How are such leaders raised? In part, through their education.
We’ve already established that traditional educational services will almost certainly be non-operational once the Schumer hits the fan, so survivalists must look elsewhere for a solution. Essentially, that solution is some form of homeschooling, because when society isn’t functioning, your children will have no one to learn from other than you.
Are you ready for that? Some of you already homeschool your kids—that’s great. But regardless of whether you already do or not, you may not be prepared for the day when there are no more easily obtainable textbooks, no more homeschool co-ops, no more video lectures, and no more sources of basic school supplies. Could you, with only the resources that you have now, teach your kids the important things that they need to know for the next three, four, or five years? How about the next ten?
Before going any further, let’s clear up some common misconceptions. First, you don’t need to be a professional teacher to be a successful homeschooling parent. College degrees in education might make you more capable of teaching a class of thirty students, but you certainly don’t need a degree to teach one or two kids at a time. Second, you don’t need specialized curriculum or fancy textbooks. Textbooks are a relatively new invention and can be useful in some cases, but they certainly aren’t essential if you have a good attitude and the right tools.
So what do you need? Well, you need some general supplies, a few basic tools, and most importantly, books—lots of books.
The essential tools and supplies are for the most part obvious—pencils and paper are a good start, and you can stock up for pennies during back-to-school sales at major retailers. Don’t settle for junk, however—you’ll be kicking yourself for buying those cheap mechanical pencils when they’re all breaking after a month or two of use. The best strategy is to simply buy a mechanical pencil sharpener if you don’t already own one, and plenty of boxes of old fashioned yellow pencils, with separate rubber erasers still in their original plastic wrapping. Don’t forget the tools you’ll need to teach math, either—items like protractors and well-made compasses are essential. Something else you may not have thought of is a slide rule, since calculator screens and batteries are prone to failure. Slide rules last for decades if properly cared for, and have the added benefit of forcing their users to engage their brains. Of course, since you’re going to be teaching your kids how to use these tools, make sure you know how to use them yourself.
Next up is books. This is the most important part of your homeschool preparation, simply because the right books are packed with valuable information that’s accessible to anyone who is able to read—both the teacher and the student. Furthermore, it’s possible to get most books for only a little bit of money—used book stores and library book sales are excellent ways to build a large library on a small budget.
The key reference works that everyone ought to own include a Bible, an exhaustive concordance, and a modern unabridged English dictionary. A complete encyclopedia would also be a valuable resource, and versions printed a few decades ago can be obtained at little cost. Your Bible and concordance should be of the same version, and the version should be both readable and accurate for serious study. Some prefer more literal versions like the New American Standard or the English Standard Version, while others like the grandeur of the King James Version or the readability of the New International Version. Get a version you like and will read, and get the concordance to go with it.
To teach your child to read, depending on age, you’ll need a variety of interesting and educational books. Teach phonics and short-sentence reading, and then move on to picture books like the Frog and Toad series (Arnold Lobel) and stories by Dr. Seuss. Eventually, you’ll be able to make the move to some of the older Newbery Prize winners, like A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle), Carry On, Mr. Bowditch (Jean Lee Latham) Amos Fortune, and Free Man (Elizabeth Yates). Other excellent children’s books include The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett), the Little House series (Laura Ingalls Wilder), The Chronicles of Narnia (C. S. Lewis), The Princess and the Goblin (George MacDonald), anything by E. B. White, My Side of the Mountain (Jean Craighead George), The Sign of the Beaver (Elizabeth George Speare), Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery) and the Redwall series (Brian Jacques). Pre-teens and teenagers ought to be able to start digesting heavier works—begin with John Bunyan, Mark Twain, and J. R. R. Tolkien, and then move on to Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, and other great authors. Poetry is also excellent reading material—start with the classics by poets like Rudyard Kipling, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Robert Service. You can also read any of these works aloud to younger kids, thereby giving them early exposure to the masters of the written word.
A strong writer is necessarily an accomplished reader, so by providing literature to your children, you are also encouraging the development of their writing skills. Writing can be improved by a lot of practice and by studying examples in literature, but resources like The Elements of Style by Stunk and White (get the 3rd edition—the 4th edition was made more politically correct by a shameless ghost writer) make it much easier. Do not underestimate the importance of the skill of writing—it forms the basis of all effective communication.
Mathematics can be taught without textbooks as well, but depending on your own familiarity with the subject, it may be difficult. Today it’s not uncommon to find people who can’t make change in their head or balance a checkbook, so if that describes you, make an effort to develop your math skills. You ought to be able to explain concepts like arithmetic (including long division and three digit multiplication), percentages, units of measurement, distance and graphs, and simple logic. A working knowledge of geometry, trigonometry, logarithms, probability, statistics, and calculus would be even better, but some find this difficult to attain. At this level, many will find it necessary to use textbooks, but there’s usually no need to have a separate textbook for each grade: entry-level college math textbooks cover a wide variety of topics and older versions are extremely inexpensive when purchased at book sales or online. Get one that has the answers in the back of the book, or one that comes with a solution manual.
As the new society develops, there will be a need for people who understand how government works and who understand the basis of government by the people. Works like Two Treatises of Government (John Locke), The Federalist (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay), and Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville) provide a better understanding of government than any civics textbook ever could, and supplementing these works with opposing viewpoints like those found in The Communist Manifesto (Engels and Marx) can generate healthy discussion.
History can be taught in a variety of ways, but one of the easiest is through biographies. Learning about the lives of people like Alexander the Great, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Martin Luther, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, George Washington, Simón Bolívar, Napoleon, Robert E. Lee, George Washington Carver, Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others can provide a basic understanding of world history. Historical fiction like that written by G. A. Henty can also be a valuable resource, because it simultaneously engages young readers and teaches history.
You may decide to teach a foreign language, or perhaps a “dead” language such as Latin, Ancient Greek, or New Testament Greek. A dictionary, grammar, and Bible in the language are all you absolutely need, but for foreign languages, a few fiction (especially juvenile fiction) books can make it more fun. It’s also extremely helpful to have access to someone who already knows and speaks the language well, so make sure you know the language capabilities of the people in your retreat group.
Science is best taught through experiments, and it’s often possible to incorporate science lessons into everyday life. Turn your latest kill into a biology lesson by analyzing all the organs and talking about what each does. Physics is critical for understanding bullet drop, and many chemistry experiments can be performed with supplies found in the survivalist kitchen. The theory behind these sciences can be easily discovered in a low-cost college textbook purchased at a book sale, but beware of physics texts that are calculus-based unless you’re prepared to teach that as well.
Despite its reputation among the more practical-minded, art encourages creativity and appreciation for Creation. The easiest way to teach art during the crunch will likely be drawing, because all you need are pencils, paper, and a view of the great outdoors. Drawing also has practical value, because a precise drawing can communicate some information more effectively than the written word. Other forms of art, such as painting and music, require more supplies and equipment, making them more expensive and harder to continue once re-supply is impossible.
There are other subjects that you may wish to teach, such as geography, astronomy, or economics. My advice is the same for these topics—find excellent practical books on each, and let them guide how you teach. Some kids enjoy learning directly from books, but others will prefer a more hands-on approach. Use some creativity to provide the learning experience that best matches your child’s style, and remember that all the information you need is hidden in the pages of the books in your library.
In addition to purchasing all these books and supplies, you should to get the experience of teaching your kids now, before you need to do it. Just like it’s foolish to build an arsenal of firearms but skip weapons training, it isn’t easy to suddenly turn into a good teacher for your kids. Taking the time now to homeschool will help you get ready for when it’s necessary, and besides, both you and your kids will likely benefit from the additional time together. If you can’t homeschool full-time due to time or financial constraints, do you best to practice teaching in your spare time, by reading to your kids and doing fun experiments in the basement. Do whatever you can, both in terms of skill development and resource acquisition, because you owe it to your children to start preparing for the day when other options are no longer available and their education rests entirely in your hands.
JWR Adds: Even SurvivalBlog readers that currently send their children to private school should plan ahead for circumstances that might necessitate home schooling. This could be because of self-quarantine during a pandemic, a natural disaster that disrupts transportation and public school schedules, TEOTWAWKI, or even just the loss of income because of a layoff. Regardless, you should plan ahead, and start stocking up on home schooling curriculum!
