Josiah Gaiter has a well-rounded perspective on education choice as a former homeschool and public school student. But his expertise doesn’t stop there—he’s also a teacher with experience in the classroom and one-on-one tutoring. In today’s episode, Josiah and Melvin explore the parents’ and teachers’ separate, yet complementary, roles. Understanding the distinction of each role helps parents and teachers do their jobs more effectively and sets children up for success.

“What I had been seeing was a whole lot of shift towards government schools taking over more of, let’s loosely say, ‘parenting’ for the students. But now we’ve been presented with this opportunity—the biggest one in my life, for sure— to reverse that.” —Josiah Gaitor, Deputy Director of Programs at FreedomWorks

Here are a few of the topics Josiah talks about in today’s episode:

• Josiah’s experience being homeschooled until high school, when he switched to public school
• Changes in the policies and agendas in the public school system require teachers to “parent” children instead of allowing them to focus solely on subject matter
• How temporary homeschooling across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic helped bring these issues to light
• The political influences and government overreach in public education
• The importance of parental involvement and transparency to balance parenting and teaching roles 

If you like what you’re hearing, check out more of our previous episodes on The State of Education with Melvin Adams.

Would you rather watch the video version of our podcast episodes? Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notified every Wednesday when new episodes launch. Here is today’s conversation with Josiah:

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE:

• FreedomWorks
• Noah Webster Educational Foundation
• Check out part two of the conversation here.