Politics & Power Quote by Steve Forbes

Forbes frames homeschooling as capitalism in miniature: a consumer revolt against a sluggish monopoly. The language is doing careful ideological work. Calling it a "phenomenon" elevates what could be a patchwork of personal decisions into a movement, then immediately baptizes it in the civic religion of "the American can-do attitude". That phrase isn’t descriptive; it’s a branding exercise. It recodes withdrawal from a public institution as patriotism, even virtue.

The subtext is a familiar Forbes-era story about governance: if the product is bad, exit the market. "Disenchanted" borrows the vocabulary of customer dissatisfaction, suggesting parents are rational shoppers rather than citizens negotiating a shared social contract. "Government-run public schools" is equally loaded. Public schools are already government institutions, but the phrasing foregrounds bureaucracy and distance, inviting readers to imagine schools less as community infrastructure and more as a centralized, impersonal machine.

Then comes the clincher: "taken matters into their own hands, literally". It’s a wink and a rallying cry, turning education into a frontier act of self-reliance. The intent isn’t just to praise parental initiative; it’s to legitimize privatization-by-exit and to frame public education’s struggles as evidence of governmental failure, not as political choices about funding, segregation, or policy. Contextually, it sits squarely in late-20th/early-21st century conservative optimism about markets and skepticism toward state capacity: the family as entrepreneur, the school as suspect, and the collective as optional.