More and more parents are taking charge of their children’s education through homeschooling. Manisha Snoyer’s podcast and online homeschooling community, Teach Your Kids, is seeking to empower parents with the guidance, tools, and network they need to thrive as educators for their children. She joined the Future of Education to discuss her work, dispel misconceptions about homeschooling, and consider the future of this growing trend. I was intrigued to explore her observations that, through modularity, families can pull apart socialization, childcare, and the learning itself to make the benefits of homeschooling much more accessible. As always, subscribers can listen to the audio, watch the video, or read the transcript.
Time Topic
1:16 Manisha’s journey into education
6:25 The value provided by Teach Your Kids
13:30 Dispelling misconceptions about homeshooling
15:57 Mastery learning in homeschooling
18:00 The future of homeschooling
20:09 Homeschooling and childcare
21:45 How to engage with Teach Your Kids
Michael Horn:
Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live a life of purpose. And to help us think through that journey today we have Manisha Snoyer, who has worked with several thousand families and students providing teaching, tutoring, education and more. And she’s the CEO and founder of Teach Your Kids, which is a podcast and online homeschooling community. And we’re going to hear a lot more about that in just a moment. But its mission is to really change the way families engage in homeschooling and make the customization inherent in the choice to homeschool much more accessible to many, many more individuals. So, with that as prelude, Manisha, it’s good to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.
Manisha Snoyer:
It’s so great to see you. I feel like we connected almost ten years ago and it’s so wonderful to be having our first face-to-face conversation right here with everybody else.
Michael Horn:
I was thinking the same thing, and I would love you to just tell your own journey into education because as you mentioned, you and I met well before the pandemic. I remember very well when you were developing an earlier startup, Cottage Class which was on the bleeding edge, I think, of the microschool movement. But tell us in your words your own journey into education and homeschooling.
Manisha Snoyer:
I would be very happy to. And I was actually just thinking about this today because I know there are a lot of exercises around writing out your life purpose and your vision and mission for your life. But I really feel like I fell into this territory completely by accident and almost never chose it in a way. So, I was pounding the pavement as an actress in New York City in the early 2000s and needed a way to make a living. And everyone in my family is a teacher, so I kind of reluctantly became a tutor because that seemed like the easiest thing to do. And before long, not making an income in acting, I found that I had taught over 3,000 children in 18 subjects in every kind of learning environment you could imagine in three different countries. And so, including teaching at some of the most elite private schools in New York City, because I was also a substitute teacher and some of the, I guess you could say, worst public schools and everything in between, including I had a three-month stint as the music teacher at P.S. 29, which is one of the most wonderful public schools in Brooklyn. And after several years of doing this, I really started to feel deep in my soul that our education system was broken at every level, from these $60,000 a year schools to even the best of the best in the public education department, but with a lot of really amazing teachers who wanted to do the best they could and just had so much knowledge and expertise. And through thinking about this, I discovered that there was this incredible homeschooling movement. And just to take it a step back, I felt like I needed to quit acting and focus on this problem because, at the same time, I was getting very concerned about climate change. And I discovered that actually giving access to education is one of the best ways that you can fight climate change, help people get out of poverty, equal rights, human rights, all the issues I care about. So my initial idea was, okay, there’s all these amazing teachers, but the system is really broken. So let’s just have teachers start their own schools. So I was an Airbnb host at the time, and I kind of liked this legal gray area that Airbnb had and found an analogy in these homeschool co-ops that were springing up all over Brooklyn. And I’m thinking, okay, this is really like all you need is a teacher, a space, a group of students. There are these parents creating microschools and homeschool co-ops. If you do it under 3 hours a day for preschoolers and two or three days a week for homeschoolers, you could get around all the legislation around schooling. I suddenly was building a tech startup. I mean, it was the most random thing. I knew nothing about technology besides being a person who uses it. But I did know a lot about being an Airbnb host. So ultimately, one of the founders of Airbnb invested in me and was a great mentor. And I went through Techstars, and we started all these wonderful homeschool co-ops in Brooklyn. But I just felt like there was something that was not quite working. And as I looked more deeply into the homeschooling movement, what I realized is that these families had created a way to build an incredibly curated education for their children that was cost effective for them and that was incredibly enriching socially, emotionally and academically. And in essence, had built a new education system. So a couple years into that, I started talking to Eric Ries, who wrote The Lean Startup and is really interested in homeschooling. And we decided together to start this new company that was specifically focused on helping families homeschool. And so we’ve been working together for four years, and it’s been really an amazing ride. The pandemic broke out right after we launched the company. So we kind of pivoted and built this nonprofit that helped over 100,000 families who were forced into homeschooling and were able to identify the main needs there. And today, what it is is an online homeschooling community and a podcast. And families can use our curriculum planner to find high quality secular learning materials based on 200 different children’s archetypes that I’ve identified. And we really offer a lot of information and support because what I’ve identified is that one of the hardest things is for parents to have that confidence that they can be their child’s teacher. It really requires a paradigm shift, so I’m putting a lot of my focus there.
Michael Horn:
Super fascinating. And I remember our conversations when you were doing what I called the AirBnB of homeschooling, something that I think I had written the line in a couple articles as a throwaway, and then you were like, I’m actually doing this. And it seems current, though, in the work you’re doing, which is to essentially make this DIY education much more accessible to many more people. And from the outside, it looks like—and this is my characterization, so I’d love you to push back if I have it wrong—but Teach Your Kids, in some ways, it feels like it’s like a facilitated exchange. It’s a way to organize the hundreds and hundreds of options out there in terms of curriculum, classes, friends and caregiving, teachers, assessments, support, to make it far easier to sort of snap these different Lego blocks, if you will, together to create that personalized education. How does that feel?
