The New York Post went looking for the new face of homeschooling and found it in San Francisco’s Nob Hill, not a church basement in Oklahoma. The write-up even bothered to note that the trend “bucks the stereotypes of rural Bible thumpers.” Cute.
The people who spent a decade sneering at Christian families for pulling their children out of government schools have now discovered the same exit ramp. They just brought a chatbot along for the ride for their “robot-powered homeschools.”
Mrugesha Sathappan, 32, and her husband Kartik, 34, an investor in alternative-education firms through Families Fund, are teaching their preschool-age son at home with custom AI games for phonics and STEM, short bursts of formal work, and child-led trips to museums, parks, and tech offices. She says she wants eyes on the values her three children actually absorb.
“Being adaptable, being kind, being useful,” she told the Post.
Their boy will sit and devour 15 to 20 books at a stretch. He got interested in rockets, so they bought a kit that can fly 500 feet. “You can’t really do when you’re in school,” Kartik said.
That last line is the whole story. California’s classrooms became warehouses for ideology, boredom, and other people’s children. Once the people who can afford $30,000 private tuition looked closely, a lot of them decided the building was the problem.