Katie Phipps Hague is a homeschooling mom of seven children and the director of content at Tuttle Twins, an educational organization that creates curricula and other educational content for children as young as toddlers and all the way to older teens.
She first got connected with the organization in a roundabout way. She was involved in local support for then Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, who was vying for the party’s nomination against Mitt Romney. Hague met Tuttle Twins co-founder Connor Boyack through a Facebook group his wife started uniting Mormons against Romney.
“We were in the same circles, and so a little while later he and [illustrator] Elijah [Stanfield] just kind of had this idea percolating at the time,” Hague said in an interview with IW Features. “They had little kids, and they were wanting to start teaching their kids some of these free market principles. They’re looking around, and there’s just no resources at all, and so they came up with this idea that they would write a kids version of ‘[Frederic] Bastiat’s The Law.’ So they came up with these fictional kids, the Tuttle Twins.”
Tuttle Twins is now one of the top resources for homeschooling families. Their books for toddlers include “The ABC’s of the American Revolution” and “The 1, 2, 3’s of the Bill of Rights.” And their online academy walks teens through more advanced subjects such as economics, logic, and civics.
Hague began by helping review and critique this material, but took on a larger role running Tuttle Twins’ social media accounts just a few years later.
“[Boyack] just gave me free range to do whatever I wanted with it, which was super cool because I feel like that’s the part that I was able to really be impactful with,” Hague said. “We were able to just create this cool identity. I think the timing was perfect for it, but also the social media was ready for it. We went in with a different brand idea. We were using memes and were being a little bit sassy in our commentary. We were getting really good responses, and I was very active on the page. I was kind of the face of it.”
In 2020, Hague was able to turn over the social media pages to her daughter to run. At the time, they had grown to about 125,000 followers from just 1,200 when Hague first took over. Currently, the Tuttle Twins Instagram page has 228,000 followers.
Hague then took a job with the Mises Institute, a libertarian economic think tank, but still does contract work for Tuttle Twins and is currently their director of content.
Hague’s involvement with Tuttle Twins stems from her firm belief that the public education system is failing kids. On her own Instagram account, she posts about the education and literacy crisis, and her reason behind her decision to homeschool her children.
“So my husband and I decided to start homeschooling all the way in 2010 or 2011. Our oldest girls were in 5th grade,” Hague says in a recent Instagram video. “And we realized that so much of their schooling was spent in assemblies, talking about feelings, with teachers trying to teach morality to kids and basically stuff completely outside the scope of what we felt like we were paying teachers through our tax dollars to do. So one Christmas we just didn’t send all our kids back to school.”
The public school system, Hague insisted, was created to churn out what she calls “factory workers.”
“It was never meant to turn out autonomous individuals with entrepreneurial spirits,” she argued.
Hague didn’t want her children to turn out to be easily managed wards of the state. She wanted them to think for themselves, ask difficult questions, and grow as human beings. And yet during her children’s brief stint in public schools, Hague was shocked at not only the social indoctrination they received there, but the mountains of homework which sucked the creativity out of their childhood.
Hague’s experience in the education system had been completely different. Describing herself as a “troubled youth,” Hague said she left home when she was about 14-years-old, living several stints as a homeless teenager. Because of this unconventional upbringing, Hague said she never grew up within the “framework” that was offered to most kids her age. She didn’t drop out of school, her most formative education was through her own reading of history and economics. When she met her husband, she told him she was reading, “The Military History of Sovereign Hawaii.”
Though it’s important for children to have more structure than Hague had growing up, homeschooling does allow parents to encourage flexibility and creativity in their children’s education that the traditional public education system is missing. And even those parents who can’t homeschool can still be actively involved and offer their children additional resources—which is exactly what Tuttle Twins is for, she said.
“Part of the messaging that always comes out in Tuttle Twins email newsletters and in lots of the things that we write is it focuses on parents,” Hague said. “Like, ‘Look, not everybody can homeschool, but that doesn’t mean that your child’s education is only in the hands of the education system. You still have your kids a lot. You’re still the voice that they listen to the most. You’re still the person who has the most investment in them, and you’re still more qualified than any teacher with any degree to teach your kids because you know them and you’re more invested in them than anyone else.’”
Hague’s message for parents is simple: believe in your ability to be the best educator of your children. No expertise or degree or institution is more valuable to your children than your own role as their parents.
