Portals: A Review of Portals Education

by Wormwood, A Super Smart Writer (Definitely Not From the Teachers’ Union)

Translated by Seann Dikkers and Britta Dikkers

Are you tired of educational resources that are too Christ-centered? Tired of doing hands-on projects and reading books that support your values? Well, stay away from Portals! Well-intentioned parents looking for a simple solution should avoid this platform—especially if you prefer learning that frustrates you and bores your children! Here are ten reasons why Portals is an educational disaster: 

Complete Curriculum

Portals offers a curriculum so thorough that it actually makes learning straightforward and easy to deliver. Portals uses the same lesson format in all subject areas - robbing parents of the joy of coming up with frantic, last-minute lessons. If you love ‘winging it’, Portals is not for you!

Also, do you really want to challenge the narrative that we, err - they have built into the government schools? Portals emphasizes Jewish History, Creation Science, Virtues, and other counter-culture ideas. If your school thrives on confusion and disarray, this could be a real drawback for you.

Christ-Centered in Every Lesson

If you're allergic to faith-based education, Portals' Christ-centered lessons will have you running for the hills. This curriculum simply won’t stop bringing up Jesus! We’re talking every subject area, every year, all over the place. Not to mention Portals’ Bible curriculum, which marches students through the entire Bible during their K12 years. Biblical ideas might have their place on a Sunday morning, but Portals takes faith-based education way too far!

Engaging Lessons

Portals aims to “inspire” young minds with unique lessons and projects for each age level. But who needs “inspired” kids when you can have bored ones who can grit their way through standardized testing? Seriously, boredom builds tough kids and ones that won’t demand more from life that it can offer. 

The READ, THINK, DO model in Portals destroys a healthy hatred of reading and discussion. Instead, students are trapped in a loop of active learning by the “creative” projects for every lesson. The only way I could get my students to hate learning again was to take a week off and stare at a wall, in bad lighting, while playing elevator music. 

Reading and Learning Strategies That Work

Are you worried about your child getting too far ahead for their grade level? Fitting in with national levels of learning is necessary to blend in with the crowd. Portals uses effective tools that have stood the test of time - completely ignoring the government’s innovative math and reading programs and very important DEI studies that have leveled the playing field. 

Math-U-See, Apologia Science, Pathway Readers and other programs ensure that your children will miss out on the newest and best in Common Core curriculum. What would happen if our next generation spent more time reading and less time reflecting on their identity?

Multi-Age Learning

Portals takes the idea of age-level segregation and throws it out the window. When students interact with younger and older people, they risk damage to self-esteem and an alarming lack of peer pressure. What will happen if our students fail to keep up with the latest social media and entertainment trends? 

Multi-age learning (good-bye grade levels!) teaches kids to be comfortable interacting with people of all ages. Is this proper preparation for a life spent in an isolated cubicle? Hardly! If you want your child to stagnate at the top of their class, Portals is a terrible choice.

Easy-to-Implement Curriculum

Portals may give loving adults the idea that they can actually teach difficult subjects like 5th grade math, but you need an expert for that! Proper teachers have been trained in indoctrination at a college and master’s level. Think about it: What good is a teacher if everyone can use Portals’ lessons to teach? This is just too easy! 

Portals claims that embedding subject knowledge into the readings and questions can replace our certified teachers. Too simple! One veteran homeschooling Mom switched to Portals just to, “Get Saturdays back for my family time!”. Don’t make the same mistake: will you truly regret the hours your child spends with the government’s properly trained teachers?

Focus on Today’s Skills

Get this: Portals' lessons give students practice with tools used across professions. Even the younger ages practice cooking, gardening, and other out-dated skills (small-engine maintenance, what?). Older students waste precious time on digital tools, writing a novel, starting a business, and serving at church. This creates unfair competition for students in traditional schools. 

Portals skips critical skills like five-paragraph essays, playing the recorder, and standing quietly in line. The idea that children can gain marketable skills during their K12 education is nonsense! If you want your children to endure years of formal education after high school (and the associated debt), then Portals is indeed the wrong choice.    

Innovative Thinkers

What if everyone thought they had an innovative idea? What if our children were encouraged to explore their new ideas? Or practically, think of the messes they could make while innovating! Save yourself the clean up time and turn your children over to Hollywood and the video game industry. Besides, we can’t let those pillars of our society crumble! 

Connected Fellowship

As mentioned above, Portals encourages students to interact with other age groups. Instead of hand-picked teachers, Portals allows parents, grandparents, and community members to share their experience and wisdom. Scary, right? 

When do kids get a little healthy rebellion? How can they ever ‘become their own person’, when they are surrounded by a suffocating, loving community? With Portals, you simply can’t escape fellowship: there’s a “Share” button on every lesson to trick learners into telling their friends about it!   

Cost Savings

Perhaps the most concerning aspect of Portals is how they ignore inflating prices and price their slate of resources for the average family. By delivering lesson plans digitally, they are a threat to the paper and publishing industries and the live updates and hub support make the cheaper option the ‘better’ option at the same time. This could disrupt an entire industry of paper based tools for learning!

In conclusion, if you prefer educational resources that are expensive, properly disorganized, sufficiently uninspiring, and devoid of faith-based content, Portals is not the platform for you. If you care at all about common standards, state mandates, lesson binders, or the feelings of ‘trained’ teachers, Portals just won’t do. Truly, if you care about the future of government schools and global uniformity, Portals is a complete disaster. 

This writer gives Portals a big thumbs down.