Posted on 01/06/2009 11:39:38 AM PST by GonzoII
A homeschooling movement is sweeping the nation – with 1.5 million children now learning at home, an increase of 75 percent since 1999.
The Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics reported homeschooling has risen by 36 percent in just the last five years.
"There's no reason to believe it would not keep going up," NCES statistician Gail Mulligan told USA Today.
A 2007 survey asked parents why they choose to homeschool and allowed them to provide several reasons. The following are the most popular responses:
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
Something for The One to crack down on.
Put a stop to this criminal, anti-social behavior.
Big Brother says: Your children belong in government schools.
(Except for Big Brother himself, of course, who’s sending his two little darlings to the poshest private school in DC.)
In Germany they jail Christian parents for homeschooling... Old Europe seems to be Obambams model.
The Federal Government has no Constitutional right to be involved in educating our children. Period.
It’s odds on that the left will portray home schooling parents as religious nuts and conveniently leave out the part about wanting to make certain their kids can actually read, write and add!
You mean parents don't want their children to be brainwashed in the government indoctrination centers?
Where are the teachers unions? They'll put a stop to this with the Obamanation's help.
1. Please stop asking us if it’s legal. If it is — and it is — it’s insulting to imply that we’re criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it?
2. Learn what the words "socialize" and "socialization" mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you’re talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we’ve got a decent grasp of both concepts.
3. Quit interrupting my kid at her dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice, baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer lesson to ask her if as a homeschooler she ever gets to socialize.
4. Don’t assume that every homeschooler you meet is homeschooling for the same reasons and in the same way as that one homeschooler you know.
5. If that homeschooler you know is actually someone you saw on TV, either on the news or on a "reality" show, the above goes double.
6. Please stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You’re probably the same little bluebird of happiness whose hobby is running up to pregnant women and inducing premature labor by telling them every ghastly birth story you’ve ever heard. We all hate you, so please go away.
7. We don’t look horrified and start quizzing your kids when we hear they’re in public school. Please stop drilling our children like potential oil fields to see if we’re doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.
8. Stop assuming all homeschoolers are religious.
9. Stop assuming that if we’re religious, we must be homeschooling for religious reasons.
10. We didn’t go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.
11. Please stop questioning my competency and demanding to see my credentials. I didn’t have to complete a course in catering to successfully cook dinner for my family; I don’t need a degree in teaching to educate my children. If spending at least twelve years in the kind of chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out educational facility we call public school left me with so little information in my memory banks that I can’t teach the basics of an elementary education to my nearest and dearest, maybe there’s a reason I’m so reluctant to send my child to school.
12. If my kid’s only six and you ask me with a straight face how I can possibly teach him what he’d learn in school, please understand that you’re calling me an idiot. Don’t act shocked if I decide to respond in kind.
13. Stop assuming that because the word "home" is right there in "homeschool," we never leave the house. We’re the ones who go to the amusement parks, museums, and zoos in the middle of the week and in the off-season and laugh at you because you have to go on weekends and holidays when it’s crowded and icky.
14. Stop assuming that because the word "school" is right there in homeschool, we must sit around at a desk for six or eight hours every day, just like your kid does. Even if we’re into the "school" side of education — and many of us prefer a more organic approach — we can burn through a lot of material a lot more efficiently, because we don’t have to gear our lessons to the lowest common denominator.
15. Stop asking, "But what about the Prom?" Even if the idea that my kid might not be able to indulge in a night of over-hyped, over-priced revelry was enough to break my heart, plenty of kids who do go to school don’t get to go to the Prom. For all you know, I’m one of them. I might still be bitter about it. So go be shallow somewhere else.
16. Don’t ask my kid if she wouldn’t rather go to school unless you don’t mind if I ask your kid if he wouldn’t rather stay home and get some sleep now and then.
17. Stop saying, "Oh, I could never homeschool!" Even if you think it’s some kind of compliment, it sounds more like you’re horrified. One of these days, I won’t bother disagreeing with you any more.
18. If you can remember anything from chemistry or calculus class, you’re allowed to ask how we’ll teach these subjects to our kids. If you can’t, thank you for the reassurance that we couldn’t possibly do a worse job than your teachers did, and might even do a better one.
19. Stop asking about how hard it must be to be my child’s teacher as well as her parent. I don’t see much difference between bossing my kid around academically and bossing him around the way I do about everything else.
20. Stop saying that my kid is shy, outgoing, aggressive, anxious, quiet, boisterous, argumentative, pouty, fidgety, chatty, whiny, or loud because he’s homeschooled. It’s not fair that all the kids who go to school can be as annoying as they want to without being branded as representative of anything but childhood.
21. Quit assuming that my kid must be some kind of prodigy because she’s homeschooled.
22. Quit assuming that I must be some kind of prodigy because I homeschool my kids.
23. Quit assuming that I must be some kind of saint because I homeschool my kids.
24. Stop talking about all the great childhood memories my kids won’t get because they don’t go to school, unless you want me to start asking about all the not-so-great childhood memories you have because you went to school.
25. Here’s a thought: If you can’t say something nice about homeschooling, shut up!
We should home school this:
Teaching by The Book: Classical education (excerpt)
Spokane Review
Published: November 28, 1999
Grammar is the accumulation of facts, when kids love memorization,” Wilson said. So rote learning is used
heavily in the elementary grades.
By the seventh grade, children become argumentative and like to challenge adults, he said. During this dialectic stage, students are taught formal logic and how to argue intelligently.
By grade 10, according to the model, students become more concerned with how others perceive them. In the
rhetoric stage, students are taught how to express themselves verbally and in writing. (snip)
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3842f5706716.htm
(Press F5 a couple of times to get the thread)
The federal government has no constitutional right to be involved in most things they seem to think is their prerogative...
Everybody is homeschooled; government schools’ job is to overcome it.
The purpose of a formal classroom is to homogenize opinion and enforce cooperation.
It all comes down to reading and encouraging curiosity.
Amen, sister!! I have plenty of schoolteachers in the family who routinely quiz my children!! It’s so insulting and little do they realize how ridiculous they are making themselves. Yours is a particularly well-written list of responses. I wish I could have them on file!
The “poshist private schools” where the teach them more than the indoctrination they program into the unlearned masses (slaves-fiefs), they train them to be “masters” in a new feudal-socialist-fascist socitey, dont ya know..;)
In reading about what happens in public schools I doubt very seriously that 'encouraging curiosity' is the norm. There have been too many horror stories when kids exercise that 'curiosity' ... one incident that comes to mind is where one child said his dad was serving in Iraq and the teacher came down on him ... humiliated him in front of his class.
They read what they are told to read and if they exhibit one bit of curiosity about themselves or pretty much anything in general they're either disciplined or suspended for a few days.
The opinion that is homogenized is dictated by the teacher.
This is just my opinion.
Where was” other________________” to be filled in by....”I don’t want my child brainwashed”? :)
I'm glad I was home schooled.
R/Jane
Wouldn’t it be better to find religious school you believe in? It can’t be optimal to isolate kids.
Home Schooling — the salvation of the Republic.
I don’t believe these numbers for an instant. I an quite sure there are several times that many. Back in the 90’s there were talking about a million homeschoolers as a million ‘families’ not total kids.
And the real ‘sky rocket’ is only just starting as the second generation homerschoolers are now having kids and wave front of their kids is just hitting school age.
On the other hand, how is it optimal to expose children to forced indoctrination by those whose values and views are questionable?
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