Posted on 09/10/2014 10:27:41 AM PDT by Faith Presses On
My interest in homeschooling was first sparked nearly 20 years ago, when I was a socially awkward adolescent with a chaotic family life. I became close to a conservative Christian homeschooling family that seemed perfect in every way. Through my connection to this family, I was introduced to a whole world of conservative Christian homeschoolers, some of whom we would now consider “Quiverfull” families: homeschooling conservatives who eschew any form of family planning and choose instead to “trust God” with matters related to procreation.
Though I fell out of touch with my homeschooled friends as we grew older, a few years ago, I reconnected with a few ex-Quiverfull peers on a new support blog called No Longer Quivering. Poring over their stories, I was shocked to find so many tales of gross educational neglect. I don’t merely mean that they had received what I now view as an overly politicized education with huge gaps, for example, in American history, evolution or sexuality. Rather, what disturbed me were the many stories about homeschoolers who were barely literate when they graduated, or whose math and science education had never extended much past middle school.
Take Vyckie Garrison, an ex-Quiverfull mother of seven who, in 2008, enrolled her six school-age children in public school after 18 years of teaching them at home. Garrison, who started the No Longer Quivering blog, says her near-constant pregnancies – which tended to result either in miscarriages or life-threatening deliveries – took a toll on her body and depleted her energy. She wasn’t able to devote enough time and energy to homeschooling to ensure a quality education for each child. And she says the lack of regulation in Nebraska, where the family lived, “allowed us to get away with some really shoddy homeschooling for a lot of years.”
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
Homeschooled kids that I have dealt with are uniformly intelligent, creative, polite, faithful, informed and witty - in other words, sort of anti-libs. So yeah, of course they want to stamp them out.
Because the Salon staff is just a little refuge of sanity.
I agree. They could have easily selected the majority of homeschoolers whose children excel in college placement tests, Stanford Achievement Tests and who go on to graduate from college unto advanced degrees. I know several such families personally. As a former private Christian school teacher (for only 3 years, though), it is entirely possible with the excellent materials available to do this. It is far preferable to "public" schools which struggle with discipline problems that take up more of the teacher's time than actual lessons do and which the "state" now mandates incorporating "social" education (read sex, birth control, homosexuality, etc.) as equally important as the basics.
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Just a little anti-Christian bigotry showing maybe?
Homeschool ping
Thanks, read earlier forgot to ping you, yes very alarming.
For added measure, just to make sure we homeschoolers are doing it right, we can do weekly bullying sessions where we suddenly attack our kids, drag them into the bathroom and give them swirlies in the toilet.
They will just never give up trying to increase government oversight over every area of life in this country.
>>There is simply no justification for allowing cases of educational neglect – wherever it exists – to go unchecked.
if this person really believed that, she would be pushing to burn down any number of big city school systems and start over from scratch. A few outlier cases of bad home schooling are nothing in comparison with the institutionalized awfulness of many of our public schools.
Educational neglect goes on constantly within the education monolith.
Without oversight or accountability.
Homeschoolers should have no more accountability or oversight than the blob.
Excellent graph.
Most of the Founding Fathers—who are, incidentally, doing pinwheels in their graves—were homeschooled.
Claude Monet (impressionist), Leonardo da Vinci (inventor and artist), Daniel Boone, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark (explorers), Robert Frost (poet), Helen Keller, C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Laura Ingalls Wilder (authors and lecturers), and Bach and Mozart (composers)… were all home-educated. They are just my favorites from a very exhaustive list of home-educated people who not only turned out alright, but changed the world.
That’s OK.
I do appreciate being notified of homeschool threads. I don’t see everything by any means.
A mom who schools multiple children will be involved in homeschooling for much more than 18 years. The writer meant that the mom gave up teaching after 18 years, and the kids who weren't finished yet were enrolled in public schools.
100% of the time I see someone use the word unschooling, it is a liberal trying to avoid being lumped with the rest of they homeschool movement out of concerns of associating with conservative Christians. This article continues that trend. Homeschooling is a lot of work and personal responsibility. Unschooling is neither. Thus one works, the other does not. After having unschooled and failed, the author now wants to project her failure on everyone else based on a few examples. I know dozens of homeschool who could point out the numerous logic flaws in the article me and do so in either English or Latin.
The last of my children are still in college, but keep that lady (and her policies) away from my grand kids!
“she says the lack of regulation in Nebraska, where the family lived, “allowed us to get away with some really shoddy homeschooling for a lot of years.”
and this howling mad faulty premise: “... but improving state and local oversight of those who opt out would be one step in the right direction.”
And that would be because state and local oversight of public school has worked so well?
To borrow a line from an automation video I watched recently.
Homeschooling does not have to be perfect, it just has to be better than public schools.
I’ve met plenty of fully educated public school grads who have about a third grade education after 12 years. How is that better?
My daughter was homeschooled thru 8th grade. She is taking calculus and a variety of AP classes as a 16 year old senior. It doesn’t seem being homeschooled before the 9th grade hurt her any...
Poorly written sentence, then. Which gets back to my original comment that it’s the writer that’s stupid not home schoolers!
Ahh ha ha ha ha ha! I bet less than 1% of the interviewees on the Jaywalking episodes on the Tonight show were homeschooled. There is Total Government Overseeing on all public school kids, right? Check out some graduates, please, all over this country. Few can really read or compute. They may have had a class called American history but they don’t know who any historical figures were or what their Importance was. COME ON.
Let parents raise their kids. Homeschooling families cannot do worse than the public schools. I am making up these stats but probably true: 25x more likely to be sexually abused by a teacher than your homeschooling parent, 50x more likely to be a strong reader if homeschooled, 100x more likely to be confident entering adult life if homeschooled, 100x more likely to do things in life that fit your desires and wishes. EVEN IF UNSCHOOLED.
Squeaking by in public schools, getting drunk and stoned, minimalist passing, IS FAR MORE UNSCHOOLED. And less supervised.
Stepping down off soapbox.
Liberals have a religion and it is the state, and liberalism. Meaning, there are Anointed Ones who are so bright they should control the others, who are losers and need leading, not freedom.
How are they any different from the Christians they fear, whom they fear are trying to control others into their way of living? They want the exact same thing in reverse.
You’re absolutely right... lol. Let’s rewrite the sentence for this writer.
How about:
“She enrolled her six school-age children in public school after 18 years of teaching at home.”
Simply deleting the word “them” seems to fix the sentence.
Good catch!
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