This post did it for me - Maryland - but not because it is free. The scholarship is the key and not just for your son. One missing ingredient for home schooled children is their ability to influence others for the best. What makes them so wonderful is that they’re partly isolated from a lot of junk education.
I’m involved in a small part of the AP program for US Government and US History. The AP targets the “best and brightest”. Every day I see teachers more ignorant and less smart than my own home schooled children try to teach government schooled kids. These teachers are both liberal and for the most part anti-American. I believe that “to educate a man in mind and not morals is to create a menace to society (TR)”.
The reason you should encourage your son to go to Maryland is the influence he’ll have on those “best and brightest” that he’ll be mingling with. How much of our nations present catastrophe is a direct result of ignorant, anti-American liberals filling the minds of our “best and brightest” with their load of drivel? Your son and other home schooled students just like him can, on a peer-to-peer basis, undo much of that damage.
America needs a strong, patriotic and wise Generation Y. Your son can both fulfill his grand ambition and serve his nation, perhaps in ways he’ll never know, by attending this program through Maryland.
That’s my two cents and a dollar. ;-]
Thank you for your thoughtful post. I've thought about these things myself, and not just about where my guys go to college, but school and life generally.
However, my primary intentions for my sons with regard to their education is to serve their needs, not the needs of others. We homeschooled because my wife and I believed that our sons would be ill-served by any alternative. We sent them to Catholic high school because we believed that was the next step appropriate to their education and formation as young men.
We were actually scolded by some others for not sending our sons to the local public schools - we were “robbing” others of the presence of our sons, the good that they could do, the good influence they could have.
We weren't willing to sacrifice our children to some nebulous greater good.
However, I'll grant that sending a six year-old out into the world to be a good influence is different from sending an 18 year-old, especially a mature one. A six year-old is yet to be more formed than to do any forming. A strong, mature, intelligent 18 year-old with a warrior's personality is something altogether.
“The reason you should encourage your son to go to Maryland is the influence he’ll have on those ‘best and brightest’ that he’ll be mingling with.”
I guess my question is, wouldn't this apply, a fortiori, at Hopkins or Harvard?
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