Beck Asks: When Are You Going to Take Your Kid Out of School?

Glenn Beck Show | 3/4/2013 | Glenn Beck

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Glenn is PO'd this morning about the two recent school incidents involving guns, the Pop Tart "gun" story, and the Florida story, where the kid who wrestled a gun away from a gunman was suspended, because he didn't wait for "first responders."

He's been asking, "When America, are you going to take your children out of these schools?"

"I know it's hard... You say, 'I don't know how to homeschool.' Well, I don't either. But we're doing it."

[austinaero]

I wouldn’t mind considering it. I just wonder how I get him from homeschool to college? a great SAT score?

[austinaero]

How did you get a college to accept them without the traditional high school transcripts?

[nascarnation]

The kid next door was homeschooled.

I always thought it was kind of an easy program until he brought over his 1600 SAT score.

Yeah, a homeschooler takes the SAT just like anybody else if he wants to go to a “regular” college.

Kid got a free ride to Butler and became a pharmacist.

[austinaero]

wow! 1600! That’s amazing. Glad he put his skills to good use!

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Using a homeschool curriculum might prepare them well for life...but not for college.

I'm interested in the former, and not the latter. I told our kids they have permission to take F's in college, rather than toe any PC line.

Better to get a good grade in life than in college.

[lacrew]

They are not mutually exclusive - I can prepare my kids for life, while the school prepares them for college.

What would be immoral for me to do is to try an amateur attempt at homeschooling, when I am not committed to the task.

Not everyone can home-school....and if those that do aren’t preparing their kids for college, they’re doing it wrong.

And a kid should never have to choose between and F and being PC...they should choose a better college in the first place.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

SCHOOL CHOICE is needed for this to become a reality.

Vouchers and abortion should be the top public policy issues for conservatives. But they're not.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Getting conservatives on our local boards means that change can start to happen at the ground up.

Nothing wrong with that, but nothing important is determined at the local level, like textbooks, or is even possible to determine, like implementing a religious curriculum.

[stayathomemom]

I think I know what you mean. When my youngest daughter was still in high school, I had a talk with a friend of ours from church. He has a masters in Classical Studies from U of M, helped run his family's business, is an accredited teacher, substitute teaches at our church's day school and also teaches at another private elementary school in the area. He has been tutoring for years. He told me he got a call to help someone who needed tutoring with the AlgGeoStat program our local public high school was using at the time. He said he tried to help, but had a hard time trying to figure out what was going on in the lessons.

[Coffee_drinker]

Getting conservatives on our local boards means that change can start to happen at the ground up. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing important is determined at the local level, like textbooks, or is even possible to determine, like implementing a religious curriculum.

School boards spend the money that makes up

57 percent of the state budget
One third of local prop taxes
And billions of federal dollars

If we want to start to take back America, we can start in the schools and help set priorities where the money is spent.

[GeronL]

and the school boards are going to change the state and federal mandates how?

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

I wouldn’t mind considering it. I just wonder how I get him from homeschool to college? a great SAT score?

Homeschoolers outperform all other students routinely.

Personally, I don't give a bleep about college and SAT scores. The number one goal for our family was raising saints.

But my oldest did get an academic scholarship ;-)

She's never set foot in a school. I was hoping that she wouldn't set foot in a college either. Trouble is, she wants to be a teacher (probably Catholic school), and needs a teaching degree. I told her that the curriculum is worthless, having seen my sister's curriculum many years ago, so I advised her to get the cheapest piece of paper that she could find. And that's what we're doing.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

And a kid should never have to choose between and F and being PC...they should choose a better college in the first place.

Good luck with that.

IMO, kids are better off at home, no matter what you do with them.

Have you ever wondered why everyone in the country has to take two units of foreign language, Trig, etc. Step waaaay back and think about it. Who sez? Why? Look into the origin of "Carnegie units." You probably recognize the name. Why is education measured in "student hours"?

Compulsory schooling, as we know it today, was largely formulated by Carnegie and Rockefeller. What was their goal? Why did they fund the first teacher colleges?

Look up Thorndike, Pavlov, and schooling. Bismark. The Know Nothings and Blaine Amendments. Dewey and Columbia Teacher's College. Horace Mann and phrenology. And his ludicrous report to the Boston School Committee.

The story of compulsory schooling is bizarre and nefarious.

Everything you've been taught about compulsory schooling is a lie or a whitewash.

I highly recommend "The Underground History of American Education."

I bitterly resent what "they" did to my head in school. You should too.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

School boards spend the money that makes up 57 percent of the state budget One third of local prop taxes And billions of federal dollars

85-90% of the school budget is teacher salaries. Good luck making any meaningful salary changes, or trying to implement pay-for-performance.

Good luck trying to make any meaningful change in anything. It's not reasonable to expect the residents of any town to agree to anything that isn't lowest-common-denominator, or whatever is popular at the moment.

I ran for school committee. You might as well run into a brick wall.

I did get to tell the folks who turned out for candidate night about the origins of compulsory schooling. And they couldn't take my mic away. It was fun, in that way. You should have seen the looks on the faces of the brown-noser, please-Mr.-School-Committee-guy-get-my-kid-into-Harvard crowd.

Some parents really appreciated it though. That made the effort worthwhile.

[PieterCasparzen]

Correction to my prior post; it was not the Glorious Revolution I was referring to but Pride's Purge and the trial of Charles I.

Regarding "do it themselves", you have to read the story. I'm surprised that you did not (you would have commented on it if you read it, because it deals with precisely that objection). This man is a PhD and his eldest son was doing calculus by the time he was 16.

Regarding making an "amateur" attempt, if you graduated high school, you've been through the material successfully yourself. Trigonometry, history and classic literature have not changed; the parent has the teaching copies of the texts. If you've ever caught a glimpse of them while you were in school, they lay out the answers, whatever the subject. After all, that is what the public school teachers are using.

The idea of needing some professional teaching ability is a farce. While there are a few basic ideas if one wants to interactively "teach" a class - most of the teachers I had in public school (a NJ suburb) were horrifically bad at it. Something as basic as "Ask, Pause, Call" that my father was taught in his training in the National Guard on how to give training classes stuck out in my mind as I sat in hours of classes where most of the class was not thinking but playing high school social games, "zoning out", etc.

I was struck by the waste of time while I was in school, where I knew that if I was just given the materials and allowed to work by myself I'd whip through things in no time. And this was back in the 70's and 80's - and I only heard about this Robinson guy a couple years ago. In elementary school I remember spending literally about 80%-90% of the time quietly, patiently waiting for the class to finish work or understand a concept, and most people waited, just not as long. The class was moving at the speed of the slowest students.

As far as teachers grading papers - that's a real joke. I saw a paper worse than mine in HS in a class where the teacher disliked my humor and had her preppy favorites. My classmate showed me his paper, two grades higher than mine but clearly worse. I had another English teacher, well into the year of "all B's" tell me to my face that she had me "pegged as a B student" from the beginning. Seeing how idiotic it all was, I just coasted. I was still accepted to every college I applied to, had the Navy romancing with a several-day dog-and-pony show at the Naval Academy, and had the highest "balanced" SAT in my class of over 400. While some had higher math or higher verbal or even higher combined, no one had a higher score than me in both. And I did that while spending countless hours in every band they had, all year long, no less than the top 3 of the trumpets all 4 years.

Homeschool will involve a lot of parental time actually finding a good curriculum that a) enables them to pass standardized tests and b) actually fills in a lot of blanks that the public education leaves.

In recent years, dealing with stepchildren's schooling, I found out the hard way that - the parent has to spend inordinate amounts of time anyway going over their child's curriculum and examining it six ways to Sunday just to know what the brainwashing is that you will have to spend inordinate amounts of time deprogramming.

IMHO, sending to public schools and tolerating the brainwashing is the greatest disservice a parent can do for their child. I did not happen to go into the details of Robsinson, but it would be wisest, of course, to ensure Reformed Biblical doctrine, a lot of history that is commonly missing (keeping in mind that a lot of history studies today are flat out wrong, i.e., students should learn both what they "need to say" and what's true), and good overview of literature.

Another point that anti-homeschoolers omit from their arguments is that tutors can be employed very effectively to supplement direct parental supervision.

IMHO...

[lacrew]

“This man is a PhD and his eldest son was doing calculus by the time he was 16.”

Yes, Calculus is generally a ‘black and white’ topic. That’s my point.

Not all topics are. I admit it - I was very fortunate to go to a first rate high school. It was a private school that my dad worked at (and still does after 40 years). I didn’t have the ‘basic’ high school education. I had teachers who challenged me - one literally ambushed me in the hallway and harangued me about writing better papers. I had a Latin teacher who insisted I stay for a half hour after class for a mentoring session. And then there was the english teacher who would make a two paragraph writing assignment the most technical and tedious task imagineable. None of these ‘pushing’ the student activities can occur, if a kid is on auto-pilot, and the parent isn’t highly skilled in every single subject (to a layman, my history papers looked fine - but not to Dr. Cooper). At some point, you need to be pushed to your limit (by an expert in the field)...this is why athletic teams have coaches.

You mentioned the Naval Academy. My high school experience prepared me for West Point, but I could see classmates who had been straight A students struggle. They struggled because they had been at the ‘top of their class’ and allowed to do independent study/do nothing classes for the last two years of high school. They should have been pushed harder - it would have better prepared them for West Point (fully 1/3 of my class washed out over four years). ‘Doing it on their own’ definitely did not work out for them - and these were very smart people.

I do not think I have done my kids a disservice either. Again, I am lucky. My school district is not a hell-hole or liberal nightmare. There is some propaganda, sure...but I try to deflect it when the kids get home. And there are opportunities - my daughter is taking a marketing class this year, and will take a business class next year, for example. Heck, I remember my step-son learned how to injection mold...the entire process from plastic pellet to toy, and learned about the pricing structures of manufacturing and importing plastic goods.

I’m sorry, but here I stand as a West Point graduate, a graduate of a prestigious private high school, and a licensed engineer...and I am not even close to being qualified to teach all the higher level classes...and I could never in a million years offer up business and marketing classes or insight in plastics production.

I am not opposed to homeschooling - especially if the public alternative is terrible. I regularly tell my kids that they are lucky...and that their reading level is above that of the teachers in the neighboring school district - and I mean it! If I lived in that district, I would move (which I did). Barring that, I would consider home school, because it was the better alternative. But, in my current situation, the school can do a better job than me...and I’m not too proud to admit it.

[PieterCasparzen]

Excellent response, thank you lacrew.

I would simply submit for your thought...

regarding “pushing” the student: IMHO, this is something that a parent should be doing all the time, in every aspect of life. Many parents do not insist on things being done right or to the best of one’s ability if one can do better than merely “acceptable”. The whole point of homeschooling, why it works better, is when a parent knows when their child is giving it their all and when they are not, and refuses to accept less than 100%, including chores, manners, sports, being prepared, having a plan, etc.

My stepson was in public school and was blowing off work. The teacher contacted me and my wife and I quickly realized that he was abusing the “honor” system. He was a good kid and we took his word that he was keeping up. The teacher told us she had a standard approach to this, having him keep a work diary of the work in all his classes and having parents and teacher initial it every day. I started by sitting him down and being blunt, pushing the point until I saw that he was really affected by what I was saying. Then every day I took the time to rake him over the coals on every class. After a few weeks, he started to actually enjoy getting things done, being prepared, and matching the higher bar I set for him. He suggested after a few weeks that he could prepare ahead of sitting down with me and write out everything that happened in class, which I approved without saying duh, about time, I just said yes, that sounds like a good idea. I was merciless, like a lawyer on cross-examination and a drill sergeant all rolled into one. I especially liked grilling him, open book, on readings, which, of course, I had not read. You read that book ? Tell me about it. The next marking period grades were all A’s, one B, and it had gotten down to simply me having to have him make a 5 minute report to me and he was all ready with it. I could even skip a day or two a week and he would file two complete reports. He was on the ball. Once people get the idea that they are NOT going to get out of the grilling, and the grilling is real pressure-cooker that devolves into a dressing down if there was a lack of preparation, they get a mental mule-switch on their brain earlier in the day that makes them prepare. Then, if the interviewer acknowledges each successfully prepared point, that becomes the proverbial “carrot” companion of the stick.

What’s the secret to the interview ? Even where you have not the foggiest idea of the interviewee’s detailed specialty ? Simply ask them to explain things to you - an open ended question and then they talk. A question like - what projects did you work on last year ? Then, work backwards from the most recent one - describe for me what you did on the project, specifically. If you’ve got some life experience, you will quickly see whether a person is shooting out consistent answers or givin’ it the ol’ Ralph Kramden. They can’t use the excuse that it’s from years ago, they can’t gloss over their whole year and say it was just a minor project.

If I can’t explain to you what I worked on last month, in laymen’s terms, and have you get the general idea, then I really don’t know the subject - and the interview is over (there are a few other factors that make this technique work well for everyone, such as the possiblity of complete customization to suit a particular interviewee).

A good manager does not have to understand the details of what their staff does. I’ve had a few such bosses - I had to come up with solutions, explain them in laymen’s terms to get approval, then do the project on time and budget - and have the result achieve what I forecasted. I was pleasantly amazed at their comfort and skill in managing me, project after project, having no desire or time to get into any details other than the critical points I gave them. They allowed me to achieve more ROI on “legitimate” projects than most managers who were hands on.

To the extent that the teacher is required over and above books and reading, the implication is that the teacher is adding in concepts or perspectives not contained in the books. Once the “subtleties” the teacher is “adding” become too large a percentage of the course, and we’re not learning a physical task like flying a plane or hitting a baseball, IMHO, we have a problem with the course readings. Is the teacher there for a sounding board, etc. ? That’s ok to a point, but the goal of the student is to be able to go on after the class and further their own knowledge and abilities in the field of study. They certainly do not want to have to go back to school every time something new comes up. The idea of a lecture is so preposterous it’s actually amusing if you think about it - the script could just be printed out. The only possible use of a teacher is when questions can be asked. And I don’t know about you, but I can read faster than people can talk and still have their words discernable. Somehow the teaching industry wants us to believe that if we just read we won’t do any thinking, whereas if we have a teacher teaching us, they will ask provocative questions and get us to think.

Bottom line, after school, if we have decent jobs, we have a task (sometimes with me it’s literally been a big book) flopped on our desk and we have two choices: do it, or pack up. No one to “help”. New language that I never had in college. New tools that I’ve never used before. New chemical reactions that I’ve never done before. Figure it out, they say. If we’re the person who needs boss person to teach us each little step to take, we are going nowhere in our careers unless we have some other talent, like politics. Certainly, if it takes our boss longer to work with us than it would for him to just do the job himself, he’s going to get tired of our “services” quickly, realizing that we’re overusing his “mentoring” and not simply doing our homework.

Regarding marketing and injection molding, these are, IMHO, not for education, but for specific profession or job education and training. Basic business, P&L, balance sheet, should be part of general education, because everyone is an investor. But general education is learning to think, learning literature, science and math, etc.

Turning out students who are cogs in the wheel is why new world order took over our education sytem to begin with (see below link):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Education_Board#Criticism