Posted on 10/15/2004 11:41:53 AM PDT by cinives
Home schooling children provides advantages
What did you learn in high school? I ask this question to people who seem puzzled by our familys decision to home school our children. Their answers are usually very interesting but not the kind of thing you would put in a campaign commercial touting increased funding for public education.
I never thought of myself as a home schooling kind of person until after nearly eight years of having a variety of teachers and other professionals trying to tell me what was wrong with my son, I figured out they were what was wrong with my son.
In the last of hundreds of meetings where a group of professionals would try telling me why my son, who everyone agreed was an incredibly smart kid, was failing classes, a teacher said the magic words.
He will do great in college, she said.
Then why cant he succeed in junior high? I asked her.
The room was quiet.
That was when I decided I could do better.
When you have a child you realize there are a ton of magazine articles, books and other resources to instruct you how to be your childs first teacher.
Television shows are lined up with experts preaching about how important a parents role is in educating their little rug rats.
But the moment your child turns five, you are supposed to hand over the responsibility of educating your offspring to complete strangers.
Most families I know dont question whether public school is the best place for their children. They just follow the herd through the back-to-school aisle and make plans to leave their children to be raised by a government institution eight hours a day for the next 12 years. It was difficult to get outside the public school box. Public school is what we do in this country. It is what is normal.
Then I started breaking down the average junior high and high school experience and asking what makes it so normal.
Showering in a junior high locker room remains one of the most traumatic experiences of many peoples lives. Why do we take children at the most self-conscious, awkward time of their lives and force them to get naked in front of one another? The only other time in your life you will have to shower with a group of strangers is in prison.
Not exactly what I want to be preparing my children for.
Public schools group kids together by age. Sounds like a good idea until you realize your child is learning communication skills, cultural values and social norms from other 12-year-olds. Great.
If a college student tried to keep track of seven classes, extracurricular activities, a part-time job and maintain relationships with family, we would think they were crazy. But this is exactly what we expect from high school students.
More than a few people asked if we were home schooling for religious reasons. That is the common stereotype: a large, fanatically religious family home schooling their children to protect them from the evils of the world.
Even a flaming liberal like me, who practices open-option religion, can understand why there are a lot of families like that out there. Ten minutes of observing life in any public high school would scare most parents. The students wardrobes and topics of conversation in the hallway are a direct contrast to the watered-down history lessons, censored literary classics and politically neutered discussions of current events in the classrooms.
We chose to home school because we believed we could do better than a school system hell bent on making everyone conform into becoming the perfect politically correct members of the populous.
I do have to give the public school teachers some credit. They were right. My 15-year-old son is doing great in college.
He is a K-State freshman carrying nine hours.
Mary Renee is a senior in speech. Please send your comments to opinion@spub.ksu.edu.
Don't be scared! You can do it, and you will love it! My daughters went to preschool and public school through 1st grade and kindergarten before I brought them home. My son, who just turned 5, has never gone to preschool and we will homeschool him, also. I was kind of panicked when I decided not to even send him to preschool, but I have not regretted the decision. He loves learning and asks to 'do school' like his older sisters. He just got his own library card yesterday and is so proud. Spending all this time with him and knowing I will get to spend so much more time with him in the future has been priceless. I has so many doubts and fears when I brought my girls home, and now I can just relax and enjoy myself knowing everything will work out great!
Here in WI, we have open enrollment and we've taken advantage of it. In a nutshell it means that the money my home district taxes me for and spends to *educate* my child follows him to the school WE choose. We have chosen a Virtual Academy (THANK YOU BILL BENNETT) from another school district. The money leaves my pathetic district and goes to where the academy is based.
I'm in a VERY similar situation as the author of this article (gifted middle schooler and utterly clueless teachers) and am happy with the way our homeschooling experience is going thus far.
We've done both also, and I'll take the public over private. My son was bored silly at a private Christian school.
I'm not up for homeschooling. If it gets very bad in public school, I might try it. However, we're not there yet.
Of course, we are in Oklahoma and the kids can pray, sing Christmas carols and are taught phonics, real math, and must diagram sentences.
Sounds like a slice of the fifties.
Thanks. My kids were also bored to death at Catholic school. I had to chastise my middle son's first grade teacher for carping about his handwriting when he was taking the spelling homework ("Make a sentence with each word") and making four line rhyming poems with the spelling words.
I am not up for homeschooling, either. I have a great deal of praise for those who do, and I have a number of FReeper friends who homeschool. Some take it too far and make it look bad for those who don't.
It kind of is! I love it here and so do the kids.
LOLOL! I love Blackadder!
I know how independent homeschoolers prefer to be, but here's the best advice on learning English: Learn Latin and translate into English. Latin is best tool --bar none-- for access to our language.
We have home schooled for many (17+) years. A daughter is now in graduate school with a major in art history. Her room mate from college and now graduate school is also home schooled and an english major. She is teaching English 101 as a graduate assistant and is amazed at the lack of basic grammer skills of the freshmen. Our 13 YO daughter sent her big sister a letter a few weeks ago that the room mate is using as an example for her 101 class. To me that says something when a 13 YO has better skills than a class of college freshmen. Our public school system is in more than a shambles - it needs to be dismantled.
"Apologies! This reply is nearly wordy enough to be a John Kerry answer. Except, I actually did say something, not just blah blah blah."
No apologies necessary. I appreciate your story, as we have just started homeschooling my son.
BTW, to give a "John Kerry" answer you would have had to say, "It's all Bush's fault. But I have a plan to fix that," about 3 times per paragraph.
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