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 family’s 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 can’t 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 child’s first teacher.
Television shows are lined up with experts preaching about how important a parent’s 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 don’t 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 people’s 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.
To Jedismom,
Put me on please!
Thanks
My boys all went to Montessori schools that were run by the Franciscan nuns when they were small. The boys, not the nuns. It gave them a great head start for public school. They are or were in Advanced Placement classes. (My eldest is now in the Navy)
You might search the homeschooling web sites for "ammo" (there are thousands!), as well as look into local homeschool co-ops and support groups, to inform your husband re homeschooling successes/facts/benefits and finding an appropriate social group in your area. It is harder to find groups for teens and fairly easy for younger children, many find. Go meet some local homeschoolers and show your husband that they are not weird.
Additionally, do what I did and research the literature on the side effects of the meds. Peter Breggin and others are good resources for a start. You might not be aware that certain meds like Ritalin disqualify a kid from jobs in the military and other occupations. I'm not sure of the extent of this - all positions or just some of the more sensitive jobs - but the info is out there if you look.
Maybe with more info, your husband would consider changing his mind, who knows.
Best of luck - freepmail me if you want some specific links, not to mention I'm sure quite a few people here could point you in any direction you'd like to know more about.
Done!
I lived in Hawaii for 4 years. I spite of having so many mixed marriages, it is a VERY racist place.
The Micronesians have a very bad attitude and many of the native Hawaiian/hapa-haoli population also have gotten used to the very large goverment teat over there. Makes for an "I don't care" attitude. Not all of course, but I experienced it also.
I am glad you are homeschooling.
Sounds like you have future doctors and engineers there....referencing their handwriting skills.
Maybe in times past. Now it would more likely mean you are on the front lines of the culture war.
In other words, there's no chance my kids will have to bow to Mecca in order to learn about Islam.
I call it the Great Asian Soup Mix LOL. You're right not all but many. We're a military family and may of us have gone to homeschooling. Also many other military kids have been subjected to harrassment. One 6 yr old girl was constantly coming home with bruises, her mother went to the princple and told him, "If my daughter comes home with one more bruise, I will sue this school system!" That's just one example. It's not enough that these children have to endure parents on long deployments to Iraq but to be subjected to this kind of harrassment? They are called white trash, Hate Haoley day which they are beaten up etc.
I'm so sorry! I sent you that private reply thinking you were a woman! Duh, on the football team! Please forgive me. Nothing personal in the reply, I'm just gushing over my husband! Your wife might enjoy reading it as I'm absolutely sure that you see her the exact same way!
Thanks for the ping, 2J!
To all the parents out there doing what's best for their kids - and that isn't always homeschooling in the classical sense - let me just say this: your kids will be grateful someday! I know I am. Seems like I'm still discovering ways in which my education was superior to 95% of my peers'.
Thanks for the ping!!!!
Don't worry. Your children will be wanted by colleges *because* they are homeschooled. I just sent my oldest off to Grove City College after being homeschooled all his life. He's doing great there. He only applied to one other school, but he got into that school's honors program. It's the same for all homeschooled students who do well at home--they will be accepted to colleges and do well there also.
Thank you for the ping, J'smom. : )
Excellent article.
I have been very successful in the area of academics with my kids. My oldest son just went off to Grove City College in August. My fifteen year old is taking college courses (a programming course and discrete math) and loving it. My other two kids also do very well.
I'd like to caution people not to get too caught up in how well the kids do academically because not all children will become rocket scientists just because they are homeschooled. But, all of our children can be taught good values, including a good work ethic. The child who isn't "brilliant" academically might do well in a trade or in a business that requires "know how" as opposed to book-smarts. I sometimes regret that I have pushed academics so much in my house because I'm ending up with brainy kids who don't always show the character I'd like to see. Perhaps I'm just being overly critical because I thought I'd have perfect children by the time they turned 18. I don't know. But, I am learning that prayer works wonders, especially when you don't have the child living with you anymore. I've learned to trust God and stop trying to make things happen myself.
I wish the best to all of you here who homeschool and to the woman who would like to homeschool but whose husband is against it. Try to fill your son's spare time with educational, but enjoyable activities. You don't want to overburden him with work on top of his regular schoolwork, but you might be able to instill in him a love of learning and teach him that learning doesn't only take place in the classroom. If you stay on top of your son's education, he'll do fine.
I remember about Haole Day. I thought it was "Kill Haole Day" actually.
Ha! I'ts prolly both.
In preparing for home school, we did a lot of reading. Some of the absolute indictment against the institutional school as currently constituted, comes from John Taylor Gatto. He was a Teacher of the Year in the NYC public schools.
"The Underground History of American Education" is available on line.
Here is the link, then a snip.
Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her. Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I’ve seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I’d admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That’s why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn’t your own little Janey or mine. Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It’s called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door. I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn’t go to school for a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal, Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves, sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading selection by guessing what the words meant.
Son is definitely engineer material... he is constantly building stuff with popsicle sticks, clay, glue.
Thinking the girl will be some kind of teacher or something. Although, she was talking military a few weeks ago... but 13 yo's, females.
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