I'm not sure if beagle is on your ping list, I wasn't sure who handled it for homeschoolers.
Thanks for the ping. Great article. My boys are four and we've decided to homeschool. I've gone back and forth, but we've finally made a decision. I am excited, terrified, nervous, hopeful...I know we're making the right decision for our circumstances, but it sure is scary!
Please put me on your ping list, thank you.
What a great article. Reminds me of our Clare who was dead BORED in school! As a sophomore, last year, she taught herself Japanese and digital video editing along with her other studies. She'll take Chemistry at a Community College in January, followed by Physics. She also wants to take Psychology, though I'm not as thrilled about that. Those folks can get really wierd sometime! ;o)
Please add me to your HS ping list! Love to hear anything about HSing, it works great for us!
To Jedismom,
Put me on please!
Thanks
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'.
Thank you for the ping, J'smom. : )
Excellent article.
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.
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.