How many children in the U.S. attend public school? How many instances of this behavior occur throughout the U.S. in public schools? How many people are assaulted on city streets in the U.S. compared to the number of teachers who are assaulted in public schools? Should we abandon our city streets too while we are at it?
How many of these teacher assaults occurred during each previous decade going back the last 30 or 40 years or more? Are things really getting worse, or has the advent of 24 hour news cycles and readily available video recording devices made for such incidents to become much more widely reported over the course of the past 10 to 15 years. People making “knee jerk” “emotional” comments about such incidents adds little to the debate.
While I don’t necessarily agree that public schools should be abandoned altogether, I also don’t want my children attending them with all this secularism, multiculturalism and anti-Americanism going on in our public school system either.
I think what we need to do is abolish the department of education, encact a voucher system so that parents in any income bracket can send their children to the school of their choice, enact merit pay for teachers, bring back into our public schools prayer, the ten commandments and the Bible, and teach the basics once again including American history, civics, reading, writing, science and arithmetic.
Until public schools enact these reforms I refuse to send my children to them.
No matter what the statistics may be, I’m sad to see a FReeper defending collective, communal, government schools at all.
SoldierDad, things really ARE getting worse, and no, it is NOT just media hype. If you’d like, why don’t you visit one public school in every state in the country, and report back to us on what you found? You would be shocked, I guess. But I wouldn’t be — not one single bit. Yes, are children in PS’s learning to read and write and do math? Obviously. Are they learning how to LEARN? Are they learning how to THINK? Nope. How can they, when bullying and violence and fear and sexual messages and peer pressure are pressing on them from every side? How do they have any emotional or mental energy remaining to work their way through the maze of their own reality — and to learn about the amazing world around them that God designed in a miraculous way for them?
How many public high school students would ANY of you guess would say they were “happy” or felt “hopeful” about themselves and their future? 10%? 20% More? Less? Hard to say. Personally, my children have their joy back, along with the love of learning and discovery, now that I made the choice to homeschool all four (as a single adoptive Momma, no less). We will never be able to afford private Christian schooling, but I have all I need right here to carry them all the way their high school education.
And they’re each thriving, and growing into the amazing human beings God created them to be — without ANY fear each morning of riding the school bus, being sexually harassed anymore, being punched or kicked or ridiculed, or having to wait on 30 other students to master a skill before they can move on to the next lesson.
If anyone tells me they can’t afford to homeschool, I tell them that we are living proof we all do exactly what we’re willing to do — because it CAN be done well, and it CAN be done effectively — even as an “only” parent like me on a limited income. In many ways — we are more “affluent” than many other families I know who have much more “stuff” and resources.
There is nothing like doing exactly what you know you should be doing for your children. It trumps everything else, hands down.