Posted on 01/06/2009 11:39:38 AM PST by GonzoII
A homeschooling movement is sweeping the nation – with 1.5 million children now learning at home, an increase of 75 percent since 1999.
The Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics reported homeschooling has risen by 36 percent in just the last five years.
"There's no reason to believe it would not keep going up," NCES statistician Gail Mulligan told USA Today.
A 2007 survey asked parents why they choose to homeschool and allowed them to provide several reasons. The following are the most popular responses:
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
You and the others who have scolded me on this thread, would be more successful convincing people if you started from a point where you acknowledge what would SEEM obvious to anybody unaquanted with homeschooling, that it’s unhealthy to keep kids in the nest for 18 years.
Maybe what seems obvious is really false, and I’m open to hearing about it, but the hostle, condescending attitude that the homeshoolers on this thread showed me isn’t the most winning approach.
It’s homeschooling that is closest to the traditional model of raising children. Formal “schools” are only a hundred and fifty or so years old. And the modern government schools would be unrecognizable to most of the students of those early schools.
Homeschooling works, period, and produces adults who are not stifled or uncertain. My husband and I were both homeschooled. We are both successful adults, engineers, voters, have multiple interests that our parents didn’t teach us. Our siblings are all equally successful adults.
It’s pretty odd for you to complain that the homeschoolers are hostile and condescending when you showed up on the thread basically accusing them of child neglect.
I think I came on this thread in an appropriate way. I simple said:
“Wouldn’t it be better to find religious school you believe in? It can’t be optimal to isolate kids.”
Maybe I was wrong, but I hardly say it was aggresive.
You don’t seem to understand that most homeschool families are making some real sacrifices to do that. That many of us wouldn’t choose a religious school that perfectly matched our views, either, because we believe that homeschooling is the best way to raise children.
Your comment is vaguely like walking up to an Amish farmer and saying, “wouldn’t it be better to get with the times and use electric lights in your house? Lighting with candles can’t be optimal.” Maybe from your point of view you’re right, but you are missing the big picture, all the choices and beliefs that mean that the lifestyle you don’t understand is the only one possible...
Our experience with homeschoolers (we tend to hang with Catholics and Evangelicals) is uniformly positive. They're all happy, mature, and responsible children and young adults --overall, a pleasure to be around.
That was our know-it-all pediatrician. I wanted to switch doctors the first time I heard about his interrogation of our kids.
But now for the rest of the story... It's been ten years since we began with him, and lately he's been telling my wife that he thinks homeschooling is a good idea, from what he's seen of homeschooled kids.
My wife bites her tongue.
Great!
A thousand times, YES! This is why grammar and formal logic has been rooted out of both high schools and even colleges.
It's stunning, really. The ancient Greeks and Medieval universities encouraged free and open debate; question and answer; grammar and logic. Modern schooling is exactly the opposite, yet most people who have gone through the gov't school system imagine that it encourages "critical thinking."
The situation would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic.
A favorite stat of mine: On the national level, public school teachers send their children to private schools at twice the rate of the rest of the population, 22.5% vs. 12%.
But in the end, the issue isn't SAT scores, etc. The issue is parental control. The first principle regarding the formal education of children is that parents should be their children's primary educators. If this is true, then our current model of schooling is fundamentally unjust, since the government is the primary educator of our children, since children are assigned and compelled to attend government schools over which parents have minimal control.
A more just system of education would be a voucher or tuition-tax-credit system, where the government (taxpayers) would provide educational funding, but parents would be free to choose a school that corresponded to their beliefs.
I’m all for the idea of vouchers or tax credits, and always have been even though I have the niggling doubt about what would happen in the end.............that being nothing different than we have now. If the government is involved in the funding, the government is ultimately going to want to be involved in every other aspect.
But this mitigates (maybe) the opinions about public education formed ONLY from what is heard in news reports.
I don't know many people whose ONLY exposure to the public education system is what they experience from news reports.
And I would consider the news media to be apologists for, as opposed to unfair attackers of, the public education system, at least where I live.
Not based upon what I read here on FR. And judging from some of the comments on the various public school bashing threads, which many homeschooling threads evolve into, there are some people that seem to only get there info about public schools from these threads.
I don't know what the problem is, but it seems that the outcry against public schools here on FR is starting to reach a level of hysteria that I can't comprehend.
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