#1) Remove your child from public school
Home school
Encourage them to read for the sake of reading. Recommend books to them. The trouble with schools is that so much of the lesson plan is indoctrination and “mental floss” of some form or another.
Homeschool. Keep them out of the typical public sports like soccer. Teach them yourself. Take them and do things.
Flee government schools.
You could buy good books for the kids and make them write you book reports or hold “saturday” classes for an hour or two to ingrain a love of freedom and real facts about history and things.
“I believe this is an insidious way of muddying things up...”
That is exactly the reason. They do not want children to learn easily.
Education makes people easy to lead, difficult to drive but impossible to enslave.....................
Homeschooling is good and I have personally been associated with some of the best products. One of my scouts was a twelve grade homeschoooler and National Merit Scholar.
To say an average mother is capable of doing a better job of educating than the schools system is a stretch. Many can but for many the kids will not be better off.
My view is that a proper course is to parallel teach. Follow the classes closely and implement and strengthen as required. Develop library skills,surfing skills, testing skills, political awareness skills ans interest and fun skills. All of the above strengthen and counter weakness.
The kid will be an adult and in the real world. To be kicked out into the world after a sheltered and unprepared for life will be a real shock. I’ve had first hand bad experience with scouts like that too. The realization dawns that part of life was missed. It can be a real problem with a teen.
Frustration is the proper response. There's a reason why multiplication tables are MEMORIZED: it's because, like addition and subtraction of single-digit numbers, they're one of the raw building blocks of higher math.
Eeesh.
Ping
Another reason for the separation of school and state.
Part of what I hate most about the institution of school is that it is an institution and people can not free themselves from the infrastructure. All that influence by your child’s peers is not necessary. The urban public high school ITSELF is a horrible thing to do to a child. Never mind what they are doing inside the classrooms.
Bells clanging, us-versus-them mentality, gates, imprisonment (especially if an act or G-d or of man occurs - try and get your child out if there was a shooting or an earthquake), walking in hordes, hall passes, drugs, competitive dressing, etc. I understand this treatment is necessary if someone has broken the law and SENTENCED to doing time, but otherwise, why do this to a good young person?
Teach kids to read, and read to them. It takes about 30 hours of tutoring to teach a ready child to read, using Samuel Blumenfeld's Alphaphonics. Or, six+ years to produce a semi-literate book hater using "look say."
John Dewey bemoaned the negative effect that a love of books had on "socialization." His disciple Richard Gray took the concern to heart, and created a tool to prevent that dread event, the basal reader, starring his namesake Dick, plus Jane, plus Spot ...
This video must be watched.....
Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI
My second grader’s school district has adopted the “Everyday Mathematics” program shown in this video. It is as bad as the lady is saying, even at the second grade level. My wife and I have a very difficult time helping him with the math homework, because quite frankly this crap is hard to understand. All those old algorithms you grew up with, are not taught. They are replaced by alternative ways of finding the answer, that may work fine for math geeks who are proficient already in the old ways – but tossing away the old tried and true way and replacing it is a mistake in monstrous proportions.
His school district use to be one of the best in the State, but it has moved way down the list. Many other districts are also now teaching this, and it’s because the state wide test is based on this math.
The results are starting to come in, and the kids are failing the state wide exam. So what do they do? Return to the older books that worked? Nope. They lower the bar on the math scores for a given time, having the math scores be a smaller percentage of the total grade.
I wish we could afford a private school, there are some good ones in our area, but its impossible. And as far as home schooling, one of us would have to quit our job, and that is a “no can do” . We do after-school him though with books recommended by fellow Freepers facing the same situation.
Limit tv programming consumption.
Homeschool
The main reason it "isn't practical" is that many states only allow children to be homeschooled by their own parents (or a licensed teacher hired by the parents). As a few people on this thread noted, group homeschooling would be a great option for families that can't afford, or just don't want to have one parent completely leave the workforce. One parent could afford to stay home and teach, if she was getting paid a few thousand a year by parents of a few other children she taught along with her own. This would also allow for some grouping of kids by age, ability level, or special needs.
Of course, teachers' unions fight tooth and nail against proposals to allow non-parental, non-licensed teacher homeschooling, and other nanny-staters at the state level enact laws tightly regulating in-home child care in a way that would classify most group homeschoolers as in home child care businesses, and which would in many cases seriously interfere with running a homeschool the way you want to (including a good deal of remodelling of your house, visits by inspectors to make sure you don't have anything accessible to children that hasn't been government-certified as lead-free, fenced yard (even if you're on a remote dirt road), etc.
From time to time, I've perused the HSLDA website and been disturbed to note that this issue doesn't seem to be on their radar screen at all. I'm sure it would easily triple the number of US children who are homeschooled, if all states were pressured into allowing group/non-parental homeschooling with the same minimal restrictions that many already apply to parental homeschooling.