Who knew? My parents are cool. Homeschooling is becoming hipster. Celebrity parents like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie proudly discuss their homeschooling lifestyle. But pioneers like my parents set the trend of educational freedom.Posted on 01/27/2013 11:08:23 PM PST by Kaslin
Who knew? My parents are cool. Homeschooling is becoming hipster. Celebrity parents like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie proudly discuss their homeschooling lifestyle. But pioneers like my parents set the trend of educational freedom.
The plan was to send me to public school. My mother enjoyed her job as an R.N. and was not bored. She was simply a creative rebel. And my father encouraged her to pioneer—because he believed in freedom.
My mother is a rebel with her own style. She once told me: “I never wanted to be like anyone else. I always did my own thing. But my girlfriends would copy my artwork and my clothes. I would get a new outfit, and they would go out and buy the same outfit. I was happy when I could eventually sew my own clothes and they couldn’t copy me. But when they copied my artwork, it irritated me.” My grandmother told her: “When they copy you, it is the highest form of flattery.”
My mother designed, sewed, modeled and won fashion awards for her clothes. Her parents could not afford to buy drawing paper so she innovatively recycled newspaper to sketch her designs.
As an adult, I think the artist in my mother motivated her to do something unique with her children’s education—and, once again, set a trend that her peers would copy. When I was five years old, homeschooling was not as cool and acceptable as it is today; homeschooling parents were scrutinized and ridiculed. My mother did not care; she was an entrepreneur.
My mother’s friends openly doubted her ability to teach her own children. She proved them wrong; I graduated Summa Cum Laude from college, my sister is a teacher at a private school and I have a brother in medical school. Today, many of my friends and cousins are homeschooled.
More and more American parents are choosing homeschooling. Here’s why:
1.) Freedom
Homeschooling parents want freedom—for themselves and their children. They do not want their children’s First and Fourth Amendment rights to be routinely violated as they are in many public schools through censorship, unprovoked random drug tests (for athletes) and unwarranted searches and seizures.
Education, per the Constitution, should be left up to individuals and states. Americans should have options for how to educate their children. Thomas Jefferson once said: “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of parent[s] refusing to let their child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible transportation and education against [their] will.” Some of the most successful entrepreneurs (think Steve Jobs) never finished college; there is no perfect formula for how much formal education someone needs to achieve success. Children learn in different ways and at different rates—and parents will always make better educational choices for their children than the state.
However, former presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson ushered in an unconstitutional era of compulsory education—directed at the federal level.
Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano explains in his book, Theodore and Woodrow, that public schools were started as a way to turn children into obedient little statists—not to provide equal educational opportunity.
Napolitano writes: “Public schools were an ideal place to weed out students in order to create an elite class of people, while relegating the rest to their rightful position in life. …Many ideas advocated by Roosevelt and Wilson were not far off from those of some European dictators of the time.” Bottom line, compulsory education is an offense to individual liberty and the Constitution.
2.) Personalized Academics
Academics is a top motivator for parents, who believe that they can use one-on-one attention to develop their children’s intellectual gifts and overcome any weaknesses. USA Today reports: “…home-schoolers, on average, scored 37 percentile points above public school students on standardized achievement tests.”
3.) Culture and Morals
Increasingly, parents want to teach their own culture and morals to their children—not the “morals” of the state. Napolitano writes that U.S. public schools: “did not separate church and state. Instead, they hoped to emphasize Protestant teachings over other religions, specifically, Catholicism.”
Secular and religious parents alike increasingly find that public schools do not meet their expectations. According to USA Today: “Secular [homeschool] organizations across the country report their numbers are growing...”
4.) Developing Talents
Homeschooled children have the benefit of more time and parental focus to develop unique extracurricular talents. Some of my friends focused on developing skills that require intense time commitments—like figure skating. Many athletes, actresses and musicians opt for homeschooling or online school at some point in their careers (think Taylor Swift, Jason Taylor and Tim Tebow).
I like to think that I am cooler than my parents. But, honestly, at this point, they are cooler than me. Because without their brazen pioneering, I would not be nearly as unique.
It's true. My kids are very popular because of it. Other kids look up to them for everything. They're like "counselors" to the lost public school kids.
Parents today throw their kids into government schools and expect the schools to raise them. The government schools are run by left wing activists, so the kids are nothing but dollar signs and future failures to them (who'll end up voting democrat for their monthly brick of government cheese). That leaves the kids without parents and knowledge of the real world. My kids teach the other kids, and the other kids respect them for it.
Could be the influence of snarky brothers and sisters, although there is probably some truth to what you're saying. My homeschooled daughters are 15 & 17, and we've yet to experience teenage snark mode, although they are capable of speaking for themselves.
In our case it was ballet. I have one kid in a good university pursuing a dance career on a scholarship, and another one about to start in the Fall.
Temperament is a bigger factor than education level for parents considering homeschooling. I know some college-educated moms who tried it and simply could not stand it... other parents with GEDs have successfully homeschooled their kids.
The elementary school grades are pretty simple. Once you get into more advanced concepts, you can buy pre-packaged curriculum that includes all the lecture material and notes you'll need.
Fine with me. That should be the parents' decision.
Most people don't use math beyond addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I don't. And I learned math through differential equations and linear algebra.
Apparently, Alfred North Whitehead believed the same thing, although he thought that children should also learn statistics.
I'd replace that with learning to read a graph.
But again, it should be up to the parent. Of all the subjects worthy of study, why are most chldren forced to learn arcane subjects like trig and algebra II?
Look at it this way, if parents aren't given primary responsibility for their chldren's education, who should be? The State? Is that really a conservative position?
While we didn’t homeschool, we had our 3 kids in private parochial school until the 9th grade, when we could no longer afford it and had to put them in government high school. That is perhaps the biggest regret of my life, as we never had significant issues with them until that point, and had to deal with a lot of crap afterwards.
Your post made my day. Congratulations!
There is no historic or biblical basis for accepting “snark” from children at all. This is a fairly historically recent development, and it all comes from the rejection of traditional (biblical) values.
Children obey your parents, honor your father and mother,
neither have a “unless you’re a teenager that knows better than your parents” caveate.
Same here. There was no "teenage rebellion."
Maybe it's a government school indoctrination thing. Kids are taught their parents, their traditions, their beliefs are all wrong. Only socialism/communism are politically correct. The kids get confused, because parents do what they do because they love their children. Schools do what they do because they love the power and money. The kids get hurt by this in the end.
Kids just influence one another. That’s where they get it.
It would have been nice to use all my time off to take the kids on educational trips when they were young and every other kid was in school. But my kids were dead-set against it and the public schools here are really good.
When your school is best in the state at Cross Country and Soccer and worst in the state at football, baseball and basketball, you have a good school.
Sadly, parents become interlopers in their children's lives. Why wouldn't teens treat parental intrusions into their lives with disdain? Who are they to give orders? All children are special, and probably smarter than their parents, who still cling to old-fashioned religious beliefs.
Maybe. My husbands boss was about to put his kids into a public school, but my husband pointed out the office window at a public housing unit across the street and reminded his boss his kids would be going to school with those kids.
The boss changed his mind and put his kids in the local Christian school. (Bad company corrupts good character. He didn't want those kids teaching his kids their bad behaviors or lifestyle.)
Public Schools = Baby Sitter Centers
Another way of seeing it, is when they are young they are like dogs, love you, want to be with you, eat the food you feed them and then one day, as teenagers, they become cats!!
Perhaps this is why more “hipsters” are getting into it -
they’re ashamed, or just offended, seeing their reflection in the mirror of their children’s behavior.
And what a day it is! Happy Feast Day St. Thomas Aquinas!!!
A baby sitting center would be at least “neutral”.
Public schools these days are malignant. They intentionally dumb down the kids while indoctrinating them in socialism.
“We are officially un-cool in his eyes.”
I don’t think home schooling is the answer to all of mankind’s ills, of course.
All of my kids have had The Snark in varying degrees at varying times.
The difference, as I see it, is the amount of control I have.
I am very much aware of what they are up to. I control most influences, from internet time to friends to outings. I let my kids grow up and I don’t hover, but, if I get The Snark I do. Thus The Snark is eliminated or kept under control.
Finally, I don’t have teachers continually undermining us, our faith, and our values.
Marx is the first lesson for the liberals.
So do I!. In all its variants. School is one of the major,
major deterrents to having children I hear. I should find
some short “You Can Do It!” book to hand out.
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