I was recently told by a raving liberal democrat university education instructor that recent studies show that children who are kept out of "nursery school" and who stay at home during the tender toddler years grow up to show greater leadership traits than their state educated counterparts. She was a guest of my dinner host and I chose not to point out to her that 1) such data would never be publicly disclosed by the NEA and 2) she had just advocated homeschooling.
You're kinder than a LIBERAL would have been if the situation had been reversed.
When Shanna got her Tsongas scholarship, we were at the Mass. Statehouse, where the brain trust of Massachusetts' state schools--and the requisite state pols-- had gathered to present the awards.
I naturally took advantage of the situation to point out to every congressman/gal and college executive I spoke with that a homeschooler was among that year's crop of the state's best and brightest....always trying to plug away and soften attitudes.
I was shocked, SHOCKED!, by the sincere positive reaction among the folks I thought would have been most off-put by the circumstance! It seems that there is only a small vocal minority (actual commies) in the state that attacks homeschooling.
Homeschooling is, aside from a couple nitwit districts, easy and accepted; very much legal, and supported by a lot of pols and college administrators. There is a strong recruitment among private and public schools. Their problem is finding the kids and getting them to apply.
Let's not condemn all liberal educators and pols with a broad brush: they're keeping the whackos at-bay....quietly.
Happy thought to share with you, friends. Even Tom Finneran thinks homeschooling is boffo.
I don't doubt it. 25 years ago, a friend got me and my son involved in a doctoral thesis study of three-year-olds' speech patterns at none other than the Nova Southeastern University referenced in this article. The young man doing the study strongly advised me to keep my son out of nursery school, and to home school him, if possible. His studies showed that toddlers who showed an advanced degree of speech capability and inquisitiveness tended to lose those qualities when regimented in a school atmosphere.
I couldn't home school -- by temperament and economic necessity -- but I did send my child to private schools, where he proceeded to manipulate almost every teacher he ever had, such that even failing test grades and sloppy grammar/spelling were considered by private school progressives as insignificant compared to his "creativity," a view influenced in no small way by his social/verbal skills, I suspect.
As a result, I found myself tutoring him in grammar and math up through his high school years, (and politely reading the riot act more than once to permissive teachers) -- with significant resistance on his part, since he had learned that he could skate very nicely without my help.
He attended college on a full academic scholarship, and is successful now, but I often think back on the advice of that doctoral candidate (as opposed to the NEA type quoted now at Nova), and wonder where his path would have led if I had had the temperament and resources to home school full-time (instead of the part-time role I had to assume while also paying tuition). The movement was barely in its infancy in Broward then (I knew only one parent who homeschooled in our area), but I'm glad to see, considering the non-standards of our public schools (and, to some degree, even private schools) that it is alive and well.