Home is no place for school - Homeschool Alert

USA Today Op Ed ^ | September 3, 2003 | Dennis Evans

[Damocles]

Home is no place for school
Wed Sep 3, 6:49 AM ET


By Dennis L. Evans 

The popularity of home schooling, while not significant in terms of the number of children involved, is attracting growing attention from the media, which create the impression that a "movement" is underway. Movement or not, there are compelling reasons to oppose home teaching both for the sake of the children involved and for society.

Home schooling is an extension of the misguided notion that "anyone can teach." That notion is simply wrong. Recently, some of our best and brightest college graduates, responding to the altruistic call to "Teach for America," failed as teachers because they lacked training. Good teaching is a complex act that involves more than simply loving children. Research on student achievement overwhelmingly supports the "common-sense" logic that the most important factor affecting student learning is teacher competency. While some parents may be competent to teach very young children, that competence will wane in more advanced grades as the content and complexity increases. 

But schools serve important functions far beyond academic learning. Attending school is an important element in the development of the "whole child." Schools, particularly public schools, are the one place where "all of the children of all of the people come together." Can there be anything more important to each child and thus to our democratic society than to develop virtues and values such as respect for others, the ability to communicate and collaborate and an openness to diversity and new ideas? Such virtues and values cannot be accessed on the Internet. 

The isolation implicit in home teaching is anathema to socialization and citizenship. It is a rejection of community and makes the home-schooler the captive of the orthodoxies of the parents.

One of the strengths of our educational system is the wide range of legitimate forms of public, private or parochial schooling available for parental choice.

With that in mind, those contemplating home teaching might heed the words of the Roman educator, Quintilian (A.D. 95). In opposing home schooling, he wrote, "It is one thing to shun schools entirely, another to choose from them."

Dennis L. Evans directs doctoral programs in education leadership at the University of California, Irvine.

[AnAmericanMother]

Good for you. Classical education is too much neglected these days, even in college (forget about high school!)

I was not a Classics major (didn't have enough time to do both my Greek and my Latin since I was also taking German) but I took a lot of courses in both languages, and they have continued to serve me well in the intervening 30 years!

Which translation of Homer are you using? I was always a Richmond Lattimore fan, until my daughter started Homer and her school (private Christian of course) recommended Robert Fagles. Wow! His language is coarse where Homer is coarse (for example Thersites) but he gives the flavor of the original better than any other translator I've read. (I still have to confess a sneaking admiration for Alexander Pope, as out of fashion as he may be!)

I am in the situation of having two children with opposite needs - one a clever scholar and hard worker, the other very bright but struggling with a whole constellation of learning disabilities. My older is in an excellent private Christian high school which can offer advantages that I cannot (Spanish, for example, and advanced science labs, and specialist teachers in each subject). After becoming disgusted with our local public school (which had promised the moon for my son's problems and did NOT deliver anything at all), I pulled my son from school last year and taught him for almost a month at home while I was looking for a small private school that could actually teach him something. I found one (it's across town which is a pain) but I discovered while teaching him that he had learned precisely nothing in his year in public school. He had no idea what a fraction was. By the time the month was over, he was reducing & multiplying fractions.

And our local public school system is supposed to be one of the GOOD ones!

[Porterville]

My keyboard sticks so letter get left out, I'm also a terrible speller. Waaa, cry me a river.

[Boxsford]

I really like your response. You are exactly correct. Everything he states is factually wrong and can be proven wrong. Pinhead is too kind.

[Boxsford]

I really like your response. You are exactly correct. Everything he states is factually wrong and can be proven wrong. Pinhead is too kind.

[Boxsford]

The school district I live in has deemed a Classical Education (in their precious charter schools) as 'inappropriate' and will no longer be allowed.

[TankerKC]

...for the sake of the children...

That's all I needed to read.

[Porterville]

Dennis L. Evans

Academic Coordinator

Director, Educational Leadership Development Programs/Ed. Admin.

949.824.7608

devans@uci.edu

[Boxsford]

Excellent quote and post! Thanks so much!!

[Wiser now]

Here we go with that silly shibboleth, "home schooled kids aren't developing socialization skills"! This asks us to believe that home schooled kids have no siblings with whom to interact and communicate, no neighbors with whom they can play and no play equipment in the yard, no parents to teach them respect for others, etc. I'm sick of it. As for Mom getting in over her head, there is nothing wrong with Grandpa teaching trig when the time comes.

[Boxsford]

Thanks for posting his email address. I think I'll shoot off Sloth's posted quote to him. We all should!

[AnAmericanMother]

The school district I live in has deemed a Classical Education (in their precious charter schools) as 'inappropriate' and will no longer be allowed.

What? Do tell me more. I thought PA by and large was a conservative state.

And how on earth do they square such thinking with the continued success of such schools as Boston Latin (which has become part of the public school system but as I understand it is left severely alone by the establishment -- and still requires FIVE years of Latin to graduate)? I may be an old fashioned stick-in-the-mud, but a good solid grounding in Latin (and to a lesser extent in Greek) will serve any scholar all his life. One year of Latin alone would probably raise a student's SAT score by an easily measurable amount. (I know it helped me in the Vocab. portion of the exam - in several cases when I did not know the English word I was able to derive it from the Latin. I didn't get Greek until college.)

[Porterville]

I just wonder what he is doing underneath that desk?!? Look at them crazzzzzy eyes... yeah, that guy is keen on social skills

[sanjacjake]

Now-hear this: The only proven way to see that children
are taught correctly, under God and man,. is HOMESCHOOLING. All four grandchildren home schooled all through the grades,
present ages...9-12-16-18. Nathan, 18 year old,through his
academic achievements...now has a full four year scholarship
at UCRiverside. All four have taken piano lessons besides their regular curriculum and all are excellent players and
students..reading?..all since 1st grade...how? Mothers
read to them since they were old enough to talk...All are
in Christian programs and belong to outside groups according
to their interests..karate by the 12 year old and he is
going through the belts...etc.,etc....Jake

[AnAmericanMother]

As for Mom getting in over her head, there is nothing wrong with Grandpa teaching trig when the time comes.

Amen and amen! My husband and I share homework and exam preparation duties for our daughter (just because she's in school doesn't mean she stops learning when she gets home!) I am more than competent to teach English lit., American and European History, grammar, and rhetoric, but I can barely balance my checkbook. My husband is a Ga. Tech graduate in chemistry ("MIT - the Georgia Tech of the North") so he takes over for the sciences and all higher mathematics (as in "higher than 2 + 2"). She is studying Spanish (I mean, really, she has an in-house teacher for Latin, Greek, German, and Scots Gaelic, and she goes and chooses to study Spanish!) but I am actually able to assist her materially since it's a Romance language and the Latin cognates are all over the place. Don't ask me about endings or conjugations though!

[DumpsterDiver]

What a load of condescending claptrap. (The article, that is, not Damocles.)

[WOSG]

Here is my two cents to Dr Evans ...
devans@uci.edu

---

Dr Evans,

I suspect that thanks to google and internet you may get a deluge to your faulty op-ed in USA Today finding your email.
Let me throw some comments on the pile. First, about your curious quote from Quintilian:

With that in mind, those contemplating home teaching might heed the words of the Roman educator, Quintilian (A.D. 95). In opposing home schooling, he wrote, "It is one thing to shun schools entirely, another to choose from them."
In the days of the Romans, the privileged Roman student were taught by Greek slave tutors - at home. So the irony is that you are misinforming with this quote - it is supportive of schooling generally and is making the point that choice in schooling is a different thing from denying education entirely. Exactly so - choosing home schooling is not a rejection of schools or education, but a choice, and for many a valid and positive education choice.
Qunitilian himself was taught first by his rhetorician father. It may be in recognition of that that Quintilian himself said:
I would, therefore, have a father conceive the highest hopes of his son from the moment of his birth. "
http://www.molloy.edu/academic/philosophy/sophia/Quintilian/education.htm
The fact that you raised the issue of "parental orthodoxies" rather than whether parents and instructional materials could teach english, math and science belies your agenda: You care about indoctrination. It is a bias against parental roles in educating the next generation which is the opposite of what Quintilian would advocate.
You wrongly assert that social values can only be taught in a socialized educational setting (why not home, and the church, and other voluntary social arrangements besides a public school?) In fact, we have seen the opposite, where the schools have decided to engage in unhealthy indoctrination of politicized orthodoxies while ignoring true childhood character and moral values development. It is a reaction to the failures of schools and their mistaken orthodoxies that parents have been forced to engage in home schooling.
I could give you my own second-hand stories, eg, I know 2 friend both with PhDs who pulled kids out of public schools and homeschooled because of the mis-education and poor teachers that were being foisted on them. Yes, not everybody can teach, but sadly many of them are employed as public school teachers today and cannot be fired due to the excessive power of teacher's unions. I am sure you'll get enough first-hand stories on it.
My own children are in private schools, my daughter last year in 2nd grade tested comparable to 4th and 5th graders in public schools, and is an avid reader thanks to being taught in ways the public school has forgotten. My son is 5 and already can read, write and do basic math. He's starting first grade in the same private Christian school; public school is sadly not up to the standards necessary to teach my children well enough.
I take Quintilian to heart. Maybe you should too. ( BTW, you realize that the quote you used was about choosing rhetoric academies for older students, ie, more like a College than an elementary schools; again, most of the privileged had Greek tutors. You think maybe it was a mistake for Alexander the Great to get 'home-schooled' by Aristotle?)

[Boxsford]

Veritas Press was a curriculum used in a charter school--homeschooling but really not. (they had to be in touch every week) The local school district told the parents that they could NOT homeschool, in their home, under their charter school, classical education. Again, they deemed it 'inappropriate'. And, you know what? The parents that were doing this either put their child back in the public school or are using another method.

[Boxsford]

LOL!!

[moyden2000]

Every liberal is a thug.

[twigs]

Well, how very interesting. A new trend in education is to have the students take the inititive in creating their own learning environments, where the teachers become more of a resource. Personally, I think classroom education in some districts tend to overemphasize this style of "teaching." But, especially considering this trend, I can't think of a place where a student is MORE apt to take "ownership" of their own education with an adult resource at hand than at home. How very hypocritical!