As I said, I am in the business, downstream... So I know what I am talking about...
Skills that should have been acquired a long time ago are lacking. Things that we are not in the business of teaching at the college level. So these students fail, and in a way, it isn't their fault, but it is the fault of the program they got.
I understand that some parents don't like a lot of what is happening in public schools, but then they better fight about it. because for the vast majority of children, schools are what they need.
Of course if your problem is that you want religious indoctrination of your children, its another ballgame... And it has nothing to do with quality!
Pitiricus,
Let's get specific -you are generalizing...
Which subjects do you base your opinion on?
Name a few...
Exactly which academic skills are homeschooled students lacking?
Marxist-Athiest alert, Marxist Athiest alert.
No offense, but you're a scary guy. How about letting parents choose the form of schooling that they feel best serves their child's needs?
I doubt you'd be as sanguine regarding the effects of government schooling if you knew the history of this pernicious institution.
A sampling:
The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleons amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichteone of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down ones life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1 lay the power to cloud mens minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.
Prior to Fichtes challenge any number of compulsion-school proclamations had rolled off printing presses here and there, including Martin Luthers plan to tie church and state together this way and, of course, the "Old Deluder Satan" law of 1642 in Massachusetts and its 1645 extension. The problem was these earlier ventures were virtually unenforceable, roundly ignored by those who smelled mischief lurking behind fancy promises of free education. People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didnt didnt. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century: as late as1920, only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school, though Switzerland has the worlds highest per capita income in the world.
Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so its not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldts brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference.
The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.
I was homeschooled through middle school and junior high. I went on to a public high school, where I graduated in the top 10%. I went on to get a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and am now pursuing a Juris Doctorate. So, apparently homeschooling didn't hamstring me academically.
My younger sister tracked along with me. She graduated the same year I did, salutorian of her class. She graduated with a B.S. in meterology from a large midwestern school with a 3.75 average. She's now a doctoral student studying meteorlogy at a large southern state school. Sounds like homeschooling really hurt her, didn't it?
My best friend and his brother graduated from high school as homeschooled students. They did okay in college. Not spectacular, but adequately well.
At school, I know three girls who were homeschooled. They are both academically advanced, and socially where they ought to be.
At church, a sizeable portion of the late high school/early college kids I know were homeschooled. Intelligent, sweet kids. No problems whatsoever.
Now, I know homeschooling sometimes fails. When it fails, it fails miserably. We've all seen the failures it can produce: kids who don't know anything, and have zero social skills. But those are very rare. Most of the time, kids whose parents care enough to homeschool them will turn out okay, and do fairly well academically.