Posted on 11/27/2006 7:04:44 AM PST by meandog
Schools With Good Teachers Are Best-Suited to Shape Young Minds
There's nothing like having the right person with the right experience, skills and tools to accomplish a specific task. Certain jobs are best left to the pros, such as, formal education.
There are few homeowners who can tackle every aspect of home repair. A few of us might know carpentry, plumbing and, let’s say, cementing. Others may know about electrical work, tiling and roofing. But hardly anyone can do it all.
Same goes for cars. Not many people have the skills and knowledge to perform all repairs on the family car. Even if they do, they probably don’t own the proper tools. Heck, some people have their hands full just knowing how to drive.
So, why would some parents assume they know enough about every academic subject to home-school their children? You would think that they might leave this -- the shaping of their children’s minds, careers, and futures -- to trained professionals. That is, to those who have worked steadily at their profession for 10, 20, 30 years! Teachers!
Experienced Pros
There’s nothing like having the right person with the right experience, skills and tools to accomplish a specific task. Whether it is window-washing, bricklaying or designing a space station. Certain jobs are best left to the pros. Formal education is one of those jobs.
Of course there are circumstances that might make it necessary for parents to teach their children at home. For example, if the child is severely handicapped and cannot be transported safely to a school, or is bedridden with a serious disease, or lives in such a remote area that attending a public school is near impossible.
Well-Meaning Amateurs
The number of parents who could easily send their children to public school but opt for home-schooling instead is on the increase. Several organizations have popped up on the Web to serve these wannabe teachers. These organizations are even running ads on prime time television. After viewing one advertisement, I searched a home school Web site. This site contains some statements that REALLY irritate me!
“It’s not as difficult as it looks.”
The “it” is meant to be “teaching.” Let’s face it, teaching children is difficult even for experienced professionals. Wannabes have no idea.
“What about socialization? Forget about it!”
Forget about interacting with others? Are they nuts? Socialization is an important component of getting along in life. You cannot teach it. Children should have the opportunity to interact with others their own age. Without allowing their children to mingle, trade ideas and thoughts with others, these parents are creating social misfits.
If this Web site encouraged home-schooled children to join after-school clubs at the local school, or participate in sports or other community activities, then I might feel different. Maine state laws, for example, require local school districts to allow home-schooled students to participate in their athletic programs. For this Web site to declare, “forget about it,” is bad advice.
When I worked for Wal-Mart more than 20 years ago, Sam Walton once told me: “I can teach Wal-Mart associates how to use a computer, calculator, and how to operate like retailers. But I can’t teach them how to be a teammate when they have never been part of any team.”
“Visit our online bookstore.”
Buying a history, science or math book does not mean an adult can automatically instruct others about the book’s content.
Gullible Parents
Another Web site asks for donations and posts newspaper articles pertaining to problems occurring in public schools.
It’s obvious to me that these organizations are in it for the money. They are involved in the education of children mostly in the hope of profiting at the hands of well-meaning but gullible parents.
This includes parents who home-school their children for reasons that may be linked to religious convictions. One Web site that I visited stated that the best way to combat our nation’s “ungodly” public schools was to remove students from them and teach them at home or at a Christian school.
I’m certainly not opposed to religious schools, or to anyone standing up for what they believe in. I admire anyone who has the strength to stand up against the majority. But in this case, pulling children out of a school is not the best way to fight the laws that govern our education system. No battle has ever been won by retreating!
No Training
Don’t most parents have a tough enough job teaching their children social, disciplinary and behavioral skills? They would be wise to help their children and themselves by leaving the responsibility of teaching math, science, art, writing, history, geography and other subjects to those who are knowledgeable, trained and motivated to do the best job possible.
(Dave Arnold, a member of the Illinois Education Association, is head custodian at Brownstown Elementary School in Southern Illinois.)
You understand that homeschooling parents don't teach their children college-level classes, right?
I doubt your lawyer friend will be able to teach addition and subtraction just fine.
"No, If you want to teach your kids at home, then fine that's your right...but you do have an obligation to support your coummunity's school system."
Why? Why is there an "obligation" to support it? The school system exists for the education of the children. It's only a means to an end. If there are better means to the same end, let's use them instead.
"The problem with public schools is that too many parents have abandoned them."
The problem with public schools is that they force parents to abandon them as the only way to safeguard their own children.
The discussion for our 3 year old is what private school to send hime to... public school is out of the question.
"If parents want better schools, then parents should support better school systems"
... that is why I support charter schools, vouchers and school choice generally. We cannot have better school systems without choice. Choice, involvement, diversity, and child-centric education. And for the taxpayers - efficiency via competition. That is what it should be about!
Give
Typed too fast. That last sentence should have read, "I think your lawyer friend will be able to teach addition and subtraction just fine."
Our NEA is doing such a bang up job, that across the country, we now have Sylvan Learning Centers, to teach your child what the schools should have been teaching them, we have Mathnastics, and several others. If our schools were doing such a wonderful job of edu-ma-cation, why-oh-why has the market for such places opened up?
"Why don't you homeschooling parents take on collegiate studies as well; after all aren't all colleges and universities dripping with liberal tenured professors?"
That may well happen. No joke. Take MIT courseware and you are all set.
If anyone needs some college textbooks, there are literally hundreds/thousands of them online as torrent files.
Within 10 years, education as we have known it will be changed forever. The classroom is quickly become obsolete for the motivated learner.
I have a PhD, 15 years of experince, and still I am learning new things, in my home. "homeschooling" never ends!
For instance, and only personally speaking, at the current salary level of teachers, I couldn't be bothered to take all of the crap that teachers take. However, were the salary to be six figures a year, with all of the same time off and benefits.....well, every man has his price. Whatever is subsidized, you get more of.
My personal experience with people studying to be teachers in college mirrors yours. I'd estimate 20% of them were there because they wanted to be (and honestly, I think that they'd be successful no matter what profession they chose, IMHO). The rest were people that washed out of their 1st choice majors.
The School of Education, and, interestingly enough, the School of Business, collected the washouts at my college. That says something but I'm not sure exactly what.
I wouldn't favor boosting salaries until it was legally possible to set higher standards for teaching and enforce them by getting rid of crummy teachers.
"I have no idea, frankly. Don't ask me how to solve the problems of 50 million schoolchildren."
Okay, but some of us do wnat to fix that system, and school choice, including vouchers is one way to build a better system. just respect the obvious point that choice works better than monopoly, that we need *some* way of giving parents choice as way to get them involved.
study after study shows tha the #1 predictor of school performance for students is parental involvement. The #1 way to get parents involved is to give them some choice and some say in the child's education. Vouchers would increase parental involvement and thereby make the whole school experience better for all concerned.
" I have, however, found a very workable solution for my four (plus a nephew)."
"Is it a free-market solution? Absolutely."
No, it's not. Your tax dollars are paying for the Stalinist model education system, and 50 million other kids are in that system. This is no more 'free market' than living in a country with socialized medicine but flying to the US for an operation. It's a band aid on a broken system.
"Can it work for everyone? Definitely not. "
that's why we need school choice that is more than just based on parents who pay twice (taxes + private funds) for school.
>>>>“What about socialization? Forget about it!”
This man is probably the best a university school of education could produce. What a shame.
Thanks for the explanation.
Yeah, public schools are so great for "socialization". There's clique-forming, bullying, competition for wearing the latest fads, peer pressure for sex and drugs, and so on. Not too say it's all bad, but I don't for the most part have fond memories of my school days and the "socialization" I received there.
This comment hits home: "They spend years in stupid pedagogy classes, often ending up with sketchy knowledge of the topics they are supposed to be teaching."
One of the real ironies of teaching as a profession and teching degrees and credentialism:
Aside from knowledge of the material, most of what makes a good teacher cannot be taught in the classroom! Being able to handle students, communicate and work with them, etc., takes a mix of innate capability and learned skills that require experience and maturity more than sitting in a classroom.
I am not a teacher, but I am a manager, and the skills of handling people, communicating, listening, etc. are
You can't learn to be a manager in a classroom either, no matter what a newly minted MBA might think.
I attended a public high school. When a family situation took our Algebra teacher out for several months, our school pulled in an English teacher for the Algebra class.
I'm sure the attorney will do just fine. Especially if he has the wisdom to hire a tutor for any of his own weak areas.
I agree.
What is it somebody said . . . to socialize your kid as he would be in public schools, drag him into the bathroom, beat him up, dunk his head in the john, and steal his lunch money!
"This may be an isolated incident, but does shed a big light on some more serious homeschool issues. Do most homeschool parents have the necessary skills to teach some of the more difficult courses? What about languages, which are often required for entrance to college?"
One can argue that most public schools don't have the teachers with the necessary skills either. My world history teacher was so bad I offered to teach the class for her. Geometry was a joke, and Physics and Chemistry were so slow it was pathetic. My 11th grade English literature teacher was also terrible.
The only reason I succeeded was because I would read the text books on my own. And that I had five teachers (out of the almost 30 I encountered in my four years at public high school) that were excellent.
I started teaching when I was a kid at summer camp -- first teaching swimming, then horseback riding. I got my Lifeguard and WSI certifications and my "Horsemaster" certification . . . wound up as a counselor teaching the Horsemaster course myself. The kids seemed to enjoy it . . .
I probably couldn't teach a subject well if I wasn't personally enthused about the topic . . . but, sheesh, I get enthusiastic about a lot of different things. I can still teach horseback riding, and occasionally sub in when my trainer needs somebody to cover a class. And I'd be happy to teach just about anything in American or Western European history . . . English lit would be a little more dicey, because I'm really opinionated about the books I like and the books I hate, and the kids need to make their own judgments. I think I could suppress my personal preferences . . . except for Catcher in the Rye. I do loathe that book!
Public schooling is not for everyone either and I would suggest that it is, by its nature, a dumping ground of last resort. My kids are going to get one education. Why should I put them in public schools???? Why should I put them in the hands of merely parochial schools?
I have one life to live and absolutely NO INTEREST in squabbling endlessly with public school teachers or bureaucrats. My kids will learn what I and my wife want them to learn---no more, no less. Planned Barrenhood will have absolutely NOTHING to do with their education whether publicly or sneakily. My children learn, will learn and have learned to be furiously Catholic.
Traditional Catholic homeschooling parents here in our part of Illinois (NW) have formed our own school according to our own tastes. Latin begins in grammar school using the same texts as my old Jesuit prep school used in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. They also learn literature, algebra, geometry, science (not atheist propaganda), grammar and literacy generally, theology, history (using Samuel Eliot Morison for American History in Junior High which most colleges would not dare to use), world history, geography and a whole lot more.
My wife teaches there and has no trouble having conferences with parents. Out of state parents are finding local parents to house their kids during the school year so that they can attend the school. Even they come here for conferences when asked. The tuition is about 1/6 of the public edjamakshun per pupil spending in Westchester County, cited somewhere above. No tax money whatsoever goes into this school. There is no cherry-picking in admissions and we have had special education kids. We test only for academic achievement to determine which classes the new student is ready to start.
Why should my kids be deprived of a first rate education in order for us to try to save a public school system which we despise for many, many good and sufficient reasons? I don't think that public educators even begin to imagine just how very much genuinely religiously responsible parents and other taxpayers hate what passes for "education" in public schools.
I am sorry that many other parents do not see the virtues of abandoning John Dewey's/Horace Mann's dream and our national nightmare. I am responsible before God for the upbringing of my children. My accounting had better not be: Well, I did not know any better or Everyone else was sending their kids to public schools. I won't send my kids to the increasingly pathetic parochial school system in this, one of the most conservative dioceses in the US. Somewhat feminist Sister Mary Pantsuit serves as diocesan superintendent and is no better than the gummint schoolcrats and the results show it. She even wants certification of teachers.
Is there some reason for parents to attend parent-teacher soirees at your school? Will it make any difference whatsoever in the institutional mediocrity that is public schooling?
Even if SCOTUS were not the stubborn secular humanist engine that it is (fully competitive with public schools), I would not expect public schools to teach your children what I believe. By their very nature public schools teach the lowest common denominator and it gets lower each year. And finally, as ever, you suggest still MORE money be thrown away at these failed schools in the form of merit pay. How about an end to tenure and the ability to recognize a lack of merit by reducing bad teachers to minimum wage to go along with merit pay? Why is it a one-way street? My wife has a real education in English Literature at Yale and I guarantee that no faculty member at your school would be caught dead taking her paycheck or perks. A BIG part of her compensation is the sheer pleasure of teaching the kids. Her school is nothing but merit.
The problem with public schools is that they exist at all.
Several exchange high school students were removed from the private unregulated school where my wife teaches, allegedly because their "papers" only allow them to attend specific schools, two public, one originally public but now diocesan. The State Department was blamed by the private exchange student agency (for profit at about $5K per student per year). What can the host parents do, if you know. Feel free to tell me by private FReepmail, if you know. Some of us have the nerve to imagine that if the State of Illinois does not object to our school, it is none of the State Department's business so long as we are not hiding anything. The actual parents and host parents were on our side.
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