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.)
*That sounds like an opening to have the NEA supervise licensing parent to have children. Nobody trained me to be a parent
I found many punctuation errors and inconsistencies in this piece.
I'm sure this gal is a former teacher, with years and years of experience. Clearly SHE can't do it all, either.
Oh - this was a GUY, and a CUSTODIAN. Just goes to prove another point, and that is that 1) men turn into women when they work long enough for the publik screw system, and 2) indoctrination is encouraged at all faculty levels.
Dear BlackElk,
You're a far more charitable person than I am to even deign to discuss education with the NEA shill.
I guess the irony of the authorship escapes the original poster, in that we have a janitor lecturing us on the need to have professional educators teaching our children. Perhaps I'll get a second opinion on that. From a ditch-digger, or the fellow cleaning the windows down at the local car wash.
It's sadly pathetic that the NEA couldn't find anyone with any credentials to write this nonsense, as well as bitterly ironic, considering that the NEA is always pounding on homeschoolers for their very lack of NEA-approved "credentials."
Frankly, if I hadn't gone to the NEA website to verify that it was posted therein, I'd have sworn that this had originated on scrappleface.
It's just too funny.
sitetest
Creeping public schoolism has done irreparable damage to the formerly in-your-face Catholic schools. I attended a parochial grammar school in New Haven, CT. One nun out of 26 had set foot in a college classroom. Naturally, she was the only liberal. We were two years minimum ahead of the New Haven Public School kids.
Now savor the full meaning of this. The New Haven Public Superintendent of Schools was a woman named Marion Sheridan, whom I later had the privilege of getting to know. By the time I attended the Jesuit prep school, she had retired. She was as liberal as I am conservative. She was a founder and proprietor of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. When she found that I was taking two summer courses at a public summer school that she ran, she told the astronomy teacher to have me come to her office on the first day of class. Smartass even at 14, I went, introduced myself and asked, since this was the very first day I had darkened the door of a public school (too old for summer camp, too young to be left completely on my own by factory-working parents, i.e. they wanted babysitting), what I had done to deserve the honor of being called to the principal's office after my very first and utterly uneventful class. Dr. Sheridan said: I understand that you are the one who goes to the Jesuit prep school. I am always looking for ways to improve our schools and the Jesuits are very good at what they do. Would you mind spending time with me each week so I can learn from you how they succeed? We spent a lot of time together. Years later, armed with a driver's license, I used to leave my summer job at the railroad, pick her up and drive her home to the suburb where both of us lived by then just for the pleasure of her company and to get a better insider's look at the degeneration of public schooling. She was an honest and wonderful woman and despised her successors and their "educational philosophy."
Marion Sheridan was wonderfully educated, thoroughly competent and utterly dedicated. My grammar school drawing its students from families of public officials, professionals, factory workers and public housing residents was a full two years ahead of the New Haven Public Schools EVEN under Marion Sheridan. I grew up in a three-family house owned by my factory-working parents. We rented the first floor apartment to a Lutheran family whose daughter was one of my pals and of the same age and who attended the neighborhood public school (as good as any in town). She was two years' behind us at the same grade level in spite of being quite intelligent. Public schools are a crime.
Now, since "Catholic" schools are imitating public school "standards" and even "certification" (the guarantee of professional pedagogical inbreeding and incompetence), they too have become ignorance factories. When my wife's school takes in parochial school transfer kids, they need re-education camp to get phonics and competent math levels just like the public school transfer kids. The homeschooled kids are generally at or above grade level on the same entrance qualification tests taken by each new student.
The sole remaining advantages of diocesan or parish Catholic schools is the ability to easily expel bad actors, to fire bad teachers and the fact that some form of religion is taught although usually a Kumbaya sort which is probably worse than useless and worse than none at all. What is left of the parochial school I once attended taught my eldest on at least five occasions (Kindergarten and 1st Grade) that Christ did not know He was God at the time of His crucifixion. I also do not want to have to waste time telling my kids that their Catholic school teachers mean well but are rank idiots who would not know Catholicism if it jumped up and bit them.
BTW, not only am I sending my youngest child to the Catholic school which the parents here created, but I have another at Hillsdale Academy which is not Catholic but is very good and does not offend. That ordinary diocesan and parochial schools are still a smidgeon better than gummint skewels does not mean I will abandon my kids to such schools. Homeschooling would be a considerably better alternative than most any public or parochial school.
Finally, the Lancastrian or 19th Century industrial model for organizing schools is over, finished, done for. The kids have figured out that it is nothing more than the lazy school's method of crowd control and that it has little to do with actual education. Even at the Jesuit prep school I attended, we had 43 kids per class, very capable teachers and a good library of our own as well as that available at the university on the same campus. Homework is what caused most of us to actually learn. Using Latin as an example, four years were required. In senior year, my homeroom translated the entire Aeneid (ca. 360 pages of grammatically difficult poetry). In junior year, we translated many of Cicero's orations (Against Gaius Verres, Against the Catilinian Conspirators, etc., turgidly complicated lawyer's grammar, never saying anything once when it could be said three different ways). That was in addition to Fr. Henle's book for the appropriate year. We were also required to learn Greek for at least two years and a modern language for two or three.
I have never seen a public school system even on the Connecticut "Gold Coast" which is at all competent. Greenwich and others have taxpayers fund a high school year in Europe for the pampered darlings.
Try an experiment. Go to a homeschooler conference as though you were considering it. Meet the parents and the leaders. Look at the textbooks being sold. Listen to the lectures. See an important part of the future. See a part of your competition. So long as public schools last, they will experience some improvement by the competition we offer to your students' families for the future of their kids.
Unless and until, the ordinary Catholic schools go back to their origins in militant Catholicism and no compromises with teacher's unions, I want them closed along with the public schools. What I do not want to subsidize with my taxes, I do not want to subsidize with my Church contributions or tuition payments. In fact, it is better to keep the virus of educational credentialism and liberalism in the gummint skewels lest Catholics be confused.
BTW, I now live in a very rural town of 300 next to the town of 1,000 where the local public schools are. Local good friends include the school board chairman and some other members and some teachers but they don't get to educate my kids subject to the standards of Chicago atheists and other liberals.
You have FRmail.
Wow! I don't mean this as anything but an observation, not a flame war...but, Fr Hesburgh is generally regarded in academia as one of the finest Catholic scholars ever to grace a campus of higher learning; besides, he was probably dutifully following the general parameters set forth in the educational dictates of Vatican II. Please describe to me the general differences between fundamental Roman Catholicism and the protestant Evangelical set because I don't see much sunlight between the two (discounting certain liturgical domains such as Marian philosophy, naturally).
This headline is telling, isn't it? One might wonder why shaping kids' minds is more important than educating them. If the goal of schools is to 'shape' young minds, one might ask, "Exactly with WHAT information do you intend to shape them"?
I've taught our kids our view of the world, shaped by our faith, over the last 26 years. As far as 'schooling' is concerned, they've either been in school, or homeschooled, and in both instances the goal has been to teach them about history and geography, have them read good literature, learn mathematics, and learn other useful skills such as the use of computers, etc. We've also taught them to think critically about things, something the schools SAY they want to do, but don't seem to get around to doing, since they're busy 'shaping' those same minds.
You don't need professionals to 'shape' kids' minds, after all, the madrassas in Pakistan and the rest of the Muslim world do that very well, and they don't have professional educators, and I wouldn't say those young men are 'educated'. Kids can be educated anywhere, and with lots of resources. They don't need to be stuck in a classroom all day with teachers droning on in front of the group. Some kids like to learn this way, but most kids just get by, some better than others, and most just learn enough to remember it for a test.
It's funny you should say that! I have been lifting the Fables from the internet for the last two years and using them! LOL!! Great minds...
I have a sister who has taught in Catholic schools for 33 years...all of the faculty there are extremely qualified. The school is an elementary and middle school, and the students usually attend the Catholic high school in another part of town. I have had many friends graduate from the high school and some went on to professional careers, which (knowing them and their ability to con their parents) I doubt would have happened if they had been homeschooled.
Dear BlackElk,
"Now, since 'Catholic' schools are imitating public school "standards" and even "certification" (the guarantee of professional pedagogical inbreeding and incompetence),..."
That's true more often than not, now. When we were trying to figure out what to do with our older son for elementary school, I was appalled at how far the local Catholic schools had fallen. This was especially true at the nearest elementary school, that was literally in the middle of a major dumbing-down project.
These schools are still better than any of the public elementary schools in the region, but not by much than the better public schools (although by lightyears better than the middling and poor public schools).
However, at the high school level, not all of our local Catholic schools have gone that way. My own alma mater has the temerity to hire large numbers of faculty who have degrees in the fields that they teach, rather than education degrees. We're considering the school for my older son, now (he's in 7th grade, homeschooled throughout). We went to the Open House a few weeks ago, and one of the handouts they gave us was a list of the faculty members.
I was delighted that only about 20% of the faculty have any sort of education degree of any kind, and only three faculty members have only education degrees. As well, many of the folks with only education degrees work primarily in the school administration, not as full-time teachers.
This very excellent private high school puts very little faith, apparently, in NEA-credentialling.
However, unlike Catholic schools of yore, all of the teachers are degreed, the majority with at least masters degrees, and quite a few with terminal degrees.
They have this insane idea that folks who teach, say, math should have a math degree, or folks who teach, say, chemistry should have a chemistry degree. Bizarre. ;-)
Here's a fun fact: I graduated from this school in 1978. Over 15% of the faculty at the school today were already teaching when I was there from 1974 - 1978. About another 15% are alumni. My sons were a little surprised at how many folks knew me, and how many folks I knew. LOL.
sitetest
When kids are in elementary school, parents can handle anything their kids need to learn. The only time it gets more difficult is during the high school years, if either parent isn't familiar with a subject. At that time, parents tend to look for co-ops, with a parent who IS knowledgeable in a subject teaching it, or the kids can attend a Community College, which provides the additional benefit of the kids getting college credit for the courses.
No one has ever said that every parent needs to know every subject in order to homeschool their kids. In many cases, for high school students, the parents simply serve as resource advisors, finding opportunities for their kids to learn.
The fact that this goober is talking about homeschooled students becoming social misfits, shows he has never spent much time in the presence of any homeschooling families. There are always field trips with other families and gatherings of teenagers with your kids, not to mention the opportunities for the kids to meet folks of all ages and backgrounds since they're not stuck in a classroom with kids their own age all day. There is no such thing as a lack of socialization for homeschooled kids; the opposite may be more accurate.
Yeah, my older sister had a coach teaching Algebra class and she said he was an excellent teacher and also VERY strict in keeping the class in line.
There's the problem right there.
And homeschoolers have ample opportunities to do that.
Case in point: someone (probably a member of the teachers' union) introduced a bill in the GA General Assembly to regulate homeschooling rather extensively. It probably had no chance of passing, but numbers of homeschool families came down to the Dome to argue against it. They brought their well-groomed, mannerly, polite, well-spoken children . . . it was most impressive to see them in the halls and especially in the lunchroom, where their table manners made the older ones among us imagine that we were back in the 1950s . . . pre-hippie and indulgent parent days.
I'm sure that they were on their best behavior, and that all the bratty homeschooled children were in chains in basements all across Georgia, but still . . .
My daughter went to my old high school. It's a private Christian school -- the kids who are there had to work hard to get there, and they all want to learn. They're given a lot of freedom, commensurate with their commitment to learning.
It works pretty well. But that's not a normal population . . it's self-selected.
"I see, it takes a "professional" to manage to get a child through 12 years of "education" and still manage to have him/her to be an illiterate social degenerate."
That's right! They're in the business of "shaping young minds!" Twisting them all up!
"I doubt would have happened if they had been homeschooled."
Perhaps - they are your friends after all. But this is not true of homeschoolers in general. Colleges and universities make an effort to attract homeschoolers:
Jon Reider, Senior Associate Director of Admissions at Stanford University (CA), told the Wall Street Journal: "Home-schoolers bring certain skills—motivation, curiosity, the capacity to be responsible for their education—that high schools don't induce very well."
In an article entitled "Homeschooling Comes of Age" in the January/February 2002 alumni magazine of Brown University (RI), Dean Joyce Reed states, "Homeschoolers are the epitome of Brown students. They are self-directed, they take risks, and they don't back off."
A Harvard University (MA) admissions officer said most of their home-educated students "have done very well. They usually are very motivated in what they do."
Here is a Stanford Mag article from 2000 - even then Stanford was eager to attract homeschoolers: http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2000/novdec/articles/homeschooling.html
Contrrary to what you apparently suppose, virtually every college admits homeschoolers, and many are making a special effort to recruit them. In conversations I have had with admissions officers there are two reasons for this. First, they are better prepared academically. Second, they are described as "low maintenance"; that is, they are considerably more mature - they take the opportunity to learn seriously and are much less likely to be found in the early AM falling down drunk somewhere on campus, high on some illegal subtance, or engaging in other colorful self-destructive activities that are all too common on campus.
There's nothing wrong with government schools that shutting them down wouldn't cure. If you want a contrarian ed school perspective on our obsolescent school system, read Lundt and Wiles - Leaving School: Finding Education (Matansas Press 2004). The authors train teachers and administrators and have come to the conclusion that the the school model is outdated in this age of new technology and that the entire system needs to be abandoned.
Well, I'm SORRY! We couldn't help it, we were so FReepin' hungry!
Bill got up in the middle of the NIGHT, and ate the leftover Chicken-Something AND the Meat Dish With the Noodles, so we had to eat the Most Qualified ... it was that or Those Really Old Sweet Potatoes!
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