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.)
No, but that was available in the cafeteria at my former place of employment. We had a lot of ex-military there, and I suppose it brought back fond memories.
:)
In other words, I hate teachers to want to trap kids in failing schools in order to protect their own jobs. I think that's a fairly common sentiment among those in FR."
Ding ding ding We have a winner! (My sentiments exactly!
'fraid you won't agree...NEA did the study (but it was backed by University of Iowa).
So post the whole study, not just vague excerpts, and let us read for ourselves. We homeschool types like doing our background reading, we just don't take other peoples' word for it.
Why do teachers need to attend teacher school? Apparently, these days even the school janitor has no trouble elucidating the established education duckspeak.
Public education is obviously a great success - the masses have risen! LOL!
Kids - only you can shut these propaganda camps down - with a boycott.
"Duckspeak"?
http://www.orwelltoday.com/duckspeak.shtml
"...What was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words — goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others — were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further."
Under the American version of socialism, school is all about inclusiveness, socialization, and validation. IOW, buying into the official NEA party line.
There is a Party Line, you realize.
Well, there's your problem right there...you were only seeing the failures. There are plenty of homeschool successes, as you've probably gathered by now.
Of course. I was just asking the meaning of "duckspeak."
Exactly. No wonder professional school teachers think poorly of us. I grew up in PA where the ridiculously strict laws required homeschoolers to be evaluated by a certified teacher every year. A pain in the neck but it had the side effect that open-minded teachers, looking to make some spare change, got exposed to what homeschoolers were capable of. There was a lot of hostility still but it wasn't quite as arrogant.
I owned an art studio geared towards youngsters, and we had several groups of home-schooled kids come in for group art activities. They were the smartest kids I'd ever seen.
There's really no need to leave, md. You could have presented your point of view and engaged in meaningful discussion of it with a decidedly less contentious tenor, had you wished to do so. Many of us perceive some of your prior postings as being pretty arrogant, and that's no way to have a civil discourse, let alone win friends.
Just FYI, take it or leave it as you like. Sometimes it's useful to get a situation report from the other side.
I have had the same thought. A small school with parental control and a small number of teachers employed by the parents.
btt
Actually, Classical Christian schools (such as the Veritas Academy) naturally flow out of such an arrangement. Charter schools are a different animal.
My posts arrogant! Did you read some of the ones I got? The whole point was to get kids back into (either public or private) schools where they can enjoy such experiences as football, basketball, track, field hockey, golf, tennis, band, NJROTC, yearbook, newspaper, drama club, glee club, drill team, debate, proms, and making friends, as well as good education (and won't turn out to be little unsocialized nerds who have to sit at home 20 years from now during h.s. reunions).
Dear Oberon,
Excellent post.
It also doesn't help to start the thread with an article that is little more than a heap of ignorant, bigoted insults by a JANITOR.
ROTFLMAO!!
sitetest
Yearbook? I had an opportunity to do that with our homeschool co-op but scrapbooking is not for me. I played softball for six years even though I was awful at it. I was on bowling teams, chess teams, math teams... had biology labs with other homeschoolers where we fussed about dissecting fetal pigs and frogs... did a play once, put on scenes from Shakespeare... no prom but I didn't date anyone until I met my husband anyway, by my choice I might add, so I didn't care. Friends? Plenty of those though as a bit of a loner kid I preferred the company of Podkayne of Mars or the Interstellar Patrol.
Twenty years from now when my age cohorts are having reunions and calling high school the best time of their lives, I plan to be living the best time of mine.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.