Posted on 11/27/2006 7:04:44 AM PST by meandog
There are no professional parents -- neve will be.
I think homeschoolers are just getting tired of being misrepresented and denigrated. And concerned that their rights as parents to educate their children might be taken away by power-hungry bureaucrats. If you consider that "radical," so it goes.
For someone to insinuate that I am unqualified to educate my kids is just ignorant. Two master's degrees (one in Education) should be evidence enough that I am qualified to homeschool my kids. And to casually dismiss homeschooling parents who aren't so formally educated is similarly ignorant.
What a crock! My best friend and my s-i-l both recently completed college for teaching degrees and they both told me the same thing- a teaching degree does not teach you how to teach or prepare you for the real life exprience of teaching. You're expected to learn that on your own; learn as you go.
They are NOT *professional* educators; they are just ordinary human beings like you or I who decided to pursue a teaching degree to earn a living- a degree that is of such poor repute that it is useless as credentials for a job in the real world.
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That would be my solution. I can't speak for BlackElk.
No. Teaching children is not difficult. Trying to control a classroomful of undisciplined, out of control kids AND trying to teach them something in the meantime IS difficult. By the time the discipline issues are taken care of, on a good day 50% of the time might be for education. On a bad day 90% is discipline and that leaves 10% for teaching. ( As per several teachers who have told me this.) If the class time is 50 mins per subject, that means that some days you might get 5 mins. of teaching time.
When your daughter leaves the gummint misedjamakashun racket to take care of her own child at home, she may grow close enough to her child not to bear abandoning that child to the gummint ignorance factories at which mom used to try to teach. She may love her child and homeschooling that child soooo much that she will present grandma with additional grandchildren to help your daughter into a real profession of motherhood: staying home loving and educating her own kids.
Good teachers ARE overworked and underpaid (in money terms) but they are seldom found working in the gummint ignorance centers. Also people here tend to be conservatives, i.e. capitalist by economic philosophy, i.e. favoring free market solutions like homeschooling or private (as different from gummint skeweling as possible) schooling ALWAYS over socialist brainwashing and ignorant socialist brainwashing at that such as is the norm in gummint skewels. That is why gummint "teachers" are not honored here or anywhere else among conservatives where objective truth is recognized. NO gummint teacher is "underpaid." We need government for armies and police but certainly not for misedjamakashun.
Dedicated teachers are the ones who get the actual education accomplished: almost unheard of in gummint skewels.
You are right about one thing. (Stopped clock/twice a day, etc.) My solution and goal as to restoring education is: JUST SHUT DOWN ALL PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Those "schools" will not be missed and maybe, just maybe, your grandchildren will wind up actually educated (i.e. homeschooled or privately schooled).
Until the gummint skewels are no more, we will be posting as necessary in reaction to teachers' union propaganda and agitprop. Stop sucking up to the teachers' collective, errr, union, and squandering stolen tax money on the fraud that is gummint misedjamakashun and we won't care as much. Hold bake sales or bingo nights like private schools do.
The point is not, and never has been, to denigrate dedicated government school teachers. The point is that the system is utterly corrupt, that the government school system was a mistake from the beginning, and that there are relatively few teachers and administrators today (and fewer every year) who can honestly be said to be competent and dedicated. But I am glad that there are still a few teachers and administrators like that.
Adults who feel called to work in the government schools, however, need to tell the truth about the system to parents, not make excuses for government school failure, not tell parents that their schools are "different", or regurgitate NEA talking points attacking homeschoolers and private schools.
I know Christian teachers and administrators, including superintendents and school board members, who are telling the truth and counseling parents to get their children out by any means possible. They understand that institutions and individuals are not the same thing. You can have good people in a bad institution, and when you do, the institution usually wins. They recognize that and are consciously making sure that they aren't being co-opted by the institution.
I hope your daughter blesses you with many, many grandchildren.
Oh? And parents aren't? I guess they're just keeping the kids home and making a huge comittment in time and money for no reason, then. And I suppose the parents aren't really interested in seeing their own children reach their full potential?
Sounds like the author is pretty full of himself.
Thanks for pointing that out. It takes a great deal of commitment to home school. It means mom has to be a stay-at-home mom and have a vested interest in trying to have a family the way we grew up expecting families to be [even though my mom always worked, I knew that was not the norm.]
As for Hillary's "It Takes A Village," I would just as soon she keep her bleeping nose out of mine! [/liberal bashing]
And it isn't just teachers doing the regurgitating. It is the liberal elite establishment in general.
Law & Order CI just did a subtle hit piece on homeschoolers this week. Girl was homeschooled by her parents, who were old enough to be her grandparents. They sheltered her so much from the world, no tv, no friends, no internet that she couldn't wait to get away from them as an adult.
Of course, she ended up being pretty darn sharp and successfully manipulative in the end, :-).
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Good post, but you could have stopped here. :) The system has become a bloated bureaucracy and political force whose last priority is teaching.
"The system has become a bloated bureaucracy and political force whose last priority is teaching"
Absolutely correct! Did you know that kids are too often labeled as ADHD because schools get enhanced federal dollars for them? And these kids are being medicated!
It's an outrage.
I agree, experts frequently do a better job.
They are overlooking a few things, however:
1. They don't ALWAYS do a better job.
2. Parents ARE experts on their kids. Which is frequently more important then being an expert on the particular subject and/or educational techniques.
3. People with incentives tend to do better then those without. Parents have a far greater incentive for their children to do well then do teachers. Teachers might have the best heart in the world, but it doesn't change the fact that the kids are only under them for a few years.
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Tell me about it. How about the latest stats about the numbers of autistic kids?
The drugging of children by government schools is one of the worst examples of mass child abuse in history.
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I couldn't agree more.
I did hear recently that autism has increased exponentially.
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