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.)
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.
*************
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, :-).
*************
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.
************
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.
**********
I couldn't agree more.
I did hear recently that autism has increased exponentially.
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.