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.)
These well-meaning "amatures" must be doing something right, their kids are doing a lot better on entrance exams than many coming out of public schools. My Niece and Nephew were both home-schooled and at 21 my nephew is working on his masters and my neice is already taking pre-med classes. I think they are going to be just fine.
Very true sir!
Interesting thing, my local Lutheran parish high school is offering Greek, and would like to start Latin. They seem to have borrowed a few pages from your ideas.
One could reasonably ask what a custodian knows about education as well.
We are all in this together. God bless you and yours.
You can too speak for Black Elk.
Ha, snark, will not read this NEA propaganda. But what I could have done in MY homeschool with $13,500.
"'fraid you won't agree...NEA did the study (but it was backed by University of Iowa)."
Figures. Having taught public school in Iowa, all my questions are now answered.
I think all education should be private. Doesn't have to be homeschool - in spite of my personal issues, I'll still admit there are often advantages to a good institutional school, from an academic standpoint.
Give all the taxpayers their money back. Private education - pay yourself for your own children, or private charity.
And here are some statistics to back you up...
SAT/ACT homeschoolers:
http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/hslda/200105070.asp
Standardized test scores homeschoolers:
http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000010/200410250.asp
Autism diagnoses have increased exponentially. Whether there's been an actual increase in the incidence of autism is a whole 'nother issue.
From my reading on the subject, I figure I could get three of my (slightly on the weird side of) normal children diagnosed as autistic, and two as ADHD, if I wanted to go to the trouble.
How that would help them, I can't imagine.
Not so. If the statistics include all homeschoolers across the board, then it should be compared to all public schoolers across the board. That would be an equitable comparison. Besides, then you're stuck trying to define *parental involvement*. How much? What kind?
My kids were pretty much self-teaching by high school. The parental involvement consisted of making sure they did their lessons, answering questions when they had trouble, and grading tests.
My daughter had 1530 SAT score by 11th grade, something the high school valedictorians of the two different school districts we live in during those high school years didn't come near; and one of those girls went to Harvard. My daughter also went to the National Spelling Bee. I have a bachelors degree and my husband has none. Not bad for a couple of amateurs.
With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with conceptual care. My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion. Often, by guesswork and my experience of other patients, I could put things into words for them, words that they grasped at eagerly. Everything was on the tip of their tongue, rarely or never reaching the stage of expression out loud. They struggled even to describe in a consecutive and logical fashion what had happened to them, at least without a great deal of prompting. Complex narrative and most abstractions were closed to them.
In their dealings with authority, they were at a huge disadvantage—a disaster, since so many of them depended upon various public bureaucracies for so many of their needs, from their housing and health care to their income and the education of their children. I would find myself dealing on their behalf with those bureaucracies, which were often simultaneously bullying and incompetent; and what officialdom had claimed for months or even years to be impossible suddenly, on my intervention, became possible within a week. Of course, it was not my mastery of language alone that produced this result; rather, my mastery of language signaled my capacity to make serious trouble for the bureaucrats if they did not do as I asked. I do not think it is a coincidence that the offices of all those bureaucracies were increasingly installing security barriers against the physical attacks on the staff by enraged but inarticulate dependents.
From a recent Theodore Dalrymple article.
Which is posted here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1739752/posts
When you see an austic child there is no mistaking he/she is one. Interesting that the Amish, who do not vaccinate, don't have Autism in their ranks, but the surrounding areas in Illinois, for example, where kids are heavily vaccinated, have 38 in 10,000.
Since there are definitely genetic links in autism, as it defintely does run in families.
I have a special needs kid (brain damage from an illness), so I am on lots of online boards with parents of autistic kids. Some of them had one autistic kid who was vacinated, so they didn't vacinate their next child. Well, the 2nd child still got autism.
I'm not saying that vacinations don't contribute, but we don't know yet what does.
My thoughts about the Amish is that they are all closely linked genetically (related), so that is probably why they don't get autism as high as other people.
Also, autism tends to run in highly educated families.
Forty percent of public teachers place their own children in private schools. Maybe they know something?????
Believe me, when voucher systems become available, most of the people starting their own little schools will be former public school teachers themselves. They will fly out of the outdated, screwed-up government schools so fast that the bureaucrats will be assigning administrators to classroom duty.
Amish also don't have television, electricity, automobiles,.... They have a very active lifestyle and have a lower diabetes rate than the general population, too. There are way too many factors in their lifestyles that could influence the autism rate to be able to say for certain that it's vaccinations.
I have a friend whose daughter was labeled as autistic. Her mother just rolled her eyes over it and said it was the new designer disability. She disagreed with it. Her daughter didn't have social skills that matched what is considered normal for her age but she talked to people, made eye contact, and made friends. Just a typical geeky kind of kid; which is why her mother disagreed with it.
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