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.)
As a certified teacher, I must say there are a lot of retards on this thread... that is just a professional opinion.
Neither Beckett nor Pinter nor Ginsberg nor their ilk are necessary or desirable to the education of my children. Purely on the "merits", their "work" is trash.
How you handle your kids' education is your business and how I handle my kids' education is mine.
Isn't that the real point of the entire controversy in this thread? Conservatives respect that choice by parents. Supporters of socialist funded education do not. Our leftist enemies want to cram amoral and immoral leftist agitprop down the throats of everyone's children at everyone's forced expense and enforce societal ignorance and error while they are at it.
If the text is what matters to you, you will get more out of Shakespeare than will the everyday English Literature professor who does in fact want his/her students to know what (he/she imagines) Shakespeare meant to say when writing the precise opposite. My kids get the point by reading Shakespeare without the socialist prism getting in the way.
Interesting points. We've been around the literature tree before, and I always pick up good suggestions from other FReepers.
However, I'm leaving FR for the Advent season, starting tomorrow, so I won't even start with my "Who needs fiction when you've got history" argument :-).
As someone who's earned two master's degrees -- one in Education -- I have to concur. Those who would challenge parents' innate right to educate their children should be ashamed. Parents are right to resist our government's power-grab to "educate"/indoctrinate their kids.
I understand how difficult it is to juggle the demands of D1 athletics and the classroom better than most, so I salute your daughter for her accomplishment. I also have two immediate family members in the teaching profession, so I understand that many teachers are dedicated and competent professionals as well.
Unfortunately, there are many terrible teachers (as there are people in most professions) that are easy to ridicule and are an embarrassment to their peers. There is far too much arrogance displayed on both sides of this argument. Seems to me it's best for everyone to acknowledge that each parent should make the decision that's best for their own child, and avoid making sweeping assertions about others.
I should state that it's nothing personal. Just a philosophical discussion. It reminds of an interview with Bob Jones III of Bob Jones University fame. He stoutly claimed that there is no way his Institution would ever teach the likes of Tennessee Williams or D.H. Lawrence. It was comical and sad.
Bob Jones I in 1928, referencing the Hoover/Al Smith presidential race, said that he would see a (vulgarism for a gentleman of African-American extraction) in the White House before he would see a papist like Al Smith there. As a Catholic, I would regard Bob Jones I as a bit out of touch.
Bob Jones III is the proud possessor of a degree from Notre Dame University, wrongly regarded as "Catholic" by many but not exactly what grandpa would have preferred as his grandson's college nonetheless. Despite passing through the pseudo-Catholic and pseudo-intellectual valley of Hesburgh, Jones III seems to have retained moral sense to despise Williams and Lawrence. Good for him! One hopes that this is proof of the existence of an actually Catholic/Christian underground at Notre Dame. Whodathunk it?
If I remember correctly, Tennessee Williams was another lavender queen. I take it you are suggesting that D. H. Lawrence was as well. Now, remind me again as to why either of them is necessary or desirable as authors for young Christians/Catholics to study. Will they be able to substitute Flannery O'Connor or Walker Percy without missing a beat. Lavenderism is proof of bad judgment and bad morals. There are plenty of quality people of sexual normality to serve as role models, sources of wisdom, sources of morality and sources of literature.
If you imagine that my children need to study the work of Tennessee Williams, D. H. Lawrence, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and such, that is one more reason for you to have nothing to do with setting the standards of their educations. Anyone's kids would profit from reading Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, or Pope St. Pius X's Pascendi Domenici Gregis or Pope John Paul the Great's Evangelium Vitae but that will be up to their respective parents as it should be. Deciding for my own kids is good enough for me.
Then we abolish gummint skewels so as to avoid having to subsidize secularist trash, anti-Americanism and organized promotion of ignorance and other forms of liberalism/socialism which are REALLY comical and sad and tragic and......
Respecting you as I certainly do, how do you propose that we avoid having to subsidize the ideas we despise (i.e. gummint skewel curricula)? I do not want vouchers to affect private schooling because the money comes with strings attached. I also want not one tax-produced nickel going to public "education."
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I'm fully in agreement with you on this issue - the public school system should be eliminated. But that said, just because the schools are failing it doesn't follow that all employees of public schools should be open to demonization. And it's just as true that articles (such as the one posted here) ridiculing homeschoolers are foolish. Too much vitriol on both sides, IMHO.
Too much vitriol on both sides, IMHO.
Free speech, American tolerance, and class separation can't manage to have incivility stand down.
That's what the government wants: to keep the slaves er, citizens, at each others' throats, so that nobody has the energy to oppose Massa.
The trained professional are just babysitters. People that are willing to be abused daily for benefits. Home schooling is the best because it leaves out the liberal indoctrination. Trained pros anymore , are just liberals on a daily direct attack on Americas youth.
Literary Canon??? Huh???? If you are a teacher (and your first paragraph suggests strongly that you are) you seem not to have noticed that the edumakationalist establishment is quite leftist. A kid with a library card usable at a quality library, with a thirst for knowledge and with access to others who care to involve that kid in the great conversation of mankind is equipped with most of what is needed for an actual education. The addition of holders of "education" degrees usually but not always hinders their progress. You are not needed.
You also seem not to have recognized the moral insanity of Whitman and Baldwin as demerits, now, did you???
I would recommend Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience to anyone interested in tearing down the temple of gummint misedjamakashun. If he happens to have been a lavender (I suspect he was more of a hermit), he can be tolerated in exchange for those forty pages or so which encourage no one else to be lavender. His politics were questionable but his methodology was superb. Emerson ought not to have disrespected Thoreau by paying that tax. Being jailed for non-payment was Thoreau's freedom. Emerson paying the tax for him enslaved Thoreau involuntarily.
You Post Graduate degree in English Literature is apparently a membership card in the cult of those who claim to know what the authors meant when they wrote the precise opposite. Your degree does not morally command anyone else's adherence to your standards.
Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy's Roommate are part of the "Canon of Gummint Skewel" Literature. Courses in Fisting are in the curriculum in Lexington, Massachusetts gummint skewels, condoms distributed to gummint skewel 5th graders in New Haven, Connecicut. We private schooling and homeschooling parents have managed to refrain somehow from such atrocities and yet our kids are more than competitve with the gummint skeweled.
Finally, you are still missing the point of most posters on this thread which is: bring your kids up as you please and I will bring up mine as I please and we both owe it to everyone else to allow them to set the educational standards for their respective kids. We need no gummint skewel system of John Dewey and Horance Mann to tax everyone to keep so many kids in ignorance. Take the tax money out of gummint skeweling and the surviving faculty can educate any kids whose parents carry the financial load for the spreading of such ignorance together with anyone else foolish enough to share the burden.
Let's see. Can my kids be conservative and Catholic and superbly educated without wallowing in Whitman posing as an "objective standard" of literature? That would be a big YES! Does Borges understand the meaning of the word "objective" despite his Post Graduate (his the capitalization) Degree in English Literature? Not so clear!
My kids are my business and your kids are yours!
God bless you and yours. There are some good folks in gummint education even today but they are exceptions and should evacuate to the private sector ASAP. Each one that leaves will enhance the ability to abolish the failed public system.
AND, when you start paying the bills for Bob Jones III and his university, you will have a say in how it is run and not until. When Americans are all taxed to support a failed gummint skewel system, we all have a say so in how it is mismanaged, not that the administrators would listen in any event.
Can't say I disagree with you there...take care and have a nice Christmas Holiday season. ;-)
Bill Buckley offered to punch Vidal out on live television on the ABC network during a national convention in 1968 or 1972 while making some colorful and graphic references (in the King's English) to Vidal's perversions.
You would not make Vidal part of the curriculum at your putatve school???? Right?
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