Home Schools Run By Well-Meaning Amateurs

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!

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.

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!

The “it” is meant to be “teaching.” Let’s face it, teaching children is difficult even for experienced professionals. Wannabes have no idea.

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.”

Buying a history, science or math book does not mean an adult can automatically instruct others about the book’s content.

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!

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.)

The author's "claims for what he meant should not be an impediment to others' interpretation." Sandra Day O'Connor, is that you?????

Fiction is filled with contingencies. If you write a 3 page short story about you and your family having breakfast you will reveal all sorts of things about yourself and your family that you had no intention of revealing. It's not avoidable. Noone involved with those 1950s Sci Fi movies thought they were making Cold War Parables. But that's exactly what they were doing. You can't help but be informed by yoru cultural references. Look at how many interpretations of Hamlet there are. Do you think Shakespeare intended all of them? No way. The oft repeated saw that 'the Prince has sexual feelings for his mother' seems like it's been around forever but only goes back to post Freudians. to give two obvious examples,

1. Milton wrote 'Paradise Lost' to justify God and his moral law to humans. However, since the late 18th century the poem has been read with Satan as the hero. He's simply a much more interesting character than God is. Milton's imagination was with evil whether he liked it or not. Blake and P.B. Shelley (who was an atheist and would have probably been a commie had he lived longer) thought so.

2. Dostoevsky was a Russian Orthodox Pan-Slavic kook who thought Catholicism was a false faith and 'those Jews' are always up to no good. 'The Grand Inquisitor' was an attack on the Catholic Church. His depictions of various nihilists were meant to scare people away from such wayward thoughts and show how fervent religious faith (preferably of the Russian Orthodox stripe) was the only thing that would save the world. However his depiction of evil was so powerful and vivid that it's the reason people read his work. His angelic characters are deathly boring.

Who decides what medicine to take when you have a certain malady? A level of expertise in the subject is preferable to someone without any such context no?

Now, come on...the "trust me, I'm a professional" line isn't the one to take in this instance. It's what added so much heat to this eight-hundred-plus-replies-and-growing thread.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a canon, but I will say that the notion that Whitman (or any other author) is important shouldn't be taken at face value. Yes, Whitman was important to some writers, and less so to others. A nodding acquaintance with Whitman is probably required for cultural literacy at this late date (thank you, Academia), but the most relevant question I ask about Whitman is is Walt Whitman's poetry important to me.

The answer is no, not really. I once flabbergasted Virginia Tech's then-Playwright in Residence Jerry McGlown by telling him that my favorite poet was Robert Frost. A lefty like Jerry (R.I.P) couldn't imagine that that could be true.

Whitman is important, yes, but his work is most important within the particular version of the history of literature that the Academy has constructed for itself. That's fine, but if you don't mind, I'd prefer not to take the Academy's word for it. Give me some stacks full of primary sources and a thermos of coffee, and I'll form my own opinions, thanks.

The Pound info is from Law, Liberty and Psychiatry by Thomas Szasz, M.D., an atheist libertarian psychiatrist who once headed the Psychiatry Department at the State University of New York. It also includes a chapter on an elderly NYC black woman who came very close to assassinating Martin Luther King, Jr., with a large kitchen knife at a book signing at Brentano's in about 1955. She was a domestic servant who said she was trying to kill him because a) she had no family to suffer from her act, b) she had always been very well treated by white people and c) she thought King would ruin relations between blacks and whites. None of this justified her crime of driving the knife within an inch or so laterally from his heart, of course. However, the NYC liberal prosecutors, decided on their own that she simply MUST be insane (since her motive made no sense to liberals) and had her put away in St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital. She should have been prosecuted. A case too late to make the book was John Hinckley who deserved to be prosecuted for shooting and trying to kill Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster.

Sensible folks those Tsarists. The Colony of New Haven had the same law under the Rev. Mr. John Davenport. Exile would do as well. Countries like Andorra are quite libertarian while maintaining reasonable social order.

I understand that T. S. Eliot was a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism but I fail to see why that makes him anti-Semitic. In his times, anti-Semitism was unfortunately more tolerated than it has been post WWII until recently as the Left is now running in that direction.

Children are not adults. Parents and not the state have the primary responsibility for the upbringing and education of their kids (upon which we seem to agree). I cannot claim the right to choose the education of my own kids without allowing to virtually every other parent to do likewise as to their kids. Such freedoms are not facilitated by homogenized public schools in the ancient era of Horace Mann, the more recent (WWI) era of John Dewey or in the current age of truly active evil in which public schools may be generalized as PS 666 such as "fisting" classes in public schools at Lexington, MA, the requirement of blatant propaganda such as Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy's Roommate (veritable literary catechisms of lesbianism and homosexuality) in NYC public schools, and other widely noted atrocities posing as "education." If the parents want this, they can buy the books to twist their own kids with their own money. They are not welcome to use my taxes to do so. If the parents want to have their kids instructed in "fisting", they ought to be jailed for child abuse.

When kids are eighteen, they ought to listen to their parents but, alas, it is the way of the world that they often do not. If my nineteen-year-old who generally shows better judgment should decide that she simply MUST know why controversy swirled around Lady Chatterley's Lover, that will now be her decision. I think she has sufficient moral foundation not to be interested by D. H. Lawrence but, if not, not. I take it that you are referencing the Tom Wolfe who wrote Look Homeward, Angel, and not the more recent Tom Wolfe of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and MauMauing the Flak Catchers and several great American novels. Either are acceptable to the best of my knowledge and the latter is close to essential especially MauMauing the Flak Catchers and also From Bauhaus to Our House. I am not aware of objections to Faulkner that would concern me.

I don't regard Whitman as necessary context but I also admit to having a general distaste for poetry not written by Virgil, Homer or W. H. von Dreele.

I bring up Mapplethorpe because the literati, the culturati and the glitterati went just ga-ga over his bullwhip photo (which placed the whip handle in the object of many of their affections---barf). I rank his photography well below poetry that was not written by the aforementioned three poets or those like them.

Whatever Wagner believed, his beliefs were not the reason for Third Reich ideology against the Jews or otherwise. Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and the rest were substantially sui generis and just dreadfully more efficient than comparable figures. I have always regarded those who worship themselves such as Hitler, Goebbels and Goering as sorely limited in their imaginations. Wagner was merely a composer and apparently a composer with racial delusions.

Before exposing my children of tender years and impressionable minds to the works of practicing sexual perverts, I would feel it necessary to read those works in their entirety and that does not seem a very attractive idea. One of my kids aspires to be a nurse and has a very practical career path in mind. She is the one absolutely most interested in literature as a hobby but a good-paying job in significant service to others as a foundation for a financially secure life. Daughter #2 is likely on her way to Yale as a chemistry major. Daughter #3 aspires to reaching the age of 13 in spite of her absolutely inconsistent desire to major in Hannah Montana and That's So Raven. It will be reaching age 13 or abandoning Disneytrash or but not both. We are currently experimenting with televisionectomy. If necessary, before resorting to execution, we will consider putting her up for adoption by a dismally cloistered convent without television, without internet and without shopping experiences at malls.

If, at some point along the way, you should encounter my children in what is termed the great ongoing conversation of mankind (in which we encourage them to engage), you might, with great effort, convince one or more of them that Whitman is essential by bringing your evidence to the conversation with them but they may fight back. No man is a prophet in his own household. Sometimes they may even disagree with me (I know how hard that will be for many to believe but it is true nonetheless) and we have taught them to accept unquestioningly only the Teaching Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church.

As to the value of opinions, God and I make a voting and binding majority. In the event of disagreement (shudder) between me and God, God makes a binding and voting majority.

BTW, don't mistake enthusiasm for anger. I am always enthusiastic but seldom angry. I must work on that transparency thing since I have had to actually articulate this paragraph.

Finally, the original subject of this thread was an essay by a school janitor shilling for the National "Education" Association and Gummint Skeweling generally. Since you and I agree that parents should be the decisionmakers on the education of their respective kids, we should find ourselves in agreement that tax money should not be utilized for gummint skewels much less to so weight the scales in favor of homogenized leftist indoctrination as to make those schools the norm in our society. Whitman, Lawrence, Tchaikovsky, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson, Browning, Wagner, Wolfe, Faulkner, et al., are strictly side issues. If we are in agreement on abolishing public schools, then we have agreed on the critical issue. Then, as Chairman Mao used to say: Let a thousand flowers bloom!

NO parent has a moral right to take the earnings of others to support a public school system of the highest quality never mind what we are stuck with. I have no right to force you to support with your earnings private schools attended by my children. That absence of moral right is mutual across all of society even as to the atrocities known as public schools.

A parent's right to make educational decisions does not entail a right go have others make believe that such decisions do not have consequences. If the decision is public schooling by theft of the resources of others, the consequences cannot very well be good.

Education is a sword and a shield. Homeschooled children and most privately schooled children are better armed and better defended by far than are the denizens of gummint skewels. Is it polite or something to lie to parents who make the choice to abandon their children to gummint skewels???

We are developing in this society a very sloppy habit of confusing actual rights with the right to be comforted in our errors. If I say a speaker is a fool for advocating Marxism, I am NOT denying the speaker's freedom of speech. Likewise, if I say that a parent is making a bad decision to abandon his/her kids to gummint skewels, I am not denying the parent's right to do exactly that (at least so long as the tax thievery in support of amoral incompetence that is PS 666 is still allowed to exist). I would only deny a right to gummint skeweling in the same sense that I would deny your right to have your household pets receive hideously expensive veterinary care at taxpayer expense instead of your own. That you may choose to have others pay your bills is not an equivalent to your having a moral right to force others to pay your bills. Let gummint skewels (not that they are a legitimate function of government in any event) support themselves by bake sales, bingo and car washes and NOT by taxing citizens at the point of a gun to support such a failed exercise.

To summarize, I fully respect the RIGHT of any parent to keep his/her children in ignorance. I do not respect either the ignorance or the parent who does so. Such parents don't have to respect me either. Their children will probably be ruled by better educated children, however. That has always been the way of our world and always will be.

What is really appalling is taxing people to support idjit excuses for ideas that they despise. At least that is what Jefferson taught.

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