Posted on 05/31/2009 1:48:40 PM PDT by aberaussie
Homeschooling: great for self-aggrandizing, society-phobic mother…… but not quite so good for the kid.
Here are my top ten reasons why homeschooling parents are doing the wrong thing:
10. “You were totally home schooled” is an insult college kids use when mocking the geeky kid in the dorm (whether or not the offender was home schooled or not). And… say what you will… but it doesn’t feel nice to be considered an outsider, a natural outcropping of being homeschooled.
9. Call me old-fashioned, but a students’ classroom shouldn’t also be where they eat Fruit Loops and meat loaf (not at the same time I hope). It also shouldn’t be where the family gathers to watch American Idol or to play Wii. Students–from little ones to teens–deserve a learning-focused place to study. In modern society, we call them schools.
8. Homeschooling is selfish. According to this article in USA Today, students who get homeschooled are increasingly from wealthy and well-educated families. To take these (I’m assuming) high achieving students out of our schools is a disservice to our less fortunate public school kids. Poorer students with less literate parents are more reliant on peer support and motivation, and they greatly benefit from the focus and commitment of their richer and higher achieving classmates.
7. God hates homeschooling. The study, done by the National Center for Education Statistics, notes that the most common reason parents gave as the most important was a desire to provide religious or moral instruction. To the homeschooling Believers out there, didn’t God say “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”? Didn’t he command, “Ye shall be witnesses unto me”? From my side, to take your faithful children out of schools is to miss an opportunity to spread the grace, power and beauty of the Lord to the common people. (Personally I’m agnostic, but I’m just saying…)
6. Homeschooling parent/teachers are arrogant to the point of lunacy. For real! My qualifications to teach English include a double major in English and education, two master’s degrees (education and journalism), a student teaching semester and multiple internship terms, real world experience as a writer, and years in the classroom dealing with different learning styles. So, first of all, homeschooling parent, you think you can teach English as well as me? Well, maybe you can. I’ll give you that. But there’s no way that you can teach English as well as me, and biology as well as a trained professional, and history… and Spanish… and art… and counsel for college as well as a school’s guidance counselor… and… and…
5. As a teacher, homeschooling kind of pisses me off. (That’s good enough for #5.)
4. Homeschooling could breed intolerance, and maybe even racism. Unless the student is being homeschooled at the MTV Real World house, there’s probably only one race/sexuality/background in the room. How can a young person learn to appreciate other cultures if he or she doesn’t live among them?
3. And don’t give me this “they still participate in activities with public school kids” garbage. Socialization in our grand multi-cultural experiment we call America is a process that takes more than an hour a day, a few times a week. Homeschooling, undoubtedly, leaves the child unprepared socially.
2. Homeschooling parents are arrogant, Part 2. According to Henry Cate, who runs the Why Homeschool blog, many highly educated, high-income parents are “probably people who are a little bit more comfortable in taking risks” in choosing a college or line of work. “The attributes that facilitate that might also facilitate them being more comfortable with home-schooling.”
More comfortable taking risks with their child’s education? Gamble on, I don’t know, the Superbowl, not your child’s future.
1. And finally… have you met someone homeschooled? Not to hate, but they do tend to be pretty geeky***.
*** Please see the comments for thoughts on the word ‘geeky.’ But, in general, to be geeky connotes a certain inability to integrate and communicate in diverse social situations. Which, I would argue, is a likely result of being educated in an environment without peers. It’s hard to get by in such a diverse world as ours! And the more people you can hang out with the more likely you are to succeed, both in work life and real life.
One last note, to those homeschooling parents out there: it’s clear from the number and passion of your responses that TeacherRevised is missing an important voice in the teaching community. If any of you are interesting in writing for us, send me an email: jessescaccia@gmail.com. I would love to have you as part of our conversation.
This is satire right? This can’t be what passes as “logical” thought in our school system. Oh wait....was that arrogant?
Points to counter this article:
I chose to put my children in private school, and thus pay to subsidize teachers like this one AND those I chose to pay. Because our school is smaller and has more traditional values, shall my children also be called inferior for not having been beat up often or exposed to drugs and told everything your parents said up to today is wrong? How many of the points given against home schooling also apply to private school, and thus could be used to say it, too, should not exist? (And tell this “teacher” to tell that to President Obama.)
If socialization is an act of multicultural tolerance, this teacher - by her sweeping accusations of homeschoolers as geeky, anti-social, and bigoted - is proving her own intoleratnce.
The point I find hilarious is that the home-schoolers are SMART AND LITERATE - thus we need them in the classroom to help teach those less literate children. Uh, isn’t that what the teacher is supposed to do?
Basically, mind control. Orwellian.
It's a scam.
“Public Schools” are better understood as “The Bus Ministry of the State Church of Secular Humanism”.
Hilarious...I’m stealing it. ;-)
Jealous and whiney...really, really whiney...with some snotty “nya-nya-nya’s” thrown in there.
How about the Case Against Public Education?
1.) The lessons are so dull and frustrating, students learn to hate knowlege.
2.) Many of the teachers have little knowlege of the topics they’re supposed to be experts on.
3.) The structures, rules, and cirriculum do nothing to prepare students for life after school.
4.) The conditions are sometimes unsanitary, leading to allergies and occasional health problems, like staph infections.
5.) The bullying, bad teachers, and artificial environment cause many students to have terrible emotioinal and psychological hang-ups as adults.
6.) American students consistantly post lower scores than any other developed nation in the world, even though they do more homework than most, which is closely linked to reason 1.
7.) The prevelence of gangs in some schools make those places dangerous.
8.) The textbooks are poorly written and often contain inaccuracies.
9.) Drug use is a persistant problem in schools, largely in response to the ill effects of the boring and stressful experience school treats the students to.
10.) Excessive schooling artificially prolongs childhood, making the transition into adulthood more difficult than it needs to be.
11.) Many supporters of public schools who denounce homeschooling are incredibly arrogant about their positions, even though they have nothing to be arrogant about.
“5. As a teacher, homeschooling kind of pisses me off.”
Translation: The more parents who homeschool, the fewer students we can coerce into public schools. This is MY
RICE BOWL, people! No enrollment increases means no ‘special study’ grants, no chance of my finally getting promoted into administration, and eventually NO JOB!
I was homeschooled and I'm homeschooling my kid sister. A few years ago we were given a Hakim series, Mom said she wouldn't use them in an outhouse.
To each his own, but Hakim is very pc.
There are good and bad examples in most everything. Most people that I know that homeschool take it seriously and do a terrific job.
I was thinking that she received both her masters degrees from a diploma mill, or possibly a box of Cracker Jacks.
Reminds me of the book "1984."
I wonder why this woman, apparently so concerned about the state of American education, doesn’t direct her anger and disdain at our urban public “education” systems, which have over multiple decades recorded a disgraceful record of 50 pct drop-out rates and barely literate graduates - something I unequivocally consider to be a moral outrage and a national disgrace.
What an absolutely pathetic hypocrite.
I agree. In order to destroy western civilisation, it first had to be equated with other civilisations. I’m sorry, but if meaured objectively, western civilisation in almost all aspects has been historically more advanced, and dare I say it, superior. That doesn’t mean the people of other civilisations were inferior, but they certainly hadn’t attained the sophistication of western civilisation in general.
The same is being done to Christianity, one of the bedrock foundations of western civilisation.
We should just call this woman what she is - a bigot.
I'm ahead of you already on grammar . . . idiot.
One major reason why home-schoolers tend to be from wealthier families is that socialist schools require taxes that impoverish ordinary families to the degree that they can’t afford to have one parent stay home and teach their kids.
Good for you and your kids. Hard work on both sides.
I happen to be a homeschool parent who majored in journalism. LOL.
And I'm growing very weary of the attacks against journalism majors on this forum... lol.
Contrary to popular opinion, journalism is not an easy major. Looking back, I know now I would've had a much easier time and much more success if I'd studied programming. But, I enjoyed using words, especially to lead a customer to buy something.
So, I always worked in sales and marketing. I started out with an associates in marketing and then majored in advertising at a university. At some point, I decided the curriculum was too "artsy", so I switched to newswriting, even though I had no desire to be a reporter. Those newswriting classes were challenging, and the professors enjoyed flunking students. Once, a professor flunked almost her entire class.
My husband studied engineering and later became a programmer. Between the two of us, I think almost all the subjects are covered well in our homeschool.
My first reaction was that this has to be satire, but apparently it is not....
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