Jesse Scaccia
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.
Ping...
Standard Marxist technique. Call your enemy names and then associate what they do as something for which they should be guilty. Expect more from union teachers.
Someone should tell her that her poorly educated students may call homeschoolers “geeky” in college, but in a few years they’ll be calling them “boss”.
Well done!
Ya beat me to it, ya bum. That one did just kind of jump right off the page, didn't it?
Another loon who will say/write anything to get folks to submit their children to the knowingly biased and marxist learning environment that is public schooling in the country.
Stick to your guns folks and home school as much as you can. Then, petition your local government to lower or even outright stop collecting property taxes to pay for these marxist indoctrination centers.
JoMa
Since I was in public schools for half of my schooling, and home school the other, I feel like I should give my point off view on each point:
10. Ludicrous. I am still attending University, and once the other students catch wind that I was home schooled, I am deluged to assist with their papers.
9. This one all depends on how old fashioned you want to go. Most kids were instructed at home before we had government schools.
8. My family were nearly as poor as church mice. I go to school to learn, not to teach others. Is it a failure mode of the government schools, that they must rely on the more enlightened students to teach their peers? Also, please see rebuttal to #10.
7. Government schools; bastions of tolerance. So long as you are a gay cross-dressing pedo minority. Just sayin’.
6. The most arrogant people I have met in my life are public school teachers. I sought direction from my parents in my learning, and answers to my questions from the material that was provided to me.
5. Being an English teacher, I will provide the following noun without a definition: redundancy.
4. MTV Real World? That is your example of real life? Please review fallacy argument “correlation does not imply causation.”
3. I find that the people I went to school with, even almost ten years out, struggle to properly identify with, and hold meaningful conversations with those younger or older than themselves. Surely, this has nothing to do with only learning to socialize around their immediate peers.
2. Perhaps you should brush up a little on choosing a source to support your opinion. Oh, I don’t know, maybe someone who does not use weasel words such as “might”, and “probably” would be more reassuring to your readers.
1. Spoken like a true person stuck in their sophomore year of high school.
Which is all to say that she resents any child being able to escape leftist indoctrination. Really, she thinks children need to be exposed to the homo agenda?
I doubt this teacher teaches English as well as I do.
LOL.
LOL, true.
I didn’t see “Home schooling kids does not yield a better result” on the list.
Jesse Scaccia
This person thinks they are a superior teacher by displaying what she thinks are sound arguments. The irony is astounding.
Good thing she doesn’t teach folks how to shoot or they would be pointing the gun at themselves and not the target.
I thought this was written by someone pretending to be anti-homeschooling, covering all the ridiculous arguments we’ve all heard before. These are particularly absurd!
This is where I concluded it's written tongue-in-cheek. Not masterfully so, but about all you can expect from someone with the credentials provided at #6.
This ties right in with the marxist principle of having everyone be equal at the lowest common denominator.
Where is the Barf alert?
If it's that, it's a good impression of a graduate of a teaching college. Still, if we can't decide what it is, I say we give it an F.
Sounds like dem publik edyoucaturs is gittin skerd. They might be onto the fact that if the wealthy middle class is pulling the kids out and doing it at home, perhaps, their failed system is about to be exposed :). I do my last one at home (going into 10th). Much better off. He is not afraid everyday from those peers I am supposed to be socializing him with......
Liberals don’t home school because they are wimps with no authority over their kids. Their kids RULE them!
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