Posted on 06/17/2002 6:34:23 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
As the school year comes to an end, I was reminded of the story of a boy whom the teachers complained about, saying he could not learn, seemed confused, and asked too many questions. Today, that boy would have been required to take Ritalin or some other drug. In his case, however, his parents decided to home school him. He was Thomas Edison.
Home schooling worked then and it works today. In fact, home schooling works far better than the deliberate stupefying of the children passing through what is surely the most expensive and ineffective educational system the world has ever known.
The American public education system today is not about educating students; it is about indoctrinating them. It has less to do with imparting information and more to do with instilling politically correct attitudes. It is producing docile, ignorant people who know little about their nation's history. This is imperceptibly -- and some say deliberately -- weakening our society.
Right now in America, public school enrollment is projected to reach a record 47.3 million and peak at 47.5 million by 2005. Private schools had 5.3 million students in the 1999-2000 school year. By contrast, between 1.6 and 2 million students were home schooled in the US during 2001-2002, taking in every grade level from kindergarten through twelfth grade. There is, though, a surprise in that number. It is an increase of 500 percent over the number being home schooled a decade ago! The growth rate of the choice to home school is estimated to be between seven and fifteen percent each year.
In numbers, home-schooled children are a minority among those being shuttled through elementary, middle and high schools like so much sausage. However, when they are in competition with the products of those public schools, they leave them way behind. The headlines tell the story. Put them in a spelling or geography bee and the home-schooled child usually takes top honors. It's actually news when they do not!
Home schooled students in the U.S. score 15 to 30 percentile points, on average, above their school peers whether the subject is reading, writing, mathematics or science or social studies. The mediocre science scores of public school students were front-page news in January. In May, the news that most US high school seniors had a poor grasp of their nation's history was also on the front pages. Diane Ravich, historian and education professor at New York University called the scores "abysmal." Bad as the scores were, they had shown no improvement since 1994!
Despite this obvious problem, President Bush recently signed an education bill, dubbed "Leave No Student Behind," that allocated $49 billion to a system so broken, so useless, that is a national shame and a national sham. His answer? Testing, testing, testing. But! If you are testing only the knowledge that is mandated for the test, all the ancillary knowledge needed to actually understand the subject is jettisoned for the sake of the test score.
Currently, the U.S. is spending about 72 percent more on education than in 1980. After more than two decades, there is no indication of any significant improvement. Instead, this huge investment of US tax dollars has produced poor reading and other subject scores, static dropout rates, declining parental satisfaction, and mediocre US student performance in international education surveys.
The home-schooled student, notes Phyllis Schlafly, doesn't have to study "fuzzy math, whole math, new math, new new math, or rainforest math." They don't have to be taught "Whole Language, which fraudulently teaches children to guess at words from the pictures, skip over difficult words, and substitute any words that seem to fit the context."
In the fall of 1999, Ridgewood, N.J., students, aged 11 to 18, were required to answer questions about their own drug use, sexual life, and any illegal activity in which they had been involved. The 156-question survey asked students to name how many times they had tried to kill themselves, used contraception, or made themselves throw up after eating. Parents took the school system to court and, after a two-year battle, won a victory for the First, Fifth, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Need it be said that none of the questions being asked had a single thing to do with whether the students had actually learned anything? Today's schools are about attitudes and behavior, not facts and skills. In September this travesty begins again.
(Alan Caruba is the founder of The National Anxiety Center and author of a four-part series, "The Subversion of Education in America" posted on its Internet site at anxietycenter.com.)
Alan Caruba
Ever wonder why the name of the program continues to change but the program itself never does? Outcome Based Education was seen as a failure. They changed the name to Goals 2000 and to Education Reform. Darn! Busted again, twice more!
Now it's "Testing Education."
Parents aren't stupid ( well, not all of them). The parents are loosing their Orwells puppies to this "new society " indoctrination, and they know it!
It's not the individual schools, It's the entire NEA program.
The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, by Charlotte Taylor Iserbyt.
My sister-in-law works in a large, fast-growing school district in Colorado and she understands why we homeschool, and readily admits there are problems in the public school system, but she feels that they don't have that many problems in her distrcit. It seems like the old "we're ok, but they have some problems" syndrome.
What I am seeing is that this is rapidly dissipating. Most kids I meet these days are envious of home schoolers. The acceptance among parents is growing VERY rapidly. This isn't just a few pebbles, it's the first few bolders of an avalanche.
No, we didn't use anything like that. From the time the girls were very small we made The Big Night Out be to go to Barnes and Nobles and everybody got a new book. Then we all went home and read (or were read to).
Wow. How exactly does that work? (I am so interested in this because I was very dissatisfied with my public school math education and am determined that when the time comes my children will have exactly the opposite.) Got any links about it? Also be sure to expose them to analytic subjects outside straight "math" such as symbolic logic, computer programming, etc., and when they do calculus make sure they are learning what it means and what it is for, not just how to solve the problems. But you probably don't need to be told that.
I invented the method. We use algebraic operators for all arithmetic problems to break down the problem into easier sub-problems. Engineers use these methods in their heads. We use Saxon only as a source of problems and for drill work. It's archaic.
In our system, all equations for word problems have units, set operations, what we call "truth statements" (such as 1 dozen oranges = 12 oranges), and calculated identities (1 dozen oranges/12 oranges = 1). "We can always multiply any number by one." No hand waving allowed. This rigorous method makes word problems a snap. There is no "borrowing" in subtraction operations. We add another equation that equals zero to adjust the subtrahend. "We can always add zero, can't we?" Any time they apply a principle, axiom, or theorem they are to cite it as if the problem was a proof.
Rigor. It's that simple. Rigorous simple problems makes complex problems easier to do later. This is the necessary preparation that will make chemistry and physics far simpler to learn.
Also be sure to expose them to analytic subjects outside straight "math" such as symbolic logic, computer programming, etc., and when they do calculus make sure they are learning what it means and what it is for, not just how to solve the problems.
Symbolic logic will be taught after the first exposure to calculus (so that we can teach physics) and after an extended period of diagramming sentences. My hope is to teach them to convert sentence structure to mathematics. My goal is that they could do legal analysis with symbolic logic. (That is a skill that would make them truly dangerous.)
I am an engineer. I won't expose them to computer programming until they routinely see science in the world and have mastered paper else paper may too easily bore them. For now, the computer is a word processor. I do not want them thinking that the computer is the world.
You may be right and Carry's kids may be geniuses. On the other hand, they may just be rising to meet the higher expectations placed upon them. In other countries Calculus is taught much younger than here in the U.S. and kids don't seem to have a problem with it on average.
In our schools we spend a lot of time talking about what the kids can't be expected to do, while in other schools (and home schools) they spend their time doing it.
Shalom.
I agree, but my husband builds networks for a living and he is insistent that our children will learn at his knee, which will be difficult to avoid since he works from home a lot, and studies constantly. I want my children to be able to interact with intellectual resources from any source or medium. He shares your interest in creating "dangerous" children, hehehe, and he does make good points to the effect that for them to truly be such in the coming era they will need to understand the fundamentals of computing and not be end users only. My dad is a programmer, and one thing I have been really surprised to learn from my husband is that the kind of network/systems/hardware stuff he does is actually more fundamental than (most) programming. When his programmer friends are hanging out here, it is obvious that they know much less than he does about what makes the machines tick. What kind of engineering do you do?
I have to admit that I'm not quite comprehending your method, I think I would need to see a full example laid out. I mean I think I get the basic idea, but I'm not quite sure how it would work on a kid who didn't already know arithmetic. You should really publish this, even if only on the web. There are a lot of people out here who want to teach our kids to really understand math, not just by rote, from the start, but are at a loss for methods. I looked at a Saxon book once, it looked just like my high school math books, only more systematic. But not deeper.
Textbooks? I like Copi's.
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