. . . what backs up the judgement [that parents should have some sort of formal training in order to homeschool]?In certain circumstances, [homeschooling] can be vital. I have a cousin, for example, who has an emotionally disturbed son. She homeschooled him for a few years, and he's been able to make a succesful reentry into the regular school system. But she's also a senior circuit court judge, a graduate of Radcliffe College and Yale Law, and an experienced former teacher. . . .
The parents who homeschool are, I make no doubt, close to universally graduates of public or parochial high school.So their only experience is vaguely remembering being taught the same things before, twenty years ago in public school? I don't see how that's an improvement. Nowhere in the country would a high school graduate be allowed to teach children in public, private or parochial school. In my kids' schools, 90% of the faculty have advanced degrees in the subjects they teach, and several have doctorates.
But if that's so and yet 25% of P.S. teachers are working outside their majors, it must on average be even worse than that outside your kids' district.I'm not sure how a simple high school grad could possibly have the requisite mastery of the subject matter. I certainly didn't after I graduated from high school . . . In the vast majority of cases, I sincerely doubt that the experience would be beneficial.
What I see as a fallacy in your argument is, to put it bluntly and at the risk of overgeneralization,All learning comes from education, andI read a psychology book (part of an educational requirement) long ago, and I remember only a couple of things from it. But I remember this one statement in particular:all education is documented in credentials.
It is doubtful if any learning occurs without motivation.And I think that is essentially correct. We go through our lives being bombarded with stimuli, and we cannot possibly remember it all; we unconsciously drop most of it from memory in order to bring the memories which impressed us to bear on present experience.I also believe that if you have a lot of education you have degrees which announce that you at one time or another knew quite a bit about the subjects in question--but nobody remembers everything they have been "taught." And nobody puts the things they have been taught together optimally.
We fail to ask the right questions; history is loaded with inventions which would have been practical and valuable long before they were in fact invented. The Minee ball, for example, was an easily made non-spherical bullet which obliterated the reason that kept the muzzle-loading rifle from completely superceding the inaccurate smoothbore musket. Apparently it was at least a hundred years from the time rifles were not uncommon until someone asked whether the spherical ball was the best shape for a bullet. Had you asked Thomas Jefferson (inventor of the contour-shaped metal plow we take for granted) that question, the hollow-tailed bullet (small enough to load as easily as a loose-fitting ball used in muskets, but expanding when fired to fill the barrel and engage the rifle grooves) might now be called the "Jefferson ball".
So I guess I think that there is less to "efficiency" than meets the eye. Your school "efficiently" gets people with degrees in front of uneducated children and youth. It is however not effective in motivating the "skulls full of mush" to learn the right things for the right reasons. And like all socialist constructs, it is better at marshalling inputs than at delivering valuable outputs.
When the parents tutor, aka, "homeschool" their children, the value of the childrens' time is not taken to be a free good to be wasted; even in a private school that naturally is less true. The parent will concentrate on what s/he deems the most important knowledge based on the parent's own experience and education.
And to me the very most suspect idea is that a subject which an adult easily forgets (thus is "incompetent" to relearn while teaching) is actually important. Or, if so, is important in the way and for the reasons that establishment education frames it to be. Because if establishment education failed to teach the parent in a way that made it stick, or even to inspire the parent over a generation's time to revisit and relearn the subject, education obviously failed to motivate that person when s/he was a student. Maybe the teacher herself didn't have much enthusiasm for that material?
And if the parents would just get out of the way would the schools necessarily do better now? They instead seem, at least in some aspects, to tend to do worse.
All of which is beside the point that the typical parent who chooses to tutor probably is not the great unwashed but themselves above average in book learning--but perhaps not in "education" courses which at most are primarily relevant to classroom instruction rather than tutoring (and which typically tend to repel those with high SAT scores from acquiring teaching certificates).
Not only so, but reportedly PS education tends to be disorganized at the same time it is overcentralized. That is, there is a failure to set priorities which allows a teacher at a higher level to repeat some material already taught at a lower level at the expense of material already skipped at all lower levels. Making everything "important" at the lower level means that in fact nothing is treated as truly important.
To the extent that establishment education can be a fox, it ought not to be put in charge of henhouse security.
My kids' district (Fairfax County, Virginia) is the best in the country, but you're not going to get me to say that all is well in the public school system. Even if teachers do teach outside their major (which they shouldn't), at least they have some formal education beyond the high school level, which I think is terribly important.
What I see as a fallacy in your argument is, to put it bluntly and at the risk of overgeneralization, All learning comes from education, and all education is documented in credentials.
I recognize that that is a fallacy. But we need to determine teacher competence with some measurement, and until some superior means is found, academic quallifications are the least-bad way of doing so.
It is doubtful if any learning occurs without motivation.
Absolutely. And good teachers, regardless of their academic quallifications, motivate their students. Bad teachers don't. But if a teacher has only a rudimentary high school education and doesn't have the requisite information or skills to pass on to his or her students, all of that energy goes for naught. Academic qualifications are a starting point, an extremely relevent starting point, but a starting point nonetheless, to finding good teachers.
The parent will concentrate on what s/he deems the most important knowledge based on the parent's own experience and education.
But if a parent has little experience, and less education? What's the point? I confess, I didn't much like my math classes in high school. If I homeschooled my kids, I'd naturally spend less time teaching math, and I'd probably give them an insufficient and possibly incorrect interpretation of what they need to know to succeed. They'd loose out, solely because of the failures of my education. They could still live and prosper, but many doors would be closed to them, doors to any career with a significant reliance on math. And that isn't fair to them.
And if the parents would just get out of the way would the schools necessarily do better now? They instead seem, at least in some aspects, to tend to do worse.
Who said anything about parents "getting out of the way?"
All of which is beside the point that the typical parent who chooses to tutor probably is not the great unwashed but themselves above average in book learning--but perhaps not in "education" courses which at most are primarily relevant to classroom instruction rather than tutoring (and which typically tend to repel those with high SAT scores from acquiring teaching certificates).
Again, I'm not inextricably opposed to home-schooling. But if you're right, and the typical homeschooling parent isn't underqualified, why don't you simply agree to oversight to make sure that the odd totally unqualified proverbial bad-apple, isn't ruining her kids' potential? What are you afraid of?
Not only so, but reportedly PS education tends to be disorganized at the same time it is overcentralized.
I think its you who are pursuing the logical fallacy. Many public schools are highly flawed, and we can discuss the reasons for that at length. But the alternative isn't necessarily homeschooling, and I think you're being dishonest by painting it as such. I think the vast majority of children benefit from the social interaction, diversity of opinions, and access to different subject matter that they get in schools. Some clearly don't. But if there must be homeschooling, there must be some oversight.