The Public's Interest in Education Might Be Better Served By a Lot Less Public Interest
The families of homeschooled children are clearly different from those of traditional schoolchildren.Some 97 percent of homeschooled children live in married couple households; the comparable number for public school students is 72 percent. Nearly 88 percent of homeschooled parents continued their own education beyond high school; less than 50 percent of the general population has attended college. The home environment of these students is supportive, nurturing and encourages diligence. . .
Yes, good! Let's actually focus on the kids and their learning, not just exploit them in the name of helping their exploited moms or any other political agenda. Let's leave prayer and religion out of it, too, since most folks in schools and government (and politics) also self-identify as god-fearing believers; religion is a confounding variable in education analysis that may quack like a duck, but really is more of a duck-billed platypus.
In other words, religion is not education and religious freedom is not academic freedom, wherever it happens. So let's stick to the constitutionally sound raison d'être of Compulsory School -- secular academics and independence sufficient to preserve and protect our liberties and provide for the common good -- for at least this one conversation.
Are homeschooled and unschooled kids in objective reality, without anybody's platitudes or grudge or hidden agenda tainting our observations, learning and progressing in the academic skills and abilities prized by government in the public interest, without government or the public interest?
. . .Keep in mind that the performance of these children is generally accomplished without certified teachers, without standardized curricula, without approved and mandated text books and teaching materials, and -- possibly most important -- without the often intrusive rules and regulations imposed by school boards and administrators.
Despite the unparalleled record of academic success of homeschooling, last year the California Department of Education posed questions about the basic legality of homeschooling, focusing on truancy, teacher certification and reporting authority. . .why should the department interfere with parents who are succeeding at a difficult task? Why try to fix something that isn't broken?
Because:
-- it works so well at doing School's job with no rules or money that it's embarrassing?
-- school systems work on the Peter Principle where folks rise to their level of incompetence, thus state ed department folks are the least able to appreciate and contribute to real education?
(Having worked in a large state department of education after rising from other levels where rules and money were more important than parents and family by FAR, I'll say both of the above.)
. . .Indications are that homeschooling is a sustainable education alternative. The parents (the teachers) are dedicated, and the students are achieving. It is a welcome example of students and teachers working together to achieve outstanding performance.
When it comes to home education, public school administrators' roles have been minimal. They should stay that way.
True! Making all these right answers into a standardized, machine-graded true-blue liberal litmus test is gonna be tough, whew, good thing I have state department of education experience and all those education credentials . . .
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Education | Feminism | Homeschooling | Public schooling | school rules | Unschooling | Christians | conservatives | Gender Equity | liberals
And perhaps the Public is a Ass
Submitted by JJ Ross on 13 June 2007 - 4:13pm.
(to prevail upon Dickens to help make my point)
We know what we think we want from "public education" in whatever form, but then we don't seem to know how to actually create the reality. So we settle for form over substance. Don't take my word for it; read this new Education Week collection of features, policy reports and commentary called Diplomas Count 2007.
An argument against home
Submitted by rwallnerny2007 on 13 June 2007 - 5:36pm.
An argument against home schooling is that teachers are *trained professionals* Should parents be able to perform surgery on their kids at home just because they think they can, and its *their* kids bodies? Or would you say that surgery is best left to trained surgeons? Frankly teachers and teaching get far, *far* less respect in this day and age than in the past. These days everyone thinks they can teach. As if the best public education teachers were just folks picked up off the street who hadn't spend years learning how to do what they do.
Yes there are plenty of cases of succesful home schooling, but the nature of it means those are the ones we are primarily going to hear about. We will rarely hear about the bad cases of home schooling, the kids pulled out of public school by hardline evangelicals with political agendas who think secular types are evil, and who will raise their kids in a closeted, warped environment so they can ensure that they grow up into closeted warped s.
Our schools are the foundations of our future society. We must use the utmost care and training in educating new generations. This work must be left to trained professionals and these new generations must be nurtured in an enviroment where they are PART of society, and not hidden from it.
Home schooling is not something that should be encouraged. Even if it can be done well, and it can, it doesn't change the overriding issues. Give public school teachers the same level of respect you'd give surgeons. Let them do their job, and stop thinking you are so brilliant you can do heart surgery better and cheaper than they can.
No
Submitted by JJ Ross on 13 June 2007 - 6:33pm.
Exactly -- schools are crumbling as our intellectual foundation, and education now happens elsewhere more and more openly, more and more successfully. Schooling as an institution will either grope its way back toward some real education with which it can justify its boondoggly omnipresence, or perish from the earth uneulogized and good riddance.
I *AM* a trained professional teacher and school administrator. I know from my professional training and my direct experience with both schooling and education, that schooling and education are not the same, and may indeed interfere with each other in some politically untenable, and therefore politically unacknowledged ways.
The party line to shore up Dem unionism of teachers as government employees (and apparently, using feminism to shut down even successful home education with its economically superior and unabashedly protectionist muscle) is a vastly different thing than the true professional analysis of what actually works, in creating real progressive education worthy as a foundation for 21st century globalization and society. If you don't believe me, read all the professional schoolfolk and corporate mucketymucks quoted in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-supported project above. That's why I posted it.
Crossposted
at Snook as and comments are welcome here or there. This is one little part of a much larger conversation happening from left to right and back again, about our individual and collective interest in high quality education for all kids, and whether School itself needs to rethink what it's teaching about the real meaning of the word "free" public education.