Clashing Cultures; Priorities Diverging
That’s what the homeschooling vs. public school debate boils down to. Nowhere is that divergence made more clear than in Nathanael Blake’s latest column for Townhall.com.
When I tell people about my plans for my (hypothetical) children, I invariably hear the same infratentorial objection, which is that they won’t “socialize” properly. No one ever tells me that home schooling will stifle my children’s academic ability. The stereotype is quite the opposite: home schoolers are smart but socially inept.
Thus we see why more people homeschool now than ever before. Now we see why most conservatives throw their hands up in disgust over exhorbitant funding with precious few results. It’s simply a matter of priorities. It seems to me that teaching kids things that are important in building a base of knowledge is far more important than teaching them social skills. With knowledge comes power is a cliche that most people my age understand and accept.
Unfortunately, too few in school administration positions make this a priority. The proof that they don’t is shown in the lowering of test scores vs. the rest of the industrialized world. Liberals talk all the time about lowering class sizes as the key to improving eductation. Until President Bush pushed the NCLB legislation, though, no one thought about making schools accountable for measurable improvements.
By contrast, homeschooling is all about making the students accountable. Homeschooling is about learning excellence. It’s also about extricating the children from awful school conditions. And I’m not just talking about inferior buildings, either.
The standard (though rarely articulated) definition of successful socialization is to “fit in” with a lot of immature little savages raised by television, video games, and the internet. Spending at least 35 hours a week, nine months of the year, with 20-30 kids of one’s own age (with a harried adult supervising) is the antithesis of what is needed in order to learn how to function in society. Give me the shut-in homeschoolers any day; from their family and their books, they will at least have some notion of life beyond their cohort and how to interact with it.
Don’t read this as an unqualified endorsement of the homeschooling system. Insetad, see it for what it is: a disparaging indictment against the teacher union regressive system that children are currently trapped in. As for social skills, the truth is that the culture in schools is alarming.
Do you think that a majority of parents were repulsed by Mr. Bennish’s anti-Bush diatribe?
It’s hard to imagine a high priority item that everyone’s involved in to some extent or another where the contrast is defined in starker terms. Sadly, the ones who lose out are the children.
Cross-post at LetFreedomRing
March 12th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
The concept that homeschooled children are socially inept is backwards. Homeschooled children learn social interactions with people from all age groups, not simply those of their same age.
In a world where we see blatant disrespect to authority (remember the giggle incident with Scalia a few weeks ago?) by my generation (I’m 24), it is evident that so-called social benefits of public education are something to question.
March 12th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
I practically homeschooled myself. I went to school in Oakland and the schools were worse that useless. The classes were completly disrupted by juvenile delinquents. You were in danger of losing your life! Especially if you were Caucasian. I quit in the 8th grade. I took the proficiency exam and graduated at 17 and went straight to college. I think I would have been stupider had I stayed in school.
March 12th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Being a country boy, I could never understand the argument that, if home-schooled, a child would miss out on socialization.
Seems to me that ever since the pinhead ivory towers started thinking in terms of what they would like to see as reality in education must in fact be reality (imagine that it is so, then it becomes so) in the 50’s & 60’s, public education has been headed toward disater at 100 mph or more. The “innovative teaching techniques” conjoured by any socialist/communist/moron that could be foisted upon an unsuspecting public (any argument against such innovation was met with derision) would not only be tried, but kept long past obvious refutal of any useful purpose.
Home schooling at this point is the only option for most parents not locked into poverty. Someday maybe we’ll see a system where the payment for the child stays with the child, not with the school district, so school choice can be based upon accomplishment, not bureaucracy.
And finally, I still wonder what business it is of the federal government to be in the business of education?