Salon Homeschooling Article

An article from Salon today.

Here's my favorite quote:

"We're not ready to surrender our kids, and ourselves, to a 10-month-a-year, all-day institution whose primary goal, at least at this age, seems to be teaching kids how to function within a 10-month-a-year, all-day institution."

The comments to the article are especially interesting. Lots of angry tirades. But a few sensible ones also. I especially liked the one at the bottom of this page, which I will reprint below.

Not home schooling, home educating

Last year, we started "home" schooling our daughter in the 8th grade. To say this was a controversial decision with our family and friends, would be an understatement.

Someone joked that we were doing it in the wrong order, as people usually start home schooling their kids in the early grades, not the higher grades. They thought our daughter was going to turn out to be an un-socialized misfit, weirdo. Despite the protests, we decided to plow ahead anyway.

So, why did we leave the system? The answer is specific to her circumstances; but I want to highlight two reasons that people don't seem to appreciate.

First, most people are focused only on their school and how wonderful it is. The truth is, the best schools in America seriously suck at offering math or science. "Oh, it is different in my school. We have AP courses and advanced flim-flams," you might say. Okay, then try your 10th grader on these exams:

http://www.2mminutes.com/pressblog8.asp

(WARNING: the math and history tests are pretty hard).

Your kids would need to pass these exams to continue onto 11th grade in India. I can give more examples from Europe to South America, where your kids would flunk spectacularly, especially in science and math.

You may have great teachers, supportive schools, but what you don't have is parents that want their kids challenged. Send home a problem that Johnny can't answer... well, there's a problem with the teacher. Ask a question on the exam that was not covered in class... well, the teacher must be bad.

So, even if the schools could offer the children a wonderful challenging environment, the parents would be "up in arms." They would complain their kids are not being spoon fed anymore. If the kids don't get it right away, and actually have to struggle, then it's too hard. We have to dumb-down the material so no one is left behind.

The second problem is that schools don't encourage risk taking anymore. This is driven by an irrational fear of vocal parents, who want to protect their children from ALL risks. Bring a knife to school -- get expelled. Bring a prescription drug to school -- get suspended. Act up -- get placed on Ritalin. Get one bad grade -- forget about going to Harvard.

Zero tolerance. What a moronic idea. If people are to make mistakes, is it not better for them to make them when they are growing up. When do we want them to make mistakes... when they are the President?

Between the colleges, the parents, and the schools, we have screwed a generation of kids. They have learned not to rock the boat. Like a sponge, they attempt to absorb hour after hour of monotonous drivel, repeated ad nauseam. And at the end of the semester they wring out the contents out of their brain, forgetting the useless facts that they've learned, ready to waste another semester on more useless facts.

I have seen far too many children of boomer parents come home to live with mom and dad. Not because they want to, but because they have to. They drift through life underemployed, desperately searching for some meaning in life. Rather than blame these kids, I blame the parents and the schooling system that the parents demanded.

Given these perceived problems, this is what are we attempting to achieve with our home schooling experiment. We want our daughter to grow, by taking risks. We want her to pursue ideas that she is interested in. What we would like to have, when she leaves our home, is a young woman who has a good sense of who she is, what she wants to do, and a plan on how to get there. And we want her to know it's okay if she changes her path. The point is, we want her to live her life to her fullest potential.

We feel strongly that the current schooling system wants nothing to do with our goals. It wants conformity. It wants obedience. It wants children to respond to arbitrary rewards. In short, it is perfect at creating workers for the throw away jobs that America seems to create by the thousands.