Prior to homeschooling, I was in one of the best districts in the area. Financially and educationally our high school was ahead. I was an honor roll student who got seriously ill two months into my sophomore year. My school refused to provide me with a tutor, as required, and told my dad that “in a school of 2,000 students, one is disposable.” After that the decision to homeschool me (again) was made unanimously.

Unfortunately, public education is not standard or uniform in any way, and students are not able to work at their own pace. The system is also filled with educations who are burned out or don’t care, as in my case. I trust myself to care about and educate my children better than anyone. After my own experiences in public schools, I know that they are limiting to gifted children, unable to cater to individual needs, and often overly harsh when it comes to restrictions and punishments. School is supposed to be about education. In my opinion, public school is about so much more, and not all of it good.

I don’t think everyone should homeschool, in the same way that I don’t think everyone should be vegetarian. But just like being a vegetarian, anyone can do it, and enjoy it for all of its benefits and challenges.

As a very specific example, I have home-schooled relatives.

Their math book wasn’t oriented around math, but about attacking the “new math.”

Literature and history was narrow, limited, and was oriented around a specific perspective and message.

Science was not science.

Seemingly well meaning, but nonetheless crap that impoverishes children.

Their parents had *no* idea the books and curriculum–which they thought had been vetted–were crap, and that they were impoverishing their children–who are sadly still limited to this day, nearly two decades later.

Yes, our schools have issues, but there is a working process for improvement. Groups of knowledgeable people create the curriculum. Teachers have degrees in their subjects. And you are still the interpreter for your kids.

Further, school and education are as much for acculturation as for straight knowledge transfer. Ours is a pluralistic society in a pluralistic world, and we have a broad common culture. Cultural experiences and cultural literacy is critical.

You need to participate, both with your school and with your kids. Of course you need to put everything in perspective for your children. You need to impart your culture, and that’s most effectively done in perspective. Also, you will further enrich their lives outside school.

Just don’t forget where the *real* gems are and “throw the baby out with the bath water” and deprive your kids of their opportunities and their birthright.

The strongest influences of wisdom and maturity on my own youth were my grandparents who were largely homeschooled, with only a few hours a day a very few months of the year, for very few years at that, in small one-room schools to supplement what they learned from their parents. They were also among the most literate people I have known; most teachers and professors I had all the way through post grad work didn’t meet the benchmark they set for literacy. Heck, even now I barely approach the literate, well-cultured knowledge base my grandfathers exhibited as mostly autodidactic farmer-carpenter and country preacher. (And yes, since I have collections of their reflective writings, I can make a fair comparison between their education and mine, which is still lagging behind theirs in many ways.)

There’s a place for formal education outside the home, but with the dumbing down of college/university studies (2005 survey reported in the Washington Post had 69% of recent college grads as barely functionally literate) and the growing wealth of education opportunities online–education opportunities, not necessarily formal class work–as well as testing and certification programs, a college education is growing to be less of a necessity even for white collar work. And for those who just find joy in learning, such things as free courseware from places like MIT are a boon.

As to public education through the high school level, if we as a people wanted to “fix” it, we could. Simply tell Washington D.C. to take a hike, abolish all “schools of education” in colleges and universities, put all school administrators and remote educrats on chain gangs making little rocks out of big ones (with apologies to the 1% of them who aren’t dumber than the rocks they’re breaking) and let schools sort themselves out at the local level. Sure, most parents today are enstupiated products of previous failed public schools and don’t know enough to know what good education is, but then neither do at least 90% of the teachers in their children’s schools. They’d muddle through eventually, wasting far less money and harming far fewer kids than statist educrats running things from their government offices and plastic, faux ivory towers.

“…If they want a more religious-based education, then so be it.”

Well, there’s a catch22.

Every state is different but in Minnesota students must be tested every year by the UofM to make sure they are progressing correctly. In contrast public school students are only tested every 4 years (may have changed since I was in school). In my personal oppinion you have to be very dedicated to it and willing to study or your going to fail. This is not only for the students but for the parents as well.

I have a question now. Do you think that the kids that did not go through the public systems get their college paid for by the state assuming that the main providers of the children are tax payers paying the same taxes as a person that didn’t keep their kids from the “system”? Or do you think that since the parents didn’t utilize what was there then its their loss and shouldn’t be compensated for in any form?

~Andy