MTheads

The Council on Foreign Relations Embraces School Choice

WSJ has an interesting essay on yet another group who espouses school choice and competition: School Reform's Establishment Turn. Eventually, school choice will be adopted by everyone and no one will remember why, or admit, they were against it. 

What's Old is New Again, But with a New Blurb on the Dust Cover

Another interesting article calling on progressive people to send their children to local public schools (ht to Joanne Jacobs).  Yes, they claim it's out of principle.  But, dang, they sure can save a lot of money.  They can put that extra money towards a good State school.

Sending My Kids to Public School: Why being a part of the system is how to fix it By Rhiana Maidenberg

Yeah! for these recent essays making the case for upper-middle class/progressive kinds of parents to enroll their children in local schools and to become part of the solution.  It's a better argument than going after people for not putting their children into the local schools.  Put your own children into local schools before criticizing other people for not doing so.  Anyway, arguments against choice and vouchers lack moral umph when made from people whose own children attend stellar public schools or private academies.

But fair warning:  For those who think their decision to opt in is revolutionary, fixing the system from the inside has been an on-going and thankless process pursued by parents for decades, and no more likely to be effective without real choice for all parents.

Funny world when progressives and Charles Murray all agree on something:

Changing life in the SuperZIPs requires that members of the new upper class rethink their priorities. Here are some propositions that might guide them: Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you're not part of that America, you've stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.

Such priorities can be expressed in any number of familiar decisions: the neighborhood where you buy your next home, the next school that you choose for your children, what you tell them about the value and virtues of physical labor and military service, whether you become an active member of a religious congregation (and what kind you choose) and whether you become involved in the life of your community at a more meaningful level than charity events.

 

A Life Lived Differently and Its Enemies

When young, I was greatly intrigued by the lives of children whose parents chose to live in unusual ways:

- Children who accompanied their scientist parents rather than attend school. What's not to love about growing up on a yacht?

- Children of missionaries who grew up in Africa, running wild with the natives, and doing school through mail-ordered texts.

- Children whose parents raised them on communes. Again, little formal schooling and lots of running around in nature.

- Children who were sent overseas to boarding schools.  Sounded like heaven to me, cavorting in the Alps.

- Children of diplomats who travelled the world.  Some children have all the luck.

- Parents who dragged their children around in an old RV in the search of good surfing and odd jobs. While this may not have suited every child, I highly suspect I'd have embraced it.  Surfing and no school....If I get a second life...

I love the idea of shaping life to suit oneself rather than conforming to society's norms. 

Many of us love the idea of a bohemian or unusual lifestyle.  NPR and the New York Times constantly highlight unusual people and jobs and lifestyles.  Children's television loves to use that sing-songy voice to slowly explain that not all children live in a brownstone town home in New York City like little Noah or Emily.  Some children actually live on ranches or in arctic villages and they are just as good as you and me.  Didn't have to convince child me of this!  They had it made!

I hold that, for some of us, this attraction to the uncommon is part of the reason we home school.  We don't see why we have to do things the way everybody else does.  Sending kids off to school while both parents commute to dull jobs where they complain to each other how stressed out they are doesn't hold much appeal to me.  If I can avoid living like this, I will.

Even if.  Even if every other person in America thinks we should all conform to one kind of life in order to create societal cohesion through shared experience.  Even if my peers think my children will be at a disadvantage because we have opted out of the college bound rat race.  Even if people who embrace just about any edgy lifestyle think home schooling goes too far. Thank God we live in a free society.

 

 

 

Now That I Home-School, I Support It

While I was composing my last post on various arguments against homeschooling, I came across this article, Liberals,  Don't Homeschool Your Kids: Why teaching children at home violates progressive values at Slate.com.  Hat tip to Joanne Jacobs for bringing the article to my attention.  While the actual arguments made by the author aren't particularly new or clever, the responses are very enlightening.

Not so long ago, leftists, liberals, progressives, democrats, or whatever people on the center to left of the political spectrum call themselves, were fairly consistent in their disapproval of home schooling.  They wanted to outlaw it, regulate it, test it, restrict it.  When homeschoolers proved too legally savvy to defeat in court, liberal types instead mocked it.  "Conform!" was their rallying cry.

But things have changed.  Despite the author's appeal to progressives' innate sense of duty to enlighten and improve the rest of us by setting good examples, most of the responses to her article were in favor of home schooling! Self-declared liberal after liberal skewered her arguments and defended the rights of parents to do what they consider is best for their children, not what some ideologically driven members of society think is best.

And best of all, they recognize the totalitarian nature of assuming society, or anybody, has a right to demand we give over our children for the good of society. We do not have a moral obligation to support public schools by turning our children over to them.  Public schools serve us, not the other way around.  Let's not mix up educating our children with social engineering and redemption. 

Anyway, it's great to see a greater swath of our society accept home-schooling. 

 

Home-Schoolers are too Cool

Unfortunately for those who hate the kind of people they imagine are homeschooling, the truth is quite different.  Home-schoolers come in all sorts of flavors, to include hippy, secular, progressive, and free-thinking.  And many of these iconoclasts are well educated and able to write.  And don't forget the lawyers.  Home-schooling is legal and mostly unregulated in all 50 states because of constant vigilance and judicial activism, not because we're a country which values educational choice.

Home-schooled students also do as well as or better than, depending on which set of figures you check out, traditionally schooled students.  So, if home-schoolers aren't all aesthetically unappealing bible thumpers, how can self-appointed, authoritarian types crush homeschooling's sexy non-conformity while pretending it's all in the name of diversity?  Why, charge sexy edgy homeschooling families with letting down the team! Call us privileged and selfish!

We're privileged because some one in the couple has to be making a selfishly large salary to allow the other one the luxury of staying home and lavishing huge amounts of effort on their spoilt children's education.  That's not fair for those who do not have that option or who prefer to put their money elsewhere.  In fairness, all of our children ought to meet on a level school yard.  Well, unless, of course, one can afford to live in a good school zone or pay for private school.  Let's not talk crazy here! 

We're selfish because we are not meeting our social obligations to be shining examples for all the less enlightened parents and students.  We're also stunting our children's ability to empathize with people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds by not having them mix it up in public schools.

Here are my counter arguments:

1) Homeschooling families are economically diverse.  Many of us make material and career sacrifices to keep one of us home.  The statistics bear this out.  Critics ought to let us know where they live and how much in property tax they pay, so we can determine whether they are being socially responsible citizens or not.

2) I don't care who you think I ought to know or who you think my children ought to mix with.  That's our call, not yours.  We all choose our social groups -- to include all the people who struggle to land a house in a good school zone.  Go after their commitment to a diverse schooling experience.  There are so many more of them.

3) I'm interested in the intellectual development of my children, not in hardening their class consciousness with cliches about the moral importance of sitting in the same room as other children assigned to be there based only on property taxes and location.  Feel free to pretend your children are better people simply by being in proximity of what you label "diversity".  Or that your children enrich the lives of others  because you consider yourself enlightened. 

 

Anti-Homeschooling Types, Part II

Homeschool critics deconstructed, part II

4) Tyranny of the Teachers' Guild:  This critic argues that only people with the proper teaching credentials should be allowed to educate children.  After all, knowledge only comes to those who take education courses in college. That's where teachers learn the secret handshake to unlock the subtle workings of the universe and how to pass it on.

5) School as Social Services:  Without daily interaction with outsiders in an institutional setting, how can we be sure children aren't being abused at home?  This critic fears that home-schoolers have too much freedom to abuse their children.  Not that they would, but without supervision they probably are. 

Perhaps, they suggest, we could at least regulate home-schooling, get an expert inside the home, to look around and make sure these children aren't being abused.  Why not?  Studies show abused children are most likely to be homeschooled...wait, no they don't. 

6) Born-Again Phobics: This anti-homeschooler doesn't like the idea of a child's education being left up to a crazy, born-again woman in a jean jumper maternity dress.  Bible reading, bread baking, home births -- these families are so strange.  And there is no greater danger to civilization than the insidious belief that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Burn the witches for their heresy!

Better these children attend school and be exposed to normal people with their correct embrace of a nihilistic, science-based agnosticism.  Only then will they be free to choose their own path, as long as it isn't homeschooling their children in some crazy religion!

 

Types of Homeschool Critics, Part I

Types of homeschool critics

1) The Worrier:  She is so sad that your children are going to miss out on the best years of her, oops, their lives --  the friends, the clubs, the boys, the dances, the student council, the pep rallies, the school newspaper; all the delights of the self-contained world of the public high school.  She thrived during her school years and assumes everyone else will enjoy them as much as she. 

But there is not a mean bone in her body.  And she is sincere in her concern, just not particularly imaginative.  She'll come around eventually.

2) The Socialization Expert:  This person fears your homeschooled child will become a weirdo, unable to function in society with anyone who is not his mother.  See, she once met someone who knew of a homeschooled child who had trouble working in groups.  Case closed.  Of course, she completely overlooks the obvious, that the vast majority of unpleasant people in our society went to public schools.

3) Homeschoolers are Segregationists:  This person is a bit more mean spirited than the previous two types.  She believes homeschoolers are all racists and misogynists who want to isolate their children from contact with people unlike themselves.  While she has never actually known anyone who homeschools, she and her friends have read about it in various liberal news sources.

While attributing to you the worst of reasons why to homeschool, she and her proper thinking friends send their own children to private schools or buy into good school zones -- the acceptable upper-middle class way of walling off one's child from the masses.

More types later....

If you want to get a good feel for how the squares view homeschooling, read this debate in the NYT. 

I'll Clean My Room After We've Eliminated Third World Poverty.

I like to read the comments on articles in the NYTs.  And I've noticed a good number of the commentators like to use a particularly dopey argument.  It has to do with: until A happens, B doesn't exist for me. 

No subject, be it ticks on dogs to John Edwards to the perfect cocktail, can be debated without making reference to Bush's two illegal wars.  Nothing anyone does can be deemed inappropriate or illegal until we have prosecuted Bush's (no one bothers with the "President" title) two illegal wars.  We can't go after lying cheating idiotic democrat politicians until we've gone after the greedy bankers who destroyed our economy on Bush's watch who started two illegal wars. 

Republican politicians, however, are still fair game because family values are one of their issues.  Strange this using of different sets of standards by which to judge people.  It certainly makes it easier to defend one's positions.  Maybe the greedy bankers were only using a different set of standards, too.  One which favored them.  Who are we to judge?

There are idiots out there who still defend John Edwards.  They think he's being persecuted for caring too much for the little guy.  You are a little guy mentally if you think he cares one tiny bit about you.  These are the same people who think President Obama can heal with a glance.  I've read again and again people who write that they trust President Obama to always make the right choice.  No need for that part of the brain which weighs facts and makes judgements.  They can fill that flabby area instead with pro-union slogans. 

This A first, then B is the same argument used by opponents of school reform.  They argue we need to first fix our broken society before we can fix our schools. Pol Pot made a similar argument. I'll take stabs at reforming our schools within our current system of justice over their idea of perfect social justice any day.  Fewer dead people. 

Now for some entertainment!

Teachers For Justice  a scary site more concerned with Honduras and LGBTQIA/Queer issues in education than with providing a good education to poor children.  You can bet these people like a good drum circle.  

Rethinking Schools  Another favorite "social justice on the backs of brown children" site of mine.   Get some popcorn.  The site is that entertaining.  Teaching Budget Cuts to Third Graders is an actual article in the latest issue. I wanted to mock the article, but I couldn't.  It is a mockery already.  Please, think about reading it and being changed for the better. 

Reactionaries Demand Schools Just Like Grandma Attended

Another essay on the success of vouchers.  Wall Street Journal: The Evidence Is In - School Vouchers Work.

Why fight vouchers?  Is it the "team" mentality, where one foregoes thinking and adopts whichever side is taken by their political peer group?

Many people believe the current system of public schooling is fine.  It is society that needs to be reformed...Always nice to have an iron clad excuse for failure -- the imperfectability of mankind.

Consider opening your minds and imagining a world that has moved on from the 50's.  Talk about your reactionaries. 

More School Choice

Quick link to article on school choice from the Wall Street Journal.  Michigan Pushes for School Choice.

The education revolution will happen.  First the discontents,  the freethinkers, and the visionaries. Then those in the middle with the ability to see.  Lastly, the enemies of change will co-opt the issue as their own.  That stage is almost here.