MTheads

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.

Freedom Of Choice, Unless It's School Choice.

Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article about a documentary on public education and charter schools.  The film maker, Madeleine Sackler, started out with the idea to make a documentary about four families participating in New York's Harlem Success Academy's lottery for places at their successful charter school.  She came to the project without strong opinions about school choice.  She says:

Going into the film I was excited just to tell a story, a vérité film, a really beautiful, independent story about four families that you wouldn't know otherwise.

During the filming, she and her crew came across what looked like a protest against Harlem Success Academy outside a school building the charter was seeking to use.  From the article:

They all said 'We're not allowed to talk to you. We're just here to support the parents.'  But there were only two parents there, says Ms. Sackler, and both were members of Acorn. And so, "after not a lot of digging," she discovered that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) had paid Acorn, the controversial community organizing group, "half a million dollars for the year." (It cost less to make the film.)

Finding out that the teachers union had hired a rent-a-mob to protest on its behalf was "the turn for us in the process." That story—of self-interested adults trying to deny poor parents choice for their children—provided an answer to Ms. Sackler's fundamental question: "If there are these high-performing schools that are closing the achievement gap, why aren't there more of them?"

One day k-12 public education will look completely different than it does today.  It'll resemble our university system with students and parents able to choose from any number of ways to get an education.  We'll use the internet and e-books and our homes.  Small schools will open that can cater to specific interests and needs.  It'll become truly democratic and responsive to its customers. 

Gone will be the common student experience of attending assigned schools which pretty much all work the same.  But in its place, students and parents will become responsible for guiding their own educations.  To me anyway, the idea of education as something one participates in is much more exciting than being given a school district and a bus number.

The Price of Perfection

When I read education blogs, I often come across people who make the argument I like to call "fix society first, and then we'll fix education." They argue that it is the racism and the inequalities of our society that are really behind many of our educational problems.  And as long as inequalities remain, many children cannot be educated.

This argument bothers me in so many ways. 

1) First, it assumes our society is irredeemably racist.  Their yard stick is perfection and anything less counts for nothing.

2) There's no acknowledgment, or perhaps knowledge, of how far we've come over the last so many decades.  The law of diminishing returns must have kicked in early.

3) It assumes only white people are truly responsible for their actions, while minorities are products of their environment.

4) It assumes that the mere idea of racism is a stronger deterrent to a good education than any real obstacle, such as bad schools, low expectations, or poor parenting.

5) It is to be completely ungrateful for all the opportunities we do have here in the States.  Get out and travel.  See how many people would love to get into our racist, flawed country and take a shot at getting a good education.

6) It assumes society can be reformed into a utopia devoid of human prejudices and flaws.  That's called a cemetery.

Children don't have multiple childhoods to waste waiting for the perfect society to be formed.  We have to do the best we can in the times we live.  When would have been a better time to fix education?  When will these people be content with the progress we have made? 

I think it all comes down to laziness.  Much easier to blame a society you find distasteful anyway than to actually do anything concrete.