Wednesday, September 13, 2006

The Carnival of Homeschooling

PedagogyThis week’s Carnival of Homeschooling is up, hosted by Principled Discovery. There are so many participants this time that I couldn’t begin to list them all. But I’ll give you a couple of samples.

The Imperfect Homeschooler attempts a gentle re-education of John Stossel, who recently published a column supporting homeschoolers but expressing amazement that anyone could manage to do it. The verdict? “You could handle it, Mr. Stossel”:

Their kids come home from school sullen after being locked up in a classroom all day, hardly interested in tackling their homework, and ready to fight about it. Meanwhile, Mom and Dad are beat from a long day of work preceded and followed by a harrowing commute. They feel like supervising the kids’ homework about as much as having a root canal, but it must be done. So the exhausted parents fight with the cranky kids about doing their homework, and that’s the picture homeschooling brings to mind when these parents consider the concept.

People only know what they know. How can I get across to Stossel and the rest of them that homeschooled kids aren’t kids who come home every afternoon irritable and tired? Kids who haven’t gone to school have ownership of their time. They don’t have to ask for permission in front of thirty kids when they have to go to the bathroom. They eat when they’re hungry, not from 11:15 to noon because it said so on their schedule. They don’t have to worry whether what they’re wearing is in style; it may be pajamas, anyway. The freedom homeschooled kids have makes them different people than they would have been if they’d been going to school every year.

When I was homeschooling the Future Baron Bodissey, homeschoolers were generally considered wackos, and their kids were weird. I heard the same question over and over again, “I can see why a homeschooled kid can learn well, but how will he ever be socialized?” It was so predictable that I could have had cards printed up with my response, which was to say dryly, “Right — I’ve noticed what a good job the public schools are doing at socializing children.”

Now that so many homeschooled children have grown up and gone on to college to become well-rounded top scholars and graduate at the top of their class, the criticisms have had to change. Many people still object to homeschooling — it’s just not right — but their arguments are different. K-Dad discusses the constantly shifting objections to homeschooling:

Home schooling and public schools are built on contradictory foundations. Public schools are systems designed to reach “all children.” Home schools are intended to serve “this child.” It is the difference between “each child” and “every child” that explains the criticism of home schooling. Any system designed for all children has to rely on “one-size-fits-all” methods sometimes.

You can design a system for “all children,” but you can’t design a system for each child. It takes a person, not a system, to reach a child. Home schooling works because it is about people, not systems…

That’s the reason that we must oppose the other criticism, “home schooling is fine for qualified parents.” Public schools are tax-funded, government-run, and expert-driven. Home schools generally get by on little more than faith, hope, and charity. There are some parents who can’t teach chemistry, but there are no parents who can’t look for someone to help. There are parents who can’t spell, but none that can’t look for someone who can. The only absolutely essential qualifications for a home schooler are that they love their children and do whatever it takes to help them succeed.

There’s much, much more available — resources, tips, anecdotes, and just plain entertainment — at the Carnival of Homeschooling.

4 comments:

Mr. Spog said...

I don't know if this Brussels Journal article has caught the eye of homeschoolers on this side of the Atlantic. "Homeschooling is illegal in Germany since Hitler banned it in 1938." Paul Belien, the editor of that site, is himself being harassed by the Belgian government as a homeschooler with unacceptable political views.

Jesse said...

"they love their children and do whatever it takes to help them succeed."

Amen. js

Anonymous said...

One thing I hold against homeschoolers, of which I am one and have been so since 1992. In general we adhere to a retreatist philosophy of education. Those of us who, like the Muslims who homeschool for religious reasons, do it to be true to our Faith, forget that, if we're Christians, we're called by God to take our quiver full of arrows and use them at the gates, where we're to confront our enemies. (Psalm 127:4-5)

Like arrows in the hand of a warrior,
So are the children of one’s youth.
Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them;
They shall not be ashamed,
But shall speak with their enemies in the gate.

Instead, when the children are old enough to have their academics straight and a comparative strength of character superior to their peers, enough to be useful in such strategic endeavors as Psalm 127 indicates, we ship them off to college to get ambushed (They need the grade for the sheepskin after all, don’t they?) or to Corporate America to conform to the norm (“Pay-check, please…) or to "ministry" overseas, when their own land is being overrun by unbelief, their own neighborhood chuck full with modern paganism.

So you tell me. Where is the concentration of homeschoolers changing the culture? In nearly 15 years that I’ve been a part of this community, I’ve yet to see anything but a retreatist attitude practiced no matter what their visionaries have articulated. (“We’re building the next generation of leaders!” Oh, yeah? How successful is a leader at the head of a mob?) The mob I refer to is the one being indoctrinated in our public schools, unholy ground that homeschoolers do not dare tread. Those are the people homeschoolers are being raised to lead. Will they listen? Not likely. Homeschoolers can’t even bring radical change to their own churches, let alone to the rest of society. They can’t even unite to pull Islamic propaganda out of their local middle-schools, where their future “followers” receive their training!

At the individual household level, the homeschooling choice is the wisest and brings rich rewards, for the parents alone are most accountable for the children’s rearing and ought to have the utmost say in what is taught to those they steward. But at a community level, the homeschooling movement is no better than collective cowardice, after 30 years of “movement.”

Profitsbeard said...

I tried homeschooling myself (it was called "playing hookey" back then) by the method of apparently "leaving the house for school" in the morning, hiding in the garage with a flashlight, reading Tarzan books all day, and then writing a reasonable facsimile of one of my parents' notes excusing myself for being absent because I was "sick". (I was sick ...of school's mind-numbing banality and narrow, uninspiring curriculum... but I didn't mention that part in the bogus epistles.)

I wish the Internet, home-based Charter schooling and such liberating marvels had existed when I was surreptitiously reading -nestled among old dufflebags, disemboweled lawn mowers and rusty tools- about Opar and Ant-Men, but such wonders were still in the realm of Verne and Wells, as far as my unimaginative teachers were concerned.

Long live the freedom from pedantics!