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Homeschooling - It really isn't that complicated

Another critic had taken it upon himself to research homeschooling. I'm not sure where he was surfing in his research because he certainly didn't learn much.

I’ve been reading a lot of homeschooling blogs lately and I generally find the defensive rationale behind homeschooling more sad than thrilling and more frightened than innovative. Children cannot become well-rounded adults if they are ground only one way.

Of course, the public school system is well known for providing a well rounded variety of educational opportunities for kids. If your school kid doesn't "get" math based on the textbook that the committee spent 3 years choosing, he is screwed. There is no alternative. If a home educated kid is having problems the parents chuck the math curriculum and try something else. Every kid is different, and contrary to the opinions of the educational establishment, there is no one best way to teach something. Mass education doesn't work.

Homeschooling appears to divide and separate while public and private schools — and even some Charter schools — choose to blend various ideas and ways of thinking to help children become greater in society and not just an individual at home.

The typical public school is hundreds or thousands of kids all from the same geographic locale and usually from very similar socio-economic backgrounds. They all are expected to learn the same thing at the same time and progress at the same rate. There is no blending of ideas, the whole point is that everybody should turn out the same. Every single kid in any public school in America is held to the exact same state standards for advancement (whatever the hell that means), with absolutely no consideration given to that unique kids abilities or interests.

No child can succeed in society until he first succeeds within himself. The schools, and David Boles, have it exactly backwards.

As a public and private school educator who was raised by generations of public school teachers in the Republican Midwest, I am curious to know the appeal of pulling children out of a mainstream education and isolating them in a home environment as a strategy for fully educating their minds and forming their experiences on a worldwide level.

Isolating? Homeschool kids are out in the world. While the poor schoolie kids are locked in a windowless room watching a 20 year old filmstrip about rock formations, the homeschool kids will be at the local quarry learning about geology by digging through the dirt. The school kids are the isolated ones. The are stuck in a room all day, forbidden to speak out loud without advance permission, and under threat of felony charge if they dare leave the grounds. What a great way to grow up. You can have it. My kids deserve better, and they are getting it.

Sure there are certain homeschooled children who are able to find a way to shine in the system, but homeschooling, at its core, seems to encourage hiding and separation and discourages tolerance for interacting with a variety of peers who may be foreign to the family core.

I'm starting to think this guys idea of research is looking at one or two sites that he knows will validate his preconceived ideas. He sure didn't spend anytime on blogs written by any of the regulars around here. The only thing my kids are hiding from is the house. They are never here. They are out interacting with people who are foreign to the family core.

I know there are drugs and violence and other threats to children in public and private and Charter schools but in what way does homeschooling protect and prepare children from those inevitable hard realities of the adult world except to delay their exposure to all the elements — both good and bad — in which our lives spin?

7 year olds aren't emotionally equipped to deal with drugs and violence. However, they are forced to grow up in an environment that teaches them to expect the worst in people because they see it everyday. Life is about choices and homeschoolers learn that way better than the school kids. The school kids have no choices. They are told where to go, when to be there, and who to be with from age 5 to 17. Does the real world really work that way? I don't think so. In the real world you get to choose when to get up, when to learn, who to hang out with, and you also learn that choices have consequences, good and bad. How exactly do kids who can't even choose what they want for lunch each day ever learn to make a choice that matters? They don't, and the consequences of that are all around us.

The world is getting smaller and our intimate neighbors are now nations, not just homes on the same block. Children need to learn how to interact with all neighbors — even if they don’t agree with them — in order to form a world of respect and understanding.

And they learn that in the Lord of Flies enactment that is the public school playground? Make that lunchroom, playgrounds are out as they don't have time to play in school these days. They are too busy trying to protect their teachers tenure by passing some arbitrary standardized test mandated by bureaucrats who haven't set foot in a school in 20 years. Kids were way more respectful and understanding 100 years ago when none of them were turned over to the state for most of their waking hours. Public school is the last place I'd expect a kid to learn to be understanding and respectful. The environment teaches the exact opposite.

Are there parents who homeschool for non-religious reasons?

His research skills certainly don't speak highly of the MFA program at Columbia. Google search on "secular homeschooling" that returns 94,000 hits. If you are going to write this crap at least pull your head out of ass long enough to look around at the real world. If nothing else it would have saved you the embarrassment of asking such a stupid question.

Other searches.
Pagan Homeschooling
Atheist Homeschooling

Of course, the question does betray his real issue with homeschooling.

If the intention of educating children is to raise them to be good citizens of the world and not just of the home, how can we, as a nation, support the idea of homeschooling as an appropriate form of education for teaching not just Math and English and History but tolerance and social interaction as well?

Here is the really cool thing about homeschooling. We don't give a damn whether you support it or not. It's legal in all 50 states, not that the legal issue really stopped us in the past.

Of course, if David Boles had actually done any research he'd know that homeschooling is all about the individual right to choose their course in life, without it being dictated by a government school. Really, homeschooling should be a liberal cause, and it once was. However, the political left in America is so blinded by their fear of organized religion that they can't see the the trees for the forest.

An institutional building staffed by government trained and certified instructors, dictating a curriculum designed in government committees, is the absolute last place you'd expect anybody to learn anything important.