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| This cute picture of Tela, Leah, Emma and Sam has nothing to do with my writing today, but it makes me happy to look at it, so I put it up here first...to make you happy before you read |
So, I have a friend on facebook who is a writer and she was tagged in a photo with another writer who happens to be be the previous owner of our house. There was a link to her book, so I had to check it out...right? And it turns out that she has written a book on secular homeschooling. Of course, next I had to read the pages Amazon allows the curious customer to peruse for free. Now, everyone knows that as a Public School Teacher, I can be a bit prejudiced against homeschooling (mostly because we have to try to pick up the slack after the parents let the children play video games all day instead of doing lessons, and then they bring them back to school for us to 'fix'...I give kudos to the parents who do a conscientious job of teaching their children). So I steeled myself to read without being defensive and to truly see her criticisms of public education as being valid. But as I was reading, something was needling me...I couldn't quite grasp what was bugging me. Her thesis was well-written, but...and finally it came to me. The author briefly discloses her background: a bright child who did well at school and got good grades, but was unprepared by the school system to live an independent adult life. She also mentions in passing that she came from a dysfunctional family with a suicidal, agoraphobic mother. Now this is important because what I realized was that her criticism of public education was that it didn't prepare her for life. But MY thesis is that her FAMILY didn't prepare her for life. She blames the schools, and I am so T-I-R-E-D of everyone blaming the schools. It is too easy. She says she learned facts at school, but not how to problem solve. So she has come up with the idea of secular homeschooling to teach her daughters the way she wished she had been taught. She uses her family as the proof text. But lookit here...whether as a teacher or as a mother, she is actively involved in teaching her daughters, they do not have the dysfunctional family she was raised in. I have a feeling they would have been successful whether they had attended public school or homeschool...because of the family, not the education system. Her daughters are headed to a university now (public BTW) and I applaud the author for successfully educating her family. BUT I don't think it is necessary to denigrate the public school system in order to validate her method of secular homeschooling. Obviously there is room for improvement, and we are always striving to make that improvement, but public schools must be doing something right for someone, as our colleges and universities ARE graduating students into the workforce who are bright, competent, creative workers. Thousands of them every year! The media loves to zero in on the students who are not prepared, but the glass really is half full. Teachers do NOT raise your children, we teach them. Parents have been given the job and want to be able to slough it off onto the shoulders of the schools. And, as a final note, the conservative constituents coalition started lobbying for accountability in the schools, which led to a demand for measurable progress, which led to a crappy set of testing (NCLB) and a drill and kill method of teaching that we, as teachers, hated. Now, the pendulum is swinging back to more authentic teaching which includes value given to creative problem solving, cooperative learning, communication, and some other 'c' word that I can't remember at the moment...oh, yeah, collaboration.
