I am goaded into writing because another dear soul has done her best to dissuade me from my false and politically incorrect ways - to sway me, as it were, from my misguided home schooling.
Sigh. People who are afraid of home schooling evidently subscribe to a number of fallacies:1. Teachers know how to teach: Some do. I, personally, know several absolutely swell professional teachers - Dave Chavis, for instance, and Linda Williams. But experience should remind all of us how bad some others have been.
A teaching degree doesn't guarantee that the graduate has mastered even the most basic communication skills - much less that she has a grasp of conceptual reason or a creative mind. My contention is that wonderful teachers are that way by nature; that training can be an enhancement, but hardly a cure.
2. The classroom is the best place for learning: Do I really have to address this? When did I really start learning? When I got out of the classroom and into the real world.
3. Schools are the protector and incubator of close families: Right. Statistics have certainly borne that one out. I suspect that my kids and I are as close as we are because we work together constantly. We have a great time. We understand each other. We share quality and quantity time.
4. School is the real world: Please. Like I spend my whole day surrounded by people who are exactly my own age, knuckling under to eight or nine arbitrarily chosen authority figures and taking showers with 30 or 40 people at a time. Real life is real life - it's knowing how to shop and to do real work - knowing how to live without a thousand peers teaching you the shallow protocols of social life. It's striking out on your own and living the consequences of your own actions.
5. Home schooled kids are "isolated and protected from the world": While my kids are rubbing shoulders with the working musicians of the real world, their peers are trapped behind a desk, popping their gum and learning about music. My kids are using math to run their own businesses - what I'm trying to say here is that my children are not exactly being gypped.
I believe that most people who know my kids will tell you they are decent, independent-thinking, educated, well-mannered, friendly and very much "home educated." I wouldn't have done it any other way.
There are definitely people who should not keep their children at home. On the other hand, there are many people who should be doing it.
The public schools, especially when they are headed by such wonderful people as Provo High's Patty Harrington, can be a terrific resource and should be used with joy and wisdom, but I do not believe that learning should ever be relegated to or dominated by an institution.
Kristen Randle
Provo