America's public schools have "dumbed our children down, drugged them up and sexed them out," said Ezola Foster, the keynote speaker at a large home-schooling convention at the University of Utah Saturday.
Foster may have been a little more outspoken in her criticism than many at the Utah Home Education Association's (UHEA) 21st annual convention and fair, but almost all of the 2,000 people at the convention agreed with Foster's assertion that home schooling was preferable to the alternatives.
Addressing the children in the half-filled Kingsbury Hall, Foster said, "All you young people — you should turn around and thank your parents profusely for keeping you out of government schools."
John Yarrington, president and chairman of the board of the UHEA, said public school education was a relatively new idea but that home schooling in one form or another had been around for a long time.
"I'm not combative," Yarrington said. "Public schools are full of marvelous people. I just think things could be done a lot better than they're being done. Who doesn't think that? Really, every parent is a home schooler. They work with their kids before school, after school. They're still their kids' primary teacher."
Barney Madsen, a lawyer from Sandy, said he and his wife turned to home schooling their four children in 1993 when they became frustrated with the public school system.
"We'd been living in England for three years," Madsen said. "We moved to Fairfax County, Va., which is supposed to have the best public schools in the country. But the more I got involved, the more frustrated I became. Our oldest son, Jed, wanted to work ahead of where his class was, but he couldn't. He just had to do busywork until the rest of the class caught up."
Madsen said home schooling had brought his children a number of benefits, such as the freedom to choose the subjects they were interested in, the time to read instead of doing busywork and the chance to be around people of all ages as opposed to just those in their immediate age group.
"I think there's a perception that home-schooled kids are isolated and insulated, and perhaps to a certain degree they are, but it's in a positive way," Madsen said. "They don't get a lot of the negative socialization from their peers. They're comfortable associating with varying ages. My son Jed, who's now 18, likes to read to our 7-year-old daughter. I don't know a lot of 18-year-olds who do that. Also, Jed is so much brighter than I was at his age, and it's because he's read so much."
Morgan, Lauren and Caty Shaw of Las Vegas, who are in 10th, eighth and sixth grades, agreed with Madsen that home schooling allowed them more freedom to learn.
"I went to public school until 4th grade," said Morgan. "But I like home schooling better because I can choose what I want to learn, and study at my own pace."
Morgan added that she got plenty of socializing from friends, children in the neighborhood and church. She said she loved "family time" in the mornings when they read scripture.
More than 70 workshops were offered at the convention, ranging from "medieval fencing" for teenagers to "The Development of a Home School," and just about everything in between.
For more information on this subject, see the UHEA Web site at www.utah-uhea.org.
E-mail: wbettmann@desnews.com