“The edu-fascists will not like this”
Education is about parental involvement. You would find the same results if you gathered statistics of similar demographic students in other educational environments.
If you excluded urban minorities, for instance, you’d see a similar statistical disparity in achievement.
If you excluded welfare recipients, you’d see a statistical disparity in achievement.
It’s an exercise in self-selecting statistics.
Education is about parental involvement. You would find the same results if you gathered statistics of similar demographic students in other educational environments.“The edu-fascists will not like this”
If you excluded urban minorities, for instance, you’d see a similar statistical disparity in achievement.
If you excluded welfare recipients, you’d see a statistical disparity in achievement.
It’s an exercise in self-selecting statistics.
I agree with that - as far as it goes. But what are the implications? If in fact the kids of involved and well-educated parents do equally well whether homeschooled or institutionalized, exactly what is our return on investment in those institutions? Apparently, pretty small - if not slightly negative.The virtue I see in homeschooling is that it unites responsibility and authority - however much the schools may preen themselves over their concern for the education of your child, their "concern" is a mere passing thought as compared to your own actual concern if you're not sure your kid is learning at the level you would expect. Consequently if you homeschool then the adult who is most concerned with the result is the one who is in control of the process leading to that result. And that adult is under no illusions that the issue "is being handled by experts."
Those "experts" are entirely capable of selling your child's future down the river for their own self interest, while telling you that they are doing the best for him/her. By, for example, using textbooks which are long on Political Correctness and astonishingly short on content. My brother had the experience of volunteering his time to help a boy who was lost in math class. He looked at the math book, and there was no actual mathematics in it - just a bunch of PC.
I recently read a book entitled (approximately) Why Kids hate school. And altho the book contained a few PC allusions of its own about Bush and Cheney (which probably helped with its target audience, teachers), I thought it was a pretty damning critique of schooling. One thing he noted was that "teaching self esteem" (he never used that term) actually makes kids dumb. Point being, that actual education is merely the child actually thinking about the subject matter - and telling a child that he is smart is actually telling him that effort is irrelevant. The implication being that if he has to work to get the subject, that would imply that he is dumb. So the child does not work - and, sure enough, that makes him dumb.
So?...I appears to me that there is no difference whatsoever between what parents of academically successful institutionalized children are doing in the home, and what my homeschooled kids and I did in the home.
Maybe, these institutionalized children are successful because the parents and kids are doing a great job of “afterschooling”. If success is entirely due to “afterschooling”, then why bother to institutionalize?
It could be that institutionalization of academically successful children is actually retarding their social and academic development.
It is very likely that government schools actually waste the child's life and cost the taxpayers unnecessary expense.
But what happens when the parents, you know, involved with their child's education aren't even at 5th grade level themselves?
Which is the case in inner city schools, which brings Detroit to mind where only some 26% of kids graduate, where the enite community has a 3rd world literacy rate.
The same thing happens decade after decade under godless hypocrat NEA leadership in inner cities, where more money is thrown at a failed model every year with the same tired results, and yet the parents will tell you they're involved just the same, and sadly, probably are.
Which does nothing to diminish the success of homeschooling.
All that reasoning does is come across as from the public school parent as justification for sending their kids to public school instead of taking the time to do it themselves.
Besides, academics aside, there's more to raising kids than just making sure they have good grades.
Homeschooling allows for the development of moral character and the passing on of values and ideology that no amount of deprogramming at the end of every school day can counteract.
In the public schools, their minds WILL be polluted with things that they don't need to see and hear. They will likely NOT get the introduction to profanity and sexually explicit talk that teens can do that once it's in the mind, is there to stay. No amount of deprogramming will remove that.