Posted on 01/08/2005 5:28:17 PM PST by wagglebee
I was sitting at our neighborhood pool New Year’s morning, enjoying the great South Florida weather while trying to grind out a couple of chapters for my new book, when three high school girls took the chaise lounges next to me and started talking about their New Year’s Eve party with their high school mates.
Seemingly still semi-drunk from the party, the 16- and 17-year-old girls began to recount how much coke, weed, vodka, guys and girls they did the night before. Listening to the F-bomb riddled report of the previous night’s peccadilloes left me thinking, how sad … and … what a waste … and … thank God my wife and I yanked our kids out of the public school system and away from these visionless, dissolute and spoiled morons.
It’s been eleven months since we pulled our teenage daughters out of the public school system and started to home school them, and I could kick myself for waiting so long. The educational, emotional, spiritual and physical progress they have made has been amazing. Not that they were anti-intellectual psychologically teetering bloated decadent nut jobs before they started home schooling, it’s just that I’ve been ecstatically stunned at how they have aggressively embraced this new lease on their educational life.
Now … they actually get to study the basics, pursue their educational and athletic interests, without waiting for the 186% overcrowded class to decide to cease fighting and copulating long enough that the teacher can teach the students how to write their name so that they can endorse their unemployment check later on in life.
Also, it seems that our alpha females really do not miss . . .
· Having everything they hold dear from a Christian standpoint trashed like a hotel room with Sum41 in it, by secular and atheistic teachers and students,
· Enduring the daily physical assaults and threats made by the multitudinous scum bag thugs and punk gang bangers on campus,
· Watching the constant drug trafficking, and
· Trying to ignore the lesbian, queer and over-the-top heterosexual make-out sessions during their lunch break.
Instead of being the goofy-looking home-schooled inbred stooges portrayed by TV and movies, my ladies are sharp, solid and full of holy chutzpah. Yeah … they’re clipping along at a nice pace, taking classes like macro-economics, logic, Latin, intelligence and national security, and afterward, pursuing the martial art of jiu-jitsu from the world-famous Gracie family, surfing and occasionally going with me big game hunting and fishing. Getting away from the prison-like public school system has caused their spirit and vision to soar even higher as they have resolutely separated from the pack and decided to run their own lives, rather than schlep with the lemmings.
My ClashPoint is this: parent . . . home schooling isn’t as tough as you think it is. With the advent of online virtual schools, plus the tens of thousands of people who have bailed out of the system, there are afforded to you, the home schooling parent and student, amazing resources, local networks of like-minded families and world-class curricula, to help you help yours be the leaders God intends for them to be.
Initially, I was a bit concerned about how home schooling was going to work within the insanity which is the Giles household, but it has been relatively painless. The adjustments my wife and I have had to make to our routine to accommodate our daughters for greatness are far less painful than the worry and concern we had sending them off to the monkey jungle which is the Public School system.
Mr, Giles also has a radio program here:
http://clashradio.com/
===
===
http://www.truthusa.com/RADIO.html
Will there be pictures?!
Oh yeah! My sister homeschools her three, two boys and a girl, ages 12, 9 and 5. In the city where she lives they have a homeschool co-op where the kids can go to get some of their classes, and the cirriculum is totally controlled by the parents. It's the only way to go.
Part of the argument against homeschooling used to be that your kids wouldn't be socialized. I would say, in the light of the spirit of this article, like that's such a bad thing?
Well, obviously these girls are being deprived. </sarcasm>
I encourage homeschooling but this is a parent problem. The schools aren't responsible for kids partying all night not having public manners and morals. I know many kids that are public schooled that have parents that would not tolerate this.
Indicative of all the public high schools in Florida??
All public schools are bad? Is that sort of like stating all black men have lon... or perhaps all Irishmen are drun... or maybe any of the other hundreds of erroneous stereotypical popular topics.
And you obviously went to a public school that didn't teach you how to spell curriculum.
JUST KIDDING!
Well, yours truly is homeschooled.
So this article suggests that the schools should police the teens at new years parties off of school grounds?
Both my brother and I are public school products and I think we both turned out pretty well....
His wife Lauralee, who was also a scientist, homeschooled their children until her death in November 1988, when the children were 12, 10, 8, 6, 6, and 16 months. During the past ten years, Dr. Robinson and the children have continued their homeschooling by developing a program entirely based upon self-teaching.
Oh goodness, Bless them both.
Homeschool ping.
A point easily missed in this story. The first thing I thought of when I read this was that the parents of these kids that allow them to stay out all night and party are responsible, not the school.
That said, I will also say that I have very little regard for public schools. My daughter is a high school teacher and I have learned a lot from her. She is a dedicated teacher but her views and skills are stiffled by government laws and regulations.
I have read much the same from other members here who are also public school teachers.
WHOOPS! That'll teach me to start spellchecking, huh?
I did go to publik skools, but this was back when dirt was still new, and schools were very, very different!
Thank you for a voice of reason.
And not all public schools are the cesspools described in the article, I'm not saying there aren't any, I'm just saying not all of them are.
My brother is a cop in an upscale, wealthy, public junior high school in a town of about 100,000. He averages two arrests per week for violence against students and teachers, as well as possession of drugs and drug trafficking.
He used to be very against our decision to homeschool our kids because of the socialization issue. And then it hit him. As he was gazing over the lunchroom one day, he wondered, "Now which of these little creeps would I want my nephews socialized BY?"
Go, TEEN! Just the fact that you are FReeping and homeschooled gives me hope for my kids as they get older.
I mean, where else can you get such a great civics curriculum at these prices?
seeing i am a junior in a florida public high school, i can personaly attest to this assessment being dead on accurate. the descriptions of students given in the article may not be correct for most of the state but in broward county it is.
Good gravy! This argument again?
Our kids have terrific Public Schools. I am pleased to see a voice of reason on here.
Good for Giles. We pulled our teenage daughters out of a 3200-student overcrowded high school and put them in a charter school which ran a program as a hybrid public school/home school. Some classes were taught on-site with professional teachers. Most of the courses were computer courses which the students could tackle at their own speed and order. In addition, the school offered on-site tutoring courses for computer courses for which some students had trouble dealing with, such as math. I was their education coordinator and met monthly with their school counselor to chart their progress and set goals for the following month.
My daughters had asked me to pull them out for years but I resisted. What pushed me over the edge was two things: the older daughter (junior) got an American History teacher who had a doctorate from Berkeley and was seriously down on America. Her first assignment was an essay on whether it was better to teach only the "good" things about America or "the truth". I helped my daughter frame a response that said, yes, they need to know the negatives but they also need to know the positives so that they believe America is a country worth working to improve instead of a lost cause. You would not believe the caustic comments from her teacher written on her paper such as "I wish I could believe America was worth saving." There were at least half a dozen other negative comments on that one paper alone. The teacher meeting was equally negative.
The second thing that soured me on public education was with my younger daughter (sophomore) at the time. She was struggling with math and her math teacher decided that those kids in his class who finished their work early could tune into MTV on the classroom television while others tried to work on math.
So I put the girls in this charter school and I and they have been very happy. They both have good personal relationships with their teachers. They had opportunities to work on projects and go on field trips and enjoy other benefits. My older daughter now attends college and my younger one is looking forward to attending college next fall. They have done well on standardized tests and are articulate and fully socialized. Never regretted it.
Its a BS argument used by the teachers union. You can enroll kids in so many different programs (i.e. youth hockey, little league, volunteer service, pee wee football, altar boys if your catholic, etc) that socialization is not even anything like a problem.
My greatest complaint about this tired arguement, is it refuses to take into consideraton the good public schools that are out there, like where you and I send our kids.
Can you imagine the uproar here if those of us that do send our children to public school continually compared ALL home schoolers to that one that killed all her children.
What gives them the right to trash us all the time.
Well, no, not ALL public schools are bad. You could move to small town USA: 1,000 people? maybe, but try even smaller....
Moving to small town USA, is EXACTLY what we did.....it's a great school district in a small rural county.
"All public schools are bad?"
Yes. To me, when I hear parents compare public schools, it sounds no different than prisoners comparing cell blocks. Meaning some may appear better than others, but anyone with half a brain knows they're all terrible places and the best thing to do is get out.
I got whipped up on for that very same remark, re: Andrea Yates. "How dare you!" with 10,000 variations about how she wasn't the norm.
Well, duh!
I'm paying a lot of taxes and my kids go to the highest performing schools in the state. Yeah, so we live in Oklahoma. I guess that negates the fact that my youngest's teacher was Oklahoma's Teacher of the Year. We do wear shoes, regardless of what the knee-jerkers like to think.
All parents need to do what they think is right for their children. I hope the holier than thou types are comfortable in their Burkas.
We have a steady population of about 5,000 here. My youngest son had his teacher named Oklahoma Teacher of the Year.
"All public schools are bad?"
To put it another way:
There are 2 types of public schools:
1) The ones that do a lousy job, and the parents know about it.
- and -
2) the ones that do a lousy job, but manage to keep the parents from finding out.
I'll send my kids to a good public school before I'll send them to a private or parochial school. Been there, done that with both.
I won't go as far as commenting on a parent who puts their kid in public school - as I obviously cannot know their circumstances. But I have done a LOT of reading on people that do track what goes on in public schools and it's pretty darn scary.
Thank you - I couldn't remember her name, and so didn't want to make a mistake.
My SIL came to visit today, and we of course got talking about education and public schools, as she works for the Delaware affiliate of Jobs for American Graduates, which is a school to work transition program. The national JAG program was originated in Delaware by then Governor Pete DuPont.
She stays with it because she loves her job and can see what good the program is doing to help, because the public schools in general are just plain lousy in Delaware.
It's a major reason we are in the part of Virginia we are. hubby's got a bumper sticker on his truck....."We're RURAL, not stupid on the Eastern Shore of VA."
There is one private school in this county and the teenage daughters of several of our friends refuse to go there because of the party atmosphere and drug problems. The gang activity is pretty bad as well.
I did a lot of research before we moved, I checked out public and private schools in 14 counties when we made the decision to move out of Dover.
I had some of all, public school, private school and home school. My favorite was the home school. Let me go at my own pace (that was ahead of the school) and let me socialize with those who were my choice rather than pushed by peer pressure. I hope to home school my kids (when I have them) the whole way.
All of the cops' kids went to the Catholic HS in my home town. It was situated diagonally from my public HS.
They were the worst of the worst. Dealing drugs, screwing, shoplifting, etc. Many are the tales I could tell you that would get me banned.
I agree that you shouldn't have to see an article like this- we can not make blanket statements about any group.
I know you asked this of anny....but I'd like to respond, about my own personal case.
One of the things that attracted me to this particular school district is the amount of parental involvement that they encourage, and expect.....from the school board, down to the principal, to the teachers. Parents are encouraged to monitor clases, have lunch in the cafeteria with their child, as well as volunteer in the classrooms.
Make no mistake, I know there are bad public schools, it's part of the reason we chose to leave Delaware, but not all public schools are dens of iniquity controlled by liberals looking to dumb down the kids. But it does take some work to find them......just like it took a lack of work on the part of parents to let the bad ones get that way.
Not around here. I'm in the Bible Belt. My kids get to sing Carols, salute the Flag and make little figures of the Cross and the Baby Jesus. You're mistaken about the "trash" filtering down. I have been sending kids to school for over 20 years. Parochial schools are a ghetto.
ROFL!!!!!!!!!
I'm a cop's kid that went to Catholic school in NYC..........I know exactly what you are talking about....and that was quite a few years ago.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.