I think this is cool but it wasn't for us.
I am all for home schooling, but unfortunately you get the idiots doing it too.
When does she think they are going to come home with a sudden interest in integral calculus, or valence shell electron pair repulsion theory?
Maybe mom is too stupid to know such things exist, or maybe the newspapers are trying to make home schooling sound bad.
It's probably both.
"..an estimated 1.1 million nationwide.."
Seems they have recited that number for years. I will bet it is a lot higher than that.
We home school and we use a curriculum.
We have some friends that are "unschoolers" and don't use any curriculum. There kids no how to read, write, and do arithmetic just fine.
Both my kids no how to ride a bike. We certainly didn't need any formal curriculum to teach them. They went riding with us, saw other kids riding, and wanted to learn how to ride. We told them a few things, pushed them along for a bit and they figured it out. It's called learning and children do it very well. Sadly, most adults have stopped.
“As school choice expands and home-schooling in general grows, this is one of those models that I think the larger public sphere needs to be aware of because the folks who are engaging in these radical forms of school are doing so legally,” said Professor Huerta of Columbia. “If the public and policy makers don’t feel that this is a form of schooling that is producing productive citizens, then people should vote to make changes accordingly.”
Apparently, the point of school is to produce productive citizens. Welcome to pre-WWI Germany.
Some officials don't like the competition. That said, this completely unstructured home schooling ("unschooling") worries me a bit.
Funny, this same theme was taken up in a derogatory, manipulative "Dr. Phil" TV show last Friday.(A description, which is how I heard about it, is appended below). Coincidence?
Some other references, that provide a broader view than either the show or the NYT article:
http://www.unschooling.com/library/faq/index.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
One of the sources that encourages many to consider "unschooling" is a well-credentialed educator who now practices his profession in a non-institutional setting: http://www.altruists.org/static/files/The%20Six-Lesson%20Schoolteacher%20%28John%20Taylor%20Gatto%29.htm
His online free book "Underground History of American Education" is indexed starting at:
http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
A "quick tour" of this history, a kind of "readers digest condensed version", begins at
http://johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/history1.htm
Biographies of Gatto and his associates: http://johntaylorgatto.com/aboutus/index.htm
A recent (2005) book provides a taxonomy of reasons parents give for home educating:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1597815721/addhaircom-20?creative
So - Why Do You Homeschool? (Paperback)
by Mimi Davis
Here is the piece on the "Dr. Phil" show referenced above:
> Forwarding from another list. Thought you might be interested.
>
> The Dr. Phil show will be airing what homeschoolers in California
> think will be a very anti-homeschooling show this Friday. It was
> originally scheduled to be aired a month ago, but it was moved to the
> day after Thanksgiving. Some homeschoolers wrote in and complained
> after the taping, and the date was rescheduled, perhaps because they
> thought fewer people might be watching.
>
> Several California Homeschool Network local contacts were invited to
> be in the audience, and one of them wrote a detailed accounting that
> others who were there agreed was an accurate description of the
> experience. It was originally discussed on the CaliforniaHS Yahoo
> list, and Annette Hall put it on her website, so others could easily
> refer to it:http://localhs.com/scuttle/2006/10/great-school-debate.asp
>
> Dr. Phil's website now has a promotional video clip of the show you
> can watch to get an idea of how it's going to go: http://drphil.com/
As long as they're actually learning something and not just goofing off all the time, this might prepare them to be self employed when they grow up, IOW, actually SUPERIOR to pubic school. "Prepared for a structured world" could be a euphemism for being trained to do what you're told, when you're told, and not to ask questions, hardly admirable values for a citizen of a Republic.
NYT pandering to the indoctrinators at the NEA.
Who bulldozed Walden's Pond?
One of the reasons home schooled kids do so much better on average than their government schooled peers is that MOST parents go well beyond the 3 hour figure.
In 1978 or so my wife and I came to know a young woman named Patty. She was a devoutly religious young mother who'd become more devout when her husband and father of her two small sons aged 2 and 6 informed her that he was leaving. In dire economic straits, I offered to let her stay in our former home in Chamblee -- which was not rented at the time – rent-free until she got back on her feet. She had been clandestinely home schooling the 6 year old for about 2 years using very well done Christian course materials from an organization in Texas the name of which escapes me. The lad had recently been tested and had placed at least a year ABOVE his chronological age. As required by the government school authorities at the time, she dutifully apprised the authorities of his scores.
For reasons which would become clear in a moment, Patty had been harassed by the DeKalb County school authorities for about 6 months and, by the time she moved into the Chamblee house, had been -- unbeknownst to us -- ORDERED to put the 6 year old into the nearest government elementary school or suffer the consequences. Because she wanted the boys to be educated Christians, there was no way she was going to do that and she told them so.
At approximately 2 am one morning, a loud knock on the door announced the arrival of the aforementioned "consequences." Dressed only in a nightgown, she was confronted by several burly police officers who thrust an arrest warrant in her face. With the now awakened 6 year old watching and the 2 year old wailing in the other room, she was handcuffed and led out the door to jail. She was tossed into a large cell with a couple of hookers and a junkie who spent much of the rest of that morning vomiting in the corner. The two young boys for whom the educational authorities professed such great concern were just left AT THE HOUSE -- ALONE! Patty was later told that the bureaucrats from Children Services who were SUPPOSED to accompany the cops were late and, in their haste to get this dangerous miscreant behind bars, the cops just missed the fact that the Children Services people were, well, missing. The CS folks showed up an hour later to find two terrified kids, one of whom had just seen his mother hauled off in cuffs.
Patty was ultimately brought to trial under the Georgia Truancy Statutes. Her pro-bono attorney tore the school authorities to shreds and hers has been called THE case that opened the floodgates to home schooling in Georgia. Once they had all the facts, the jury didn’t take long to acquit her. I’m proud to have played a small part in that.
At Patty’s trial, a previously overlooked aspect of the government schools was put into sharp focus for those paying attention: The Director of Instruction for DeKalb County testified that the then current 7 hour school day consisted of an average of approximately 3 hours or less of instruction. At that time, Patty was devoting 4 to 5 hours a day to direct instruction.
He also as much as admitted that the REAL reason they wanted ALL these kids in school was the $3,000.00 per kid per year they then got from the state and federal government. Empty seats = lost funds. As in most things, follow the money. Patty home schooled these two boys through high school.
And how did the boys turn out?
One is now a physician and the other a budding journalist.
But that now seems to be the norm for the growing legions of home schooled kids – which most likely explains why the NEA and the government school folks feel so threatened. I believe a home schooled child won the last National Spelling Bee.
Thomas Jefferson believed an EDUCATED PUBLIC to be the cornerstone of the system he and the other Founders TRIED to leave behind. He would NOT, I feel certain, be a big fan of the current government education system. If he returned today, he’d home school his children just as he did before.
Kids *want* to learn. They are by nature inquisitive. It's often the formal setting of the government classroom that stifles that desire to learn.
Un-schooling may work just fine in some situations. My sister-in-law (15), for example, is somewhat un-schooled. She's learning several languages and reads voraciously (War and Peace in a week, for example). She also does video editing and doll-making and other fun things. All out of her own initiative.
Probably much faster and with more psychological stability than those "structured" kids will to a world that is, despite your assertion, not particularly structured. I think the sausage-factory citizens are worried about the abilities of the "unstructured."
Some former "friends" sent their kid to a private school that had a philosophy like this. My son was the same age as this kid and was an outstanding student. My son's parents were not lazy and he learned well. He is now in his second year at Ohio State and is still doing quite well. Meanwhile, Aaron was never disciplined and was taught to read with the idea, "when Aaron is ready to learn to read, he will let us know." Now Aaron is a lost moron from highly educated parents, living an alternative lifestyle, with chains hanging from his pants, baggy pants and a "wondeful" personaility. Of course he feels wronged by the world, when in reality, it was his lazy and selfish parents. /rantoff
Her younger sister isn't interested though. She's more into dolls and sports.
Kids need time to do their own thing. God has given each of them special gifts, and sometimes we need to sit back and watch the gifts unfold. This is a great benefit of homeschooling.
As far as formal academics go, we're using a pre-packaged Catholic curriculum. The girls do most of the work on their own. Mom doesn't get downstairs until about 10 or 11. The kids are done between 1 and 3. And they're both 1-2 years ahead of their peers in academics, and lightyears ahead of their peers in their religious instruction.
After 14 years of homeschooling we've learned that we need to spend more time teaching our kids how to write. But I guess that has nothing to do with this post.
Apparently the NY Times is again allying itself to the Democrat party to ban homeschooling, and using examples of the worst homeschoolers to do so. When is this piece of crap newspaper going to go bankrupt already?