Posted on 04/20/2011 1:19:13 PM PDT by RJR_fan
In 1992, I earned my "15 minutes of fame" with an MS thesis about "Social Maturity of Home School Children." I've decided to make it more widely available, starting with this extract (CLICK HERE to open the .pdf document).
FReepers, this is my gift to you. I formatted it into a dozen or so attractive pages to read on screen, or to print out and give to worried friends and family.
I found it interesting to cull trenchant observations on the state of public education from a variety of sources: Ayn Rand, the atheist capitalist. Ivan Illych, the Marxist Jesuit. R. J. Rushdoony, the ArmEnian Calvinist. Decades before John Taylor Gatto burst onto the scene, these antagonistic pundits agreed on one thing: public education is bad for children and other living things.
>>They don’t eat the cows that produce the greenhouse gases, and eat the plants which correct global warming.
And you expect anything else from the public school? <<
LOL!
I never thought of it that way!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!! May I have your permission to post your thesis on my facebook page for all my homeschooling friends?
Whenever anyone asked me about socialization, I would reply if we were any more socialized we wouldn’t have time for school.
I'll bet it's 6 more numbers than your average, or even above average, public school kid knows pi to.
I've seen 2nd graders who can't even add or subtract numbers above 5 and kids older than that who can hardly read those 6 letter words.
Not to mention, that your comparison reveals a lack of understanding of how kids learn and the fact that numbers aren't letters and the brain doesn't process them the same.
The saw on that subject I learned from FR homeschoolers goes like this:
You want to simulate the public school experience in the home? Take your kid to the bathroom, blow smoke in his face, swear at him, beat him up, and take his lunch money.
“I had my doubts about the socialization aspect until I met the home schooled son of a friend. The brightest, friendliest, most empathetic, sociable child I’ve ever met. A joy to be around.”
This is why homeschooling continues to grow. The kids themselves make the case for it.
At what point in history did kids only interact with other kids their age?
Wow a 7 year old didn’t know everything about pi, thats profound.
When my son started public school at that age the majority of kids didn’t know their numbers or the alphabet.
YES YES YES !!!!
Please, FRiends! post and share this link as widely as possible!
I know a 13 year old home schooled kid who already has a free ride to med school. He’s a real anomoly. Had he been in public school, he would have been stoned on Ritalin day one. He’s now not only brilliant but very mature.
Stunning excerpt. It seems trivial almost to mention this,
but many I know still recall the breakup of a two school
system (1-6, 7-12) into three (1-4, 5-8, 9-12). This
had as an effect that there was no one in the school who
could remember the last election, so no one could compare
the campaign to the reality.
http://tomsmedley.com/SSS01.pdf
Here’s a funny observation from our situation -
a friend was skeptical of homeschoolers’ socialization, but our daughters freely talk with him and are fully sociable with everyone, including adults.
He said, “sure, she’ll talk with adults, but how about kids her own age?”
Huh? I don’t really understand the point of that question.
Here’s another - the MIL is a HUGE skeptic of homeschooling because she’s a lib. She keeps saying that they need “influence from other adults”. I know exactly what she means - they aren’t being sufficiently indoctrinated in humanism (and they never will).
Same age education grouping, instead of same level of mastery grouping,
occurred when the government imposed mandatory attendance laws. (I’m not going to argue the good/bad of these policies)
When that occurred, the older teenaged immigrants who needed to work to feed their families weren’t allowed to, and were forced to go to school. They often couldn’t read, and were put in a classroom of MUCH younger kids, with some teen girl teacher trying to control them in a classroom where they didn’t want to be. They then switched to same-age classrooms to alleviate the problem.
I (tried to) explained pi to my 6 yr old.
She could probably rattle off the digits (she and her sis have all the planets memorized, etc),
but didn’t quite have the math skills (ratios) to understand the concept. That’s OK. That’s a trigonometry level concept, and it’s foolish to try to teach that stuff except on the most general level without the basic math skills.
She DID, however, get the joke:
“Pi R Squared”
“No, Pi R Round, cornbread R Squared”
I am a public school teacher/homeschooling dad and let me tell you I go to my job every day and simply cringe at the ever-declining skill sets of my 9th grade students. What they don’t know at their age is frightening. They don’t know ANY grammar (not taught in gramm...er...elementary school). They don’t know simple mathematical operations (can’t add, subtract, multiply, divide) and then are thrown into Algebra classes in high school). They don’t know the first thing about America’s history.
I believe much of this goes far in explaining their inability at social skills. They are forever battling teachers from a guilted complex. They come to classrooms every day and are asked to do that for which they are not prepared. The educational system has failed them and they must sit (compulsory education) and face their (and the school system’s) failure day in and day out. Put another way, they have been lied to...and at some point in time in high school, they know it!. Where the guilt comes in is that they have heard a smattering of attempts by teachers to actually try to offer education. They have, of course, passed on this. Public education no longer requires that you learn, but that you...comply. When they get a teacher (yes, like me) that actually tries to make learning matter, they are incredulous, offended, amused, outraged (on any day, any student can adopt any one of these approaches—keeps me on my toes...and in The Word!) Couple this with their parents’ own personal issues, poor training methods, twisted thinking (their child can’t read, but s/he is still a “Terrific Kid!”—if I see one more of those bumper stickers, I’m going to...nevermind), and you get what amounts to a walking time bomb. And, so, from time to time, you’ll see one or more of them “go off”.
One more thing...being the homeschooling parent that I am, I am aware of what it is they SHOULD know, or, more importantly, COULD know, while most of my colleagues aren’t. They have been dumbed down, as well, by ever-diminished requirements, course content that is heavy on “socialism-ization” and light on academics and development of critical thinking. The veteran teachers have suffered through the “water torture” of time, as American public education has devolved into, what can only be called, an absolute disgrace. And most of my colleagues don’t even know it! So, many of them just roll with it...while I, doing my very best impersonation of the weeping prophet, attempt to raise a still, small voice in the wilderness over my students’ inability to read, inability to work, inability to...(fill in the blank).
I often ask aloud, “Lord, what would you have me to do here?” He hasn’t moved me, but, rather, has given me a mind, a heart, and an ability to speak to teens, to persuade, to cajole, to exhort and, where necessary, to rebuke (this last one is where I can get into trouble—prayers, please). I eventually conclude (like Paul, when he refers to living epistles), that I am there to present to my students what ought to be, in terms of their education/socialization. I can tell you, though, the numbers of takers has been declining steadily over the past few years.
The understanding of the concept will come and will be all the easier for having been introduced to it at a young age.
Something that might help is to take a circle, measure the diameter with a string, and then have her wrap the string around the circumference of the circle and mark where the ends of the string are and count how many times she wraps the string around the circle.
It will give her a hands on explanation of what it is you’re saying.
I loved it when my kids got to the age where they could start to understand jokes like that. To me it indicated that they were growing up and actually thinking abstractly. A good sign.
We did some illustrations with a wheel drawing a line, but the whole ratio thing was still beyond her. She accepted what I was saying, but didn’t get the “why” of it.
Yes, kids starting to make and get jokes is a really fun time. She really likes puns on words that sound alike and often asks me for a joke based on words she thinks of that sound alike.
God Bless you for your heart and efforts.
The kids need people like you and it will have an impact on some of them.
It’s like the story about the kid throwing the starfish which were washed up on the beach back in the ocean. When challenged that it didn’t matter because he couldn’t save all of them, he commented that he could save some of them and it mattered to the ones he did save.
And there will be homeschooled children who opt for public high school and will appreciate what you are doing for them. They need you, too.
Don’t hesitate to ask for prayers for situations as they come up on the homeschool threads. I don’t see your name on either of my homeschool ping lists. I would be happy to add you to them if you’d like.
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