Homeschool surpasses private school
In North Carolina:
Sometimes it's nice to be able to report a positive trend for a change. And it sounds as if the numbers of homeschoolers will continue to grow.
North Carolina officials say there has been a huge increase over the past two years in the number of Tar Heel families who have pulled their kids out of public schools and begun educating them at home. The number of homeschools has jumped 27 percent since the 2011-12 school year, NewsObserver.com reports.One number they omit to mention is 1,443,998. That's the number of public schooled children in North Carolina. Which means that more than six percent of school-age children there are being homeschooled, considerably up from the national average of two percent a few years ago.
As of last year, 98,172 North Carolinian children were homeschooled; that’s 2,400 students more than the number who attended a private school.
While the sputtering economy is the reason families are choosing homeschooling over private schooling, the nationalized learning experiment (Common Core) is the main reason families are leaving the public schools in the first place. “Common Core is a big factor that I hear people talk about,” Beth Herbert, founder of Lighthouse Christian Homeschool Association, told NewsObserver.com. “They’re not happy with the work their kids are coming home with. They’ve decided to take their children home.”
Sometimes it's nice to be able to report a positive trend for a change. And it sounds as if the numbers of homeschoolers will continue to grow.
Labels: education
72 Comments:
But will it be like gasoline.
Gee, we're not making any tax dollars on gasoline that you aren't buying, for your eco-'lectric car, so your licence plates are now based on x3 the value of that already overpriced car.
Mindful that parents who opt out of the public school system STILL pay their "fair share" of taxes, is there a case to be made for a tax 'credit" for relieving the stress on "the system", that oddly can't seem to comprehend "economics"?
CaptDMO
By the way.
Nster? Really?
Nster? Really?
I know nothing about them. They sent me an email and said "we would like to give you money." I get that sort of thing all the time, so I responded with my usual response: "offer 3x more than that and I'll consider it". I'm now considering it via this test.
What's the matter with them? All I can say is that they've been quite responsive, cut the size to the one I recommended, and dropped the feet fetish advertiser from this feed.
Small town Iowa here. Homeschooling is growing. On our street we have 10 houses with school age children and of those 10 there is 2 of us homeschooling. Plus there is at least 2 houses homeschooling on the street behind us.
It is growing for a variety of reasons and I think its going to speed up, not slow down.
VD August 30, 2014 12:31 PM
and dropped the feet fetish advertiser from this feed.
c'mon, dude.
that was like the perfectly absurdsist advert possible.
they love calling you RSHD anyways. feet are perfectly work safe, vaguely sexualized but still neuter and non-white chicks were showing up every so often.
and then it also plays into the 'ankle-biter' ( is that like a pillow-biter? ) thing.
keep the soccer ads though. that way you've still got 'gay' covered.
They will try to ban homeschooling. The homos. We aren't teaching tolerance. Heck, with gay marriage the rule of law, we are teaching anti American traitorous Nazi terrorist propaganda. Therefore we must be stopped. They will come for us.
What's the matter with them?
Esthetically stuff like "Top Ten drop dead Gorgeous Beauties" and photo makes it look like a voyeuristic eruo trash blog, Daily Mail ect... Just my observation.
That would be better over at your AG.
Earl: "They will come for us."
And quite likely lose, as their parasite-run system continues to decay, and the simplest tasks get botched.
bob k. mando August 30, 2014 12:50 PM
VD August 30, 2014 12:31 PM
and dropped the feet fetish advertiser from this feed.
c'mon, dude.
that was like the perfectly absurdsist advert possible.
Gotta admit, that was cracking me up too.
I think this is good news. Especially if children are able to learn to read, write and do math to a higher level than many public schooled kids do. As far as I'm concerned, public school is a contradiction in terms and I would say it about college education as well.
And quite likely lose, as their parasite-run system continues to decay, and the simplest tasks get botched.
Back when I informed my former colleagues at work that my brother home schooled his six children, they took offense even though I never said a bad word about them sending their children to public school because I didn't care. They used social pressure ON ME about what my brother did even though I have no choice nor do I want any on how he raises and educates his children. They started telling me all the horror stories about not getting proper socialization for the world outside the home and how it was bad because they did not have educational degrees.
They took it personally as if it had in some way caused personal harm to them. I could only conclude that they must of had some kind of self guilt I wasn't aware of. I still to this day don't know why it mattered to them in the lunch room that day.
Quartermain: "I think this is good news. Especially if children are able to learn to read, write and do math to a higher level than many public schooled kids do."
It's clearly excellent news.
Reporting from central Florida, the wife and I are seeing positive response from 9 out of 10 people we meet. Almost no one disses home schooling anymore. The typical response is "(Sigh...) I wish I could do that too." Which my wife--the best salesman I have ever known--takes as an opening and drives right in for the kill. She's converted at least 3 families this past year.
Outlaw X, it sounds to me like they were upset that your brother opted out of a collective suicide pact.
...the nationalized learning experiment (Common Core) is the main reason families are leaving the public schools in the first place.
And good for them. The concern, however, is that as the homeschooling trend grows, there will be concerted efforts to keep these families in the fold. One way to do that is to mandate through state law that Common Core be taught in homeschools; another is to de facto require it through standardized testing. Folks ought to stay on top of what their state legislatures are planning to do in that regard.
Just 5 years ago when I told people we planned on homeschooling we received negative comments or concerns (socialization being the big one). Now, just like rycamor said above, we get mostly positive comments and a lot of people who say they wish they could homeschool.
All the things the left tries to scare the American people with (school shootings, bullying, etc.) are completely nullified by homeschooling and the kids get a better education to boot. Its a win-win.
The left is going to lose this fight at the state level. I think the left's big push against homeschooling will come from some activist federal judge overturning state laws and mandating school attendance.
Socialization is still a concern for homeschoolers, but with public school, so much of the socialization that children receive is negative and destructive that avoiding it seems like a no-brainer.
Hilarious story on NPR today about Spanish speaking "immigrants" home schooling their kids to make them bilingual. All positive, of course, from the leftist standpoint. Anything, anyone from another culture does is magnificent and fabulous. Anything American citizens do is wrong and evil. I remember reading a children's book belittling the cruel pilgrims for swaddling babies whilst the author lauded the wonderful Native-Americans for "cradle boarding" infants. I am ultra-sensitive to irony.
http://www.npr.org/2014/08/30/344477148/immigrant-keep-children-bilingual-by-schooling-them-at-home?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=npr
Our eldest is entering Kindergarten in t (-) 3 days. I'm sad, but everyone around me says "don't worry, she'll be fine!" For how long, though? I don't know.
The "socialization" aspect is the thing deemed so important by others. Eldest may be one of those kids who needs other kids around her to learn well. It's not entirely unheard of; and I suspect she might have dyslexia or some other LD which requires a special approach to learning reading skills. Math-wise, she is like Mr. C. - sharp as a tack, but couldn't care less about reading. Listening to stories, no problem; reading them? issues.
I don't know what to do. Just keep a sharp eye on her and hope for the best? Our kids deserve more than hope, I think.
Seven years ago, I was ridiculed and questioned constantly about our decision to homeschool our children. Nowadays, it's zero ridicule, wistful envy, and thoughtful questions about how to start.
The tide does appear to be turning.
I'll mention there is a Christian homeschool co-op in our area where the kids would have ample opportunities for socialization. Such organizations need better...PR or what? I don't know. Word of mouth communication through churches, perhaps. And an easing of walls between various Christian denominations. A sort of agreed-upon set of principles...hmm
There's still quite a bit of antipathy towards homeschoolers.
One new series starting up has a scene near the beginning where the nurse complains about being delayed at the coffee shop - and that she was surprised the homeschooled idiot behind the counter could spell "scary" without trying to put an "E" in it.
Nevermind the image shown in movies like "Mean Girls" where the homeschoolers talk about men hanging out with dinosaurs....
That scene in "Red Band Society" knocked me out of the story. Sure, maybe the CHARACTER had an issue with homeschoolers, not the scriptwriter, but that still goes against my personal experiences with both homeschoolers and starbucks. In the first - usually MORE knowledgable, and in the second, starbucks leans towards public school and liberal arts types.
The irony of the scene in Mean Girls being that the first homeschoolers I ever met were Wiccans who both despised the shiftiness of the public schools, and were willing to consider parochial but none of them in the area were sufficiently better to justify the expense.
More space for the illegals.
More space for the illegals.
Mr. C.'s argument: we pay for public school. Should get our money's worth.
Yeah. But we pay for our kids, and your kids, and their kids, and kids whose parent(s, if they care/exist) don't even pay taxex. For substandard shit learning. Good bargain.
But I get it. Take my kids out, still pay for them, but give their seats to illegals who'll lap up the socialist indoctrination they spew.
I hope I can teach ours better than to swallow it wholesale.
In North Carolina, the reason for more homeschooling is simple. The standardized test score results are bad and moving towards terrible. This with a public school system that is not unionized, but acts as if it was ... before the wascally wepublicans who now run state government ended tenure last year. This has also turned every public school student into a lobbyist for restoring tenure and career status for teachers. The sad part about this is that the wepublicans are going to get their heads handed to them in 2016 in spite of their gerrymandering the districts to give them a supposidly turnover proof situation.
Socialization
Its a very strange socialization that they advocate
What society is based on arbitrarily dividing people up by age and then giving power over right/wrong and action/inaction to a government employee following government rules
The closest one I can think of is the military. Normal society consists of interaction with people of many different ages, experience, knowledge, capabilities etc. Public schools are the opposite of real socialization, taking your kids out into real society is real socialization.
Cranberry, make sure your kids learn cursive at an early age.This tends to help mitigate the possible dislexia issues. And don't worry about the "socialization" crap. It's not as if homeschoolers lock their kids in a closet 12 hours a day. Routine interaction with parents and siblings is normal. Spending 8 hours a day in the same room with 30 people the same age is not. My two year old is friendlier than a wet dog, and engages adult strangers in conversations. He didn't need to go to school to learn to socialize. He learned that from his siblings.
@Bob Ramar
Never occurred to you that conservatives of the Christian stripe are behind the homeschool movement? Or that, perhaps, the NCLB/RTTTop/Common Core initiatives are sorely lacking in any sort of standards other than "don't make our kidz have the feelbadz over bad-graydz"?
Bad teachers exist. Tenure laws are not perfect, mostly not even plausible. They were initially designed to prevent nepotism and favoritism in hiring practices by government entities (i.e., school boards - hmmm, wonder why the .gov would need laws restricting its practices). I oppose tenure laws. If you cannot teach your kids yourself, you want someone who can. If the hired teacher cannot teach according to your standards, get someone who can. But I recognize that school districts have many student populations and many difficulties to manage in terms of getting the right teacher for every student.
Hence, homeschooling, or private schooling, or co-op schooling. Find someone who lives and breathes your life's philosophy and you will find a teacher worth keeping. Our public schools are so separated from Christ and Christian living and standards and principles that we can't even make a coherent definition of what a "teacher" is, any longer.
My two year old is friendlier than a wet dog, and engages adult strangers in conversations. He didn't need to go to school to learn to socialize. He learned that from his siblings.
ThirdMonkey, our eldest is so friendly, I almost cringe at how willing she is to engage strangers in conversation and telling them all about her day and what she learned, etc. Mostly, other people don't care and just indulge her with friendly smiles. I try not to make too much of it, but I do wonder if she wouldn't benefit somewhat by seeing how her peers navigate difficult or unfamiliar social situations.
Mr. C. needs to learn about the concept of "sunk cost." If you think your public school sucks, then sending your kids to it to get to "get your money's worth" is simply foolish. It's like buying a burger, discovering that someone injected it with a powerful laxative, and eating it anyway because you hate wasting money.
As someone said earlier, the states are going to have to try to stop homeschooling at some point. They won't have any choice; the public schools are too big a part of their ability to indoctrinate the population. I don't think big leftist government could survive without top-down control of schooling of most kids. They can afford to have a few percent of kids getting away, especially when they're the kids whose parents would have fought the indoctrination tooth-and-nail anyway. But if it ever becomes fashionable and gets into the double digits, they'll have to act.
They've already tried a couple times in my state, but homeschooling is popular here because it's entirely unregulated, so people came out in droves to shut it down. It wasn't a real serious effort, though. If the left starts seeing public education as half as critical as abortion, we'll have a serious battle on our hands.
Public schools are a big part of the System. Where you think all these Social Justice Warriors and their shrieking hordes of followers come from? 16 years in the System.
Sorta OT, but not really: Am I the only one who sees (via Drudge) that Kansas City has hospitals full of kids battling an "unusual" virus and wants to know how many illegal "children" the Obama administration shipped there?
Anyone else? Anyone at all?
Enough people -- and no longer just the Amish and people on rural communes -- have been homeschooling for long enough now that everyone knows some homeschooled kids and has seen that they haven't turned into reclusive freaks. In fact, people who are honest will notice that they tend to be polite without being standoffish, and better at engaging in conversation with adults and people of other ages than their age-segregated, schooled counterparts. They're not perfect and there are exceptions on both sides, of course; but when you're around both, as at my church where several families homeschool, it really is night and day.
So the anti-homeschool myths aren't working on most people anymore. If someone says something overtly anti-homeschool today, he's usually a leftist who mistrusts anything that's not tightly controlled by the state. For instance, the last person I heard denigrate homeschooling was a Franciscan priest/college teacher. They don't come much more left-wing than that.
The only reasonable reservation I've heard about homeschooling in the past few years was a guy whose great love is music, so it bothers him that homeschoolers typically don't belong to a band like many schooled kids do. But it's not that they couldn't; they could form bands just like they organize for sports and other group activities. And there have always been private lessons for things like the piano and violin that most schools didn't offer, as well as other skills like dance. Many homeschoolers get their kids such lessons. So if homeschoolers don't get their kids a band instrument and some lessons, that just means it isn't important to them -- so why does every school have band again?
ThirdMonkey August 30, 2014 2:56 PM
Spending 8 hours a day in the same room with 30 people the same age is not.
while NOT being allowed to 'socialize'.
are you passing notes? whispering to someone? off to the principal's office with you.
that's another argument against public schooling; how much 'socialization' time do they actually get?
recess + passing each other in the hallway + a couple of minutes at the beginning and end of each class + lunch?
so, less than 2hrs for the whole day? and much of that of the 'Lord of the Flies' variety where the biggest, strongest punks thump anybody who doesn't toe their line?
uh huh.
cailcorishev: "If the left starts seeing public education as half as critical as abortion, we'll have a serious battle on our hands."
True enough.
But remember that the powers that be couldn't even get their strike on Syria organized.
They're geniuses at log-rolling, infiltration, exploitation, corruption and destruction. Actually making things work: not so much.
Your local pipe and drum corps is always looking for new people. Home school band problems solved.
My wife and I homeschooled our children until high school. At that point the kids enrolled in home study through the local high school (and junior college for some courses).
Looking back, homeschooling our children was one of the best decisions we made.
Cailcorishev-
School bands have one purpose and one only. The same purpose as military bands. Do you want children manipulated like that?
Cranberry - I haven't had the time to read the whole thread thus I don't what others have said. As a dyslexic myself with dyslexic nieces, I feel that I must weight in. The public schools do not have any special knowledge on how to work with dyslexic children. From my observations, their approach doesn't help in any way. And worse, I think it has harmed these girls. It pains me to see what they are going through both academically and socially. Do your research. You can work with your own dyslexic child more effectively than the public school can.
Do you want children manipulated like that?
It wasn't my argument. I simply pointed it out as the only reservation I've heard about homeschooling in the past few years that was based on something other than a knee-jerk fear of people raising kids independent of the system.
>>But remember that the powers that be couldn't even get their strike on Syria organized.
It's fairly clear to me (through a lot of personal experience as well as observation) that the Left Progressive establishment relies heavily on social pressure to achieve any goal. When social pressure fails, they must resort to force.
Now, whether or not such a style of social organization can actually set a goal, much less achieve it, is another story. But it's an essential part of fighting back against the progressive establishment to resist the social pressure and attack its goals and itself as a method.
I would go so far as to say that Common Core is in part an established goal because it can be pushed via social pressure. Heuristically, how good can a standard be simply because it was agreed on in committee?
Simon Jester, good points.
I'm not religious at all yet I would have preferred to have been homeschooled. I've known very left wing and right wing people who've done it. I hated all the cliques at public schools.
I fully understand the homeschooling movement as 90% of the people don't have the ability to forum shop their public school district. I like my kids school district well enough. It claims to follow common core, but the material they use looks nothing like the stuff people post online.
Its not perfect, there is still social justice indoctrination going on, but no more so than I was getting 30 years ago, and its easy enough to fix with a supplemental 30-60 minute history discussion and another 30-60 minute bible discussion once a week.
Want your kids to be socialized into swearing, lying, drinking, getting high, and fornicating? By all means seems them to public school.
I'd second this. We adopted a teen who had an obvious learning disability but over the 7 years of public schooling was never helped with it. They noted the issues in her report cards but no one ever actually DID anything. We stared homeschooling her as we do our other kids and within 2 years her issues were conquered. We are not education specialists, just people who can read a book and do some research on learning disabilities. It's not that hard AND it's worth it.
This.
I reread it. My apologies
Public education is a problem an American's are great at solving problems. The problem for public educators is that they are the problem and Americans know it.
The matter-of-fact nature of the comments here, give me great hope.
I do note that there has been zero mention of firearms training for the young'uns on this thread.
Simply Timothy, Nate hasn't made his presence known...
The public schools do not have any special knowledge on how to work with dyslexic children.
No school teacher has any special knowledge about anything like that. I've known good teachers and bad teachers, but the good ones were good because of their attitude, not because of great intelligence or some special store of knowledge.
It's well-known that a teaching degree is one of the easiest degrees to get. That was already known when I was in college in the 1980s -- the boys who couldn't handle their first choice of major bailed to something like marketing, and the girls all bailed to education. Add almost 30 years of PC indoctrination, and what's left has to be a joke. If your kid has some special need, and you spend a couple weeks researching it intensively online and talking to other parents in your shoes, you're guaranteed to know more about it than any school teacher your kid is likely to encounter -- and what you know is more likely to be the truth and not some PC lie about it.
You can't convince most folks that homeschooling is a good thing, but you can subvert their belief in public schooling. Here we see the dialectic/rhetoric divide again. Logic and facts won't dissuade the fools from their folly. Good stories might help them skip tracks.
I like to ask people to read John Holt's How Children Fail. Holt taught 5th grade at an elite private school during the 1950s. The book is based on his memos to another teacher at the same school, trying to figure out why almost all the children were failng to learn. Holt was an eminently humble, consistently irenic man. He assumed that the failure of his students was his fault, and he tried to figure out how to fix it. The book is a sort of travelogue of the failure of the best case for schools.
Speaking of home schooling, how's the astronomy course doing?
And, I may have found an illustrator for my "battle for boys" book. Possibly. Maybe. We'll see.
People aren't overly impressed with many public school kid's social skills (or lack thereof.) Children do NOT learn the best things from other kids--that's the parents job; to teach them to be polite, respectful, etc. It's also our job to protect them. Public schools are dangerous in every aspect; they are godless, perverted, and the test scores prove the education itself is subpar, at best. ANY normal, loving parent can home school well.
A friend of mine is a grade school teacher and his take on dyslexia is this: It might exist, but he's never seen it.
He has a set of posterboards five foot high with the individual letters on them, and if a child shows the beginning signs of dyslexia, he'll have sessions with them with the giant posterboards sufficiently far apart so that the child has to turn their head to get the next one in the frame. With that, he starts teaching them to recognize the letters again and put them back together into words Letter People style.
His theory, a version of one of the standard dyslexia theories, is that the kids are too young and just haven't had the right brain development in the right area yet. The larger, clearer, more separated characters make it easier to trigger that first 'catch' of neural development. Once they get it at that size, you can start making the characters smaller and moving them closer together.
It got the point that the administrators realized he didn't have any dyslexic kids in his classes, and started shifting the other dyslexic kids over to him.
I haven't read the source material but I never trust anyone. Particularly when there is a dramatic change in percentages.
This may not be as good news as it sounds. (I'm not refuting it. Just suggesting people be suspicious.
It could be someone changing a classification. Government school districts in Indiana boasted drastically reduced drop out rates recently. Turns out they began classifying drop outs as home schoolers.
http://bookstoysgames.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/indianas-abuse-of-compulsory-attendance-laws/
The increase in homeschooled kids is tied to the economy. Now there is a parent home who can't find a job.
On the upside we can look forward to more finger paintings of dinosaurs next to humans. I wonder if that will be categorized as art or history?
luagha - Although I believe that the dyslexia label is too often given to children who are simply late readers, dyslexia does exist. As for myself, I no longer have much trouble keeping the letters within the words, but when I'm tired, the letters rearrange all over the page. It's probably hard to imagine if you don't experience it.
Your teacher friend is probably helping these children with eye tracking - starting with gross eye/body motion and then moving to finer control. That could be a very helpful exercise for a dyslexic person. Many dyslexic children find moving their finger (or a pen light) across the page is very helpful, but have run against school teachers who won't allow it. Often times, dyslexia is not that difficult to overcome, with the right intervention. When I was a child, I had help starting in 3rd grade and in 4th grade I not only began to read but joined the highest reading group. Although the public school wanted to put me in the mentally disabled class, my Mom had me IQ tested to avoid that fate and then found me the help that I needed.
Curley: On the upside we can look forward to more finger paintings of dinosaurs next to humans. I wonder if that will be categorized as art or history?
If the dinosaur is involved in revenge scenarios against humans or romantic liaisons with humans, we apparently call that art.
By the way, I welcome you to check out my astronomy and astrophysics homeschool curriculum. There is one activity in which students calculate photoionization masses for supermassive black holes using the singly-ionized magnesium broad emission line and continuum luminosity in a real quasar spectrum. It's pretty cool.
"It got the point that the administrators realized he didn't have any dyslexic kids in his classes, and started shifting the other dyslexic kids over to him."
Typical bureaucratic response. They COULD have just bought more poster sets. Then they'd have had a whole school full of teachers who knew how to handle dyslexic kids.
Of course Common Core sucks. It was put together AFAIK by Education majors. Those people are predominantly lazy leftists and stupid, and the rest are evil, with no little overlap between the last two characteristics.
My children will be homeschooled. If anyone finding this out gasps in horror, and rhetorically asks about their "socialization", I'll respond that I can beat them up and steal their lunch money myself (while basely insulting them in poor English). Or, rather, that won't happen to them, because my wife and I care enough to take the time to homeschool them.
Say, are there any other colleges as liberty-minded as Hillsdale? It sadly doesn't have Engineering.
I taught in public school in NC in the early '90's. Those unable to afford private school homeschooled because of Outcomes Based Education, the first step toward Common Core. One year was all I could stand before going to private Christian school to teach until my certificate expired.
Luke, Bryan College in TN and most colleges in GA, including GA Tech are friendly to homeschooled students. I personally know 2 grads of GA Tech who had been homeschooled. I'm sure there are others, just can't think of them w/o my 2nd cup of coffee.
The Common Core is coming to private school, and homeschool also.
There is a push to have a standardized set of courses that must be done in order to get any sort of degree. There is even talk of doing so at universities (my bride's cousins are professors).
In short, while private and home school is a great place today, don't be surprised when those options are actively subverted or attacked. In this day and age where "certification" is king, it is very easy to block access to those who do not conform.
Outlaw X August 30, 2014 1:25 PM
They took it personally as if it had in some way caused personal harm to them. I could only conclude that they must of had some kind of self guilt I wasn't aware of. I still to this day don't know why it mattered to them in the lunch room that day.
We are sending our oldest to a private religious school. We lost friends over it. Some said "Well, your kids will be little terrorists then, so we don't want to talk to you!" (these were good Churchian people by the way). The others said "How can you send them there! They don't have a big gym and very low diversity". Even though the sports teams beat the snot out of the local Jr High's, and that there are plenty of "diverse" kids. They just happen to be Christian and from intact families who value education.
People at work make fun of me, or did till I said I would rather pay for my children to have a top rate education in a safe atmosphere than have them learn how to sell meth by age 10 (which happened to one co worker).
I think it is guilt. They know something is wrong, but don't want to sacrifice to help. We have some good friends who homeschool (not an option for us at this time, we need the insurance), and are very supportive of their choice. Their daughter is turning into a Godly young woman, who is very social. But she is not "trashy" and that offends some.
Luke,
Indiana University, Purdue and Notre Dame are all homeschool friendly as long as you can back your grading with the SAT, AP tests and the like. My homeschooled son recently received two academic merit scholarships to attend IU Bloomington and was admitted to the honors college there.
I've heard that many state colleges are actually recruiting from the homeschool pool. One way to find out if a college is homeschool friendly is to search for a mention of homeschool requirements under it's admissions policies.
We home schooled our oldest two children, through high school. Little by little, year after year, somehow, you know, low inflation and all, our one paycheck family could not afford it anymore. My wife started teaching in a nearby private Christian school, where our youngest two children began to attend and finish their 2 and 3 years remaining of H.S.
In our area, around NASA-JSC, home schooling has been going on for years and on fairly large scale. It is viewed as just another option.
There is a push to have a standardized set of courses that must be done in order to get any sort of degree. There is even talk of doing so at universities (my bride's cousins are professors).
In short, while private and home school is a great place today, don't be surprised when those options are actively subverted or attacked. In this day and age where "certification" is king, it is very easy to block access to those who do not conform.
Semi-agreed.
The role of 'gate-keeper' is not going to be relinquished without a fight.
However, merit trumps politics in the arena that matters--reality. Good engineers, scholars, scientists respect genuine ability, precisely the thing Government education seeks to corrupt.
You can either drive the damn truck or you cannot. You either know western history or you do not. You can either pilot the damn machine or you cannot. You can either solve that differential equation or not. You can either speak Latin or not.
I think we are on the cusp of another flowering of intellect and creativity that pops up from time-to-time in history. But that is just a hunch.
Thank you for the list of colleges that are home-school friendly. However, I was looking less for that characteristic, than I was for ones that are pro-Constitutionalist. Ideally, it would be one that would disallow Federal student aid (as Hillsdale does). Even better would be ones that ban homosexuals, feminists, Muslims, Earth First/PETA types, admitted socialists, etc., but I think I'd need a time machine to find that kind of college.
On another note, does anyone know of a college with a predominantly online program in Petroleum Engineering Technology?
"You can either speak Latin or not."
Bad example, in its way. I studied Latin for three years in HS, and while I can no longer do a cold standing translation of a passage from Cicero or Virgil (I once could, but now no longer, eheu), what I learned from studying Latin was powerful insights into the nature of grammar, into how Western languages, and how languages in general, work. I can't speak Latin any longer in a fluent sort of way, but I do have x-ray vision into the nature of various European languages. That's worth more in the long run, in our world, than knowing how to unravel Ovid.
Oh, but by the way, Catullus is really funny and sharp, and waaaaay cool.
Scoobius Dubios.
You relate an important truth; i concur, with the caveat that 'speaking Latin or not' holds if you are seeking work as a Latin instructor.
All I can speak to is my experiences. In Louisiana, arguably one of the worst educated states in the Union, Common Core acceptance has horribly backfired. The intelligent people here who were lucky enough to get educated have gone on to become teachers, and their outrage is very much vocal.
We started homeschooling our kids when we lived in Orleans Parish, before Hurricane Katrina. Completely dysfunctional N.O. public schools for intelligent white kids struggling with dyslexia? In a practically martial law environment? That would've gone well. I taught music in a private school for those years, my wife taught 5th grade in the same school.
We've since moved out into the country, and the amount of families homeschooling here (where the schools are relatively good) is astounding to me. We're talking hundreds of families, that I know of, just in this one city. We're now the "wizened gurus" of homeschooling here because we've been doing it for close to fifteen years. Everybody else is completely new at it except for about 4-5 other families.
Things are definitely changing, even outside the big cities. You can't deny it.
Post a Comment
Rules of the blog