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Homeschooling

Through a long chain of links (from XRLQ to I Think Therefore I Blog to Mom is Teaching to Sympathy Pain) I encounter a discussion about home-schooling that really highlights what should already be obvious: the purpose of public schools is not to teach social skills, and in fact they aren’t good at it.

Bryan (at Sympathy Pain) kicks off the conversation with the statement:

I really don’t understand the militant position most homeschoolers or homeschoolees take on their position.

I honestly appreciate that he is willing to admit that he doesn’t understand. But I must note that (in my experience) the homeschooler position no more militant than the position most professional educators take against homeschooling. It’s one of those arguments where most people on both sides tend to rely on their own “common sense”, which means that they are actually relying on their opinions and select anecdotes and articles that support their opinions. Those conversations tend not to result in anybody being persuaded to change their mind, and that’s why folks on both sides come off as being militant. This certainly doesn’t make anybody’s opinion wrong, but I rarely see it well supported.

Now to Bryan’s main point:

I taught for a while, theatre, of course, and would like to put my 17 years of experience up against any home school instructor. I think most teachers feel that way. It’s an insult to think that someone can teach algebra, or physics, or Russian from a pamphlet and a book. I feel the same way about the experience early education teachers bring to the classroom. There is so much now known about the elementary student that I can’t imagine someone trying to arm chair quarterback a classroom of one.

First, of the homeschoolers I know, none has tried to tackle every subject by themselves. There are entire networks of homeschoolers who have different areas of expertise and who help each other out. Just as in the public schools, this becomes more and more pronounced as the children get older and the requisite level of expertise becomes greater. If for some reason I wanted my children to speak Russian, I wouldn’t get a pamphlet and have a go – I would get in touch with somebody who speaks Russian and make arrangements, just the same as if I were trying to learn the language myself.

Second, it’s an insult to think that I can’t teach algebra, or physics, or frankly every subject offered in middle school and high school. I know more about each of these subjects than I did at graduation, and more about every one of these subjects than do ~95% of last year’s high school graduates. I say this as a high school teacher who sees firsthand what is covered in the courses at my school – I’m not just speculating out of my ass on this one. I don’t know more about theater than our school’s theater teacher, but I damn well know more about it than her students do, which means that I could teach them about theater. Everything? No. As much as she does? No, certainly not to 30 of them at a time, a regimented 50 minutes a day. But that’s not the comparison that is being made. The question is whether I could teach my own one or two children more by the time they are 18 than they will learn in public schools. I’ll say it again – it’s an insult to think that I can’t.

Of course, Bryan would have a reasonable point if his argument were limited to parents who are of sub-standard intelligence, motivation, and/or education themselves, or who don't have the time to devote to educating their own children. But he did not limit his argument to those parents. And if he did, I would fall back to the point that homeschoolers don’t operate in a vacuum.

Bryan then moves on to an argument I find baffling:

Some of these kids would rather be at school…because it was warm and relatively safe…That is why we need public schools.

Not to teach them Russian, algebra, and physics… but to provide them with a haven from their abusive home lives. And your children should be in that riotous classroom he describes, with those abused children, because it’s an insult to teachers to say that you can do better than that for your kids in your own home.

The real issue here is that Bryan does not understand the premise behind home schooling. He says,

If you want to improve the world of education, stop tearing down the public school system, and help.

But who homeschools because they want to improve the world of education? People home school in order to improve their own children. Not mine. Not the kids downtown. Their own children. If you think this is not helpful to them in the long run, then no, you don’t understand the militant position most homeschoolers or homeschoolees take on their position. And that failure to understand is yours. The proper response to it is not hubris – it’s to get educated.

At Mom is Teaching, Summer responds to the notion that kids become socially stunted if they are home schooled. I have often heard it argued that they are incapable of normal interactions as adults – Bryan specifies the time right after “graduation” as the most problematic, because these kids are released from the proverbial cellars and into jobs or colleges that are completely foreign to them. But there is a big problem with that logic. Summer notes:

I feel that the best place to prepare them for college and for life as an adult is by letting them be a part of the real world. Where they have to get to class on time of their own accord and not because of some distant bell ringing or adult lecturing, where they must manage themselves, and where they can direct their own educational futures… [Bryan]’s right. It takes a village. The baker, the farmer, the police, all the people in the real world who haven’t set foot in a classroom since they graduated. Luckily homeschoolers don’t spend 8 hours a day stuck in a brick bubble…they get to be a part of the real world every day.

Exactly. As a teacher, this is the aspect of schools that frustrates me the most – parents and students somehow assume that school prepares children for the “real world”, but school is not the “real world” and we go to great lengths as a society to ensure that. In the real world, you don’t have to take gym class if you’re fat or scrawny or just don’t like it. You don’t automatically get promoted when you show minimum competence. You don’t get detention for chewing gum, and you don’t just get two weeks off work if you beat somebody up at the office. You choose which interests to pursue, and when to choose them, and your level of success and happiness is dependent on those choices. I have no idea why people think the artificial society that exists in fifth grade would in some way prepare children for the “real world”. It can be a rewarding, enriching, wonderfully educational experience, but it certainly isn’t automatically these things, nor is it at all clear that public schools are the best way to have these things.

Or, in the words of Kate at I think therefore I blog:

I suppose if you believe the purpose of an education is to teach a child to deal with being treated like crap then, sure, the public school system provides many more opportunities for such experiences to be told to shut up, put up with bullies and disregarded by someone whose approval they seek.

To Bryan’s immense credit (I can’t emphasize that enough), he says the following in his own comment section:

I realize I am biased…teaching and working in schools. I’m going to take Summer’s advice and find some 3rd party publications and studies, and visit this again later. I am going to stay away feom the overly pro public school and the militant homeschool pages and try to find some actual studies from outside sources. If you have any, please shot them to me in an email.

Off the top of my head, I don’t know of any, but I hope he will consider what I’ve had to say, and I will keep an eye out for the type of sources he is asking for. And I’ll refrain from making some smart-ass comment about how that kind of information could best be researched in a school, and not at home.