Opus 2020-086: On the Street: School’s Out

I am hoping that we survive the shutting down of the economy.  At the same time there is at least one shut down that I heartily approve of:  Schools.

Full disclosure:  We home schooled our children.  They never attended a formal school until they enrolled in college at 13 and 16.  I also taught in a public school for almost 30 years.  I can speak from experience.

Home schooling can work.  It is the way education was done for most of history.  It might be that all you could learn was how to farm but it gave you the skills you needed for life.  We have friends who did not home school.  Their children usually turned out okay but that was because they had parents who worked with them after school. 

Home schooling is almost always going to be better than public school.  I say that because public school is a charade.  We used to have students in 8th grade who could still not do basic math or write a complete sentence.  That is not because they are too dumb.  It is because they had not been taught anything except recess and how to tattle on bullies. 

Home schooling can be a disaster.  The reason I say this is because I am not sure how many parents love their children enough to put in the time and effort to home school.  I am not talking about the teaching part.  That really does not require years of education and specialized classes in education.  All it requires is that you know more than the student or know how to find information.  I would hope parents qualify on the first and the child who understands the internet can help you with the second.  Can you picture a child coming to kindergarten and not knowing his colors?  It is common.  It reflects a failure of parenting.

Fifty years ago I was involved in an inner city church.  In Sunday School I found that some kids could read well and others didn’t have a clue.  The ones who could read had learned at home.  My point with this is that home schooling will have to work hard to do worse than modern public school.  We have nothing to lose and everything to gain by keeping the schools shut down.

It won’t happen of course because parents don’t want that kind of responsibility.

homo unius libri