From "American Homeschooling Goes Boom/Meet the parents yanking their children — some five million of them — from schools that they say aren't working" by Suzy Weiss (at Bari Weiss's Substack).
September 11, 2021
"Are we creating a brave new, standardless world stripped of any canonical texts? Or are we reaching backward?"
"[M]any of those behind the most radical political experiment in history studied in little, rickety houses, in medium-sized, mostly uncultured cities or on the edges of sprawling farmlands. They read with the aid of candlelight. They were Zoom-less. They squeezed their studies in between milking cows and learning how to use a rifle. They were steeped in the greatest minds of the ancient world and the Enlightenment.
The Founders did not have the benefit of any playground or tablet or teachers union, but they were free thinkers. The Constitution, Speed pointed out, 'was largely the work of people instructed at home.'"
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27 comments:
by Why Stretch, of the imagination; ARE american schools working?
We're paying $10,000? $20,000? $30,000 a YEAR? to graduate 'students' that can't read or write?
Let alone to math. Pretty expensive day care?
Serious Question:
Can someone point to a powerful person that sends there kids to public school?
Any politician? Any one?
I subscribe to Weiss, Taibbi, and Greenwald on substack. They are worth every penny of $50/year.
Nice piece; Bari Weiss's site looks good and I appreciate the opportunity to have seen it. Ex-NYTer, and exes can tell you a lot. Site looks like the work of a woman unchained.
Five million. What a great number to see. I have relatives who home-schooled back in Eighties and Nineties. They faced a lot of opposition and misunderstanding, including, I'm sorry to say, from me. Dire warnings were issued and by me too. But I learned. I saw how hard they worked to make sure the kids were in clubs like 4H, had classes in music and dancing and travelled. And they were educated in the end, not just home-schooled - they knew history, literature and math, not sociology, psychology and sex ed. They grew up and got PhDs in literature and jobs in computers and physics research; they also got married and have kids that are kids, not adjuncts to some piece of digital equipment. There's future in and for home-schooled kids.
I am one of those people. I have an education degree from UW Madison, worked in the public school system on and off for over a decade, loved school as a child, and loved being a part of school as an adult. No more. It was ultimately due to my complete lack of faith in the the district’s ability to teach virtually (which I found maddeningly pointless in the first place) and their disgusting eagerness to back BLM and proclaim ownership of “white guilt” - there was no way I was going to force my children to engage in that. But truly doubt in our place in the public school system had been creeping in for years. As a conservative family with conservative values it was very clear that the system was actively indoctrinating against these. We always told our kids to keep their minds open, to question what they learned, and to keep asking questions, but even this is not enough to equip young children against the Long March.
So we are in our second year of homeschooling. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. I started not with young kids, but with middle schoolers (now one high school aged), who were used to education being presented and done a certain way - not to mention dealing with my own preconceptions about how school at home must be done. There are rough days, there are tears. But there are so many beautiful moments too - not to mention that I’m pretty sure they’re learning more than they would’ve at “regular” school. There are so many other homeschool families to connect with and get advice from - I had so many questions answered just by other moms (mostly moms) on Facebook homeschooling pages!
Sometimes I wonder if I should’ve stayed in the system and fought back - if I should’ve started attending school board meetings, maybe even attempted a run for the school board, etc. Honestly though, I don’t think it would’ve made much difference in my area (Dane County). People here are by and large on board with the policies I find terrifying. And when I remember that, and the fact that my children come as my first responsibility, I still feel I made the right choice. There are times I still miss school, and I experienced twinges of sadness when I saw all the back to school photos. But we are doing what we need to do, and I don’t regret it at all.
Last thing - in spite of my statement that this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I would also like to say that ANYONE can homeschool, and that includes single and working parents. There are so many curriculum choices, including not paying for any at all. A favored mantra I see is that you can homeschool with little more than a library card. If there are any readers here with young children who are pondering it, I say look into it, and the earlier you start, the better! When I think back on my kids as little guys, and all that they were curious about and interested in, I get wistful at the thought of following their curiosities down rabbit holes of discovery. Also - homeschooling, as much as the media may want to portray it as so, is not the weirdo experiment - that tag, if it belongs anywhere, would be to the system of yanking kids away from their families and homes and plopping them in a room all day with only peers of their own age, being taught not what the parents thing is important, but what the current administration/teachers unions find important.
P.S. I know this very much goes against Althouse’s desire for brevity, and it is indeed the longest post I have ever written - by a lot. If you took the time to read it, I thank you, and hope that if the subject of homeschooling does not pertain to you, that you will at least pass on encouragement in considering homeschooling to someone for whom it does.
I trust the parents of children in mass more than I trust the scumbags who are implementing CRT.
What they are doing to schools is going to end the public education system.
And the university system is going to share in the backlash. It is already mostly funded by foreign students.
I wouldn't send my kids to public schools to be indoctrinated. My two neighbors...both public school teachers...send their two kids to Catholic school, and they aren't Cathelic. If that doesn't tell you all you need to know...I don't know what will.
There is a reason parochial schools run by conservative church bodies are experiencing growing enrollments.(At least in my area of southern Wisconsin.)
The reason that the teachers unions are the primary source of institutional/systemic racism in America is their iron grip on what is done in our failing public schools and their knowing lack of caring for minorities consigned to an “education” that fails to tach the basic reading, writing and math skills required for a decent middle class career. The evil of the teachers unions is compounded by their aggressive push for anti-American brainwashing in schools that further undercuts the ability of students to function successfully in a free society. Small wonder that most teachers, given a choice, send their own children to private schools, which are generally better than public schools but not good homeschooling.
Bari Weiss had a good week.
Reading the John Adams biography a few years ago, the one thing that stayed with me more than anything was the grand education he received, at home, by candlelight, reading the classical thinkers. The ideas of mankind, as many as possible. No censoring due to unapproved words or thoughts. And in some cases he read them in their original Latin or Greek.
He and others like him had the history of world leadership to study and learn from and that is how and why they came up with our amazing system which today resembles very little of what they handed us.
Home schooling has to be ridiculously difficult for a family to do. With work, and other family duties calling, how do you prepare for and continue to operate a home school schedule? That parents are choosing to do this, many choosing to leave one job to undertake it, speaks volumes about the view of public education in our country.
I will add that, if parents had actual school choice in every market, all across our country, where the parents could choose either a charter school of choice or a quality public school of choice, do you think we'd have the system we have now? Do you think our kids would be better educated, maybe even able to read and add? Of course. We all know the answer to this. So why do we put up with the Teachers Unions running our country?
Why would you ever vote for the party owned by that union and keep the kids (and nation) dumbing down further?
"I know this very much goes against Althouse’s desire for brevity...."
It's fine to go long if you're not verbose/tedious.
My "I encourage brevity" is there to keep people from thinking that's it's better to be expansive and to belabor your point. The important thing is to try to write what people will read.
A few of the pictures set me off, I mention one: the girl with the chickens.
I see a well-dressed young girl wearing yoga pants, cowboy boots & a bowler. Sixteen mostly untouched apples toward the left. At least three breeds of chicken.
This is not "education enrichment", this is a hobby. Anyone with two brains cells wouldn't wear a pair of boots then foul the yoga pants with chicken poop. Here is education: teach the girl how to kill, pluck, dress, & cook the hens which stop laying. Maybe even the smarties at Harvard are impressed by that.
There is a subject called Home Economics. It was a major track when I was in HS. It taught things such as how to can apples, how to cook chicken. Practical subjects that the founders would have recognized, such as milking & riflery.
After 13 years of K-12 schooling, 4+ years of college (working the entire time), and then 3 threes of law school -- more than 20 years in all of institutional education -- I then discovered in my real life world and legal practice that most of what is actually useful has been self-taught.
In practically any legal case, for example, you can't simply rely on what you learned in school. You have to do a lot of new research, reading new cases and statutes and commentaries, and sit there and figure out the thing yourself. Ultimately, you have to teach yourself in life.
About time.
I hope it's the first step in destroying the teachers' union.
Jefferson didn't need Tik Tok...
Temujin said...
Why would you ever vote for the party owned by that union and keep the kids (and nation) dumbing down further?
Half of people are on the left side of the bell curve. By definition.
Bureaucrats and HR types and lawyers are not particularly enthusiastic about disruptive talent.
When everybody is special nobody is special. A lot of people prefer that for obvious reasons.
I will slightly rephrase an aphorism attributed to James A. Garfield in reference to his instructor, Mark Hopkins: "The ideal college is a teacher on one end of a log and a student on the other."
My "I encourage brevity" is there to keep people from thinking that's it's better to be expansive and to belabor your point. The important thing is to try to write what people will read.
May I add my $0.02? The paragraph is our friend. It separates our thoughts and makes things easier to read, regardless of the length.
Just speaking for myself.
Sixteen mostly untouched apples toward the left.
They look like mangos to me, not apples. Some have the supermarket stickers on them, and some of them have exposed pulp. Since apple seeds are toxic to chickens, I would be surprised to see any apples there. Mangos have a large pit. Also, chickens like insects, which rotting fruit attracts. Ants can destroy fallen apples in less than a day.
I see a well-dressed young girl wearing yoga pants, cowboy boots & a bowler.
I suspect any teen girl would try to look her best when a professional photographer is coming to stage a photo shoot. I am not fashion conscious enough to know what young girls should have been wearing 5 years ago. That is about the time I occasionally picked up a friends son at middle school. I do recall lots of yoga pants. Then again, it seems like yoga pants are worn everywhere, not only in formal settings.
In 1994 I attended my first homeschooling conference, in Arlington, Texas, just a few weeks after the Texas Supreme Court had ruled in favor of homeschooling parents in Leeper vs. Arlington ISD. People talked about that court decision all through the conference, and it has truly made a huge difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of students and their families. At the time I had a baby and an almost 3 year old and was just beginning to explore educational options. I checked a few books out from the library, then got a few more through interlibrary loan. In less than 2 months I had read every book about homeschooling that was available, other than curriculum materials. Even then there were a variety of curriculum options available, and different approaches to homeschooling- traditional, often Christian education, unschooling, the classical Trivium curriculum, Charlotte Mason approach, unit studies, etc. With so many tempting options to choose from, my homeschool friends and I often came home from those conferences loaded with more curriculum than we could possibly get through in one year!
We made wonderful friends through our homeschool group and shared art classes, science projects and countless field trips together.
There is so much more information and so many curriculum options that I think I might be overwhelmed by the choices if I were starting homeschooling today. For those who are just starting, know that others have done this- you'll make mistakes just like we did, but that's okay. You'll work with your kids, figure out what works and what doesn't, and change plans as you need to. You don't have to do it all on your own, because there are lots of other homeschooling families to work with, as well as grandparents, coaches, piano teachers and scout leaders. There will be good days and bad days, but you'll have a front row seat as you watch your children learn and grow. Happy Homeschooling!
I wonder if school choice will elect Larry Elder as it elected Ron DeSantis? It is the issue that can break the bond between Democrats and black parents.
I think the reaction to Act 10 (Insurrection in Madison) was the first major reveal to a lot of parents. But the intersection of woke curriculum and Covid school from home blew it wide open.
I have a friend who sent both his kids to a local Lutheran High school. Their enrollment has blown up since the public schools went to mandatory masking. He's concerned as well as hopeful about the huge infusion of kids who are products of public schools.
Weiss wrote a good article. This is the way journalism should be done. She didn't insert her own opinion into the subject matter.
My grandchildren are all home-schooled. They are all way above their grade level in their subject matter and skills and the twelve year-old is already in some college level subjects. He has finished algebra and is now studying Trigonometry.
"Home schooling has to be ridiculously difficult for a family to do."
Let's not romanticize it, either. Certainly, it can be the right option for a lot of people. Just like there are good and bad public and private schools, though, plenty of the people home-schooling their kids are doing a bad job of it. And there's no guarantee that the kids won't still grow up and rebel against the parents' politics.
Hallelujah!
Had I been home-schooled and lived in Baltimore or Chicago, I would have graduated high school by the age of 10 or 11.
The 'achievement' levels in those places is appalling.
"Baltimore Schools- four high schools and one middle school do not have a *single student* who is considered proficient at math or reading. Not one. This is fraud. This is failure. It’s a tragedy."
if parents are needed to help with homework/remedial schoolwork why not start with the front end of the horse?!
Joe Smith said...
"Baltimore Schools- four high schools and one middle school do not have a *single student* who is considered proficient at math or reading. Not one.
Serious Question: HOW would it not be better for the Baltimore students, if we just GAVE Them a Check for the amount we are spending on their 'education'
It's More than $17,000... A year
So $17,000*12 years is More Than Two Hundred Thousand Dollars (not Even including k or preK)
HOW would it not be better for the Baltimore students, if we just Gave them the $200,000?
Of course; this complete misunderstands the point of public school...
Public school is Not to educate kids; it's to provide cushy jobs for democrats
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