I asked Bernard Chapin if he would like to submit something to the Carnival of Homeschooling. He doesn't have a blog, but he did send the following thoughts which I wanted to share:
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When I grew up I didn’t know much about school choice or home schooling. My father was a principal in Detroit who used to tell everybody, “You can’t beat a good public school.” My father trusted the government implicitly even though he experienced enough anarchy and selfishness in the public sector to last a lifetime. Eventually, they forced him out after forty years. He sued for race discrimination which his lawyer eventually (and wisely) changed to age discrimination. The board settled and bumped his pension up a bit.
A more specific reference comes from when I was lucky enough to teach 9 classes in Chicago at the college level. All of them were graduate courses for teachers. I recall one of the students telling us about his homeschool experience. All of the other listeners felt quite sorry for him I believe. They thought he had it rough, yet he was one of the rare happy, well-adjusted individuals from those days as an instructor that I’ll always remember. He explained to the group that his mother, along with several other families, had formed a cooperative wherein ten students had one teacher who they met with for about 40 hours a week. He did not share with the class any, “I was a teenage, under socialized vampire” tales. The fellow was just like everybody else except friendlier.
My sister, an Al Frankenite who never once heard a teacher union angle that she didn’t want to hug like a big friend from home, is thinking of homeschooling her 4 year old based on some of the new information that my brother-in-law has unearthed. She asked for my opinion and I told her to go for it. Saving your child from conformist, politically correct, gobbledygook is worth your every effort. I’m sure you agree.
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Bernard Chapin is a writer whose book about the crazy school in which he worked, Escape from Gangsta Island: The Progressive Decline of an Alternative School, will be released next month.
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