Tony Woodlief writes about Why Some Kids Aren’t Heading to School Today. He starts with:
----------
My wife Celeste and I have four boys under the age of nine. This life stage is not a good time for experimentation. Order is the watchword, because order yields control, which preserves sanity, which saves lives — specifically, the lives of four children who some days are much closer to being sold to the local zoo than they think.
We believe everything you need to know about parenting can be gleaned from Little House on the Prairie. Growing up in wildly dysfunctional households, we both learned that you can do much worse than the Ingalls family. We decided when we got married that our home would be better than what we knew as children. The foundation is love, order, and relentless application of rules like: Eat all your vegetables, and Mind your manners, and Don’t push your brother’s head into the toilet.
So we frown on radicalism. Yet we have embarked on one of the most radical endeavors families can undertake: home-schooling. Given preconceptions about this practice, I should note that we are not anti-government wingnuts living on a compound. We like literature, and nice wines, and Celeste would stab me in the heart with a spoon if I gave her one of those head bonnets the Amish women wear. We are not, in other words, stereotypical home-schooling parents. But neither are most actual home-schooling parents.
----------
And ends with:
----------
Folks in our neck of the woods embrace the proper goal, which is not supporting public schools, but supporting public education — the education of the public, which is only ever you and me and our neighbors. The goal is educated children, after all, not allegiance to some institution or ideology.
This includes, by the way, a willingness to walk away from home-schooling itself if a better alternative emerges, like our local classical schools founded by groups of home-schooling families. There’s a lot of talk around election time about reforming schools, which always leads to top-down solutions. For many people we know, the best school reform they’ve found is forming their own.
----------
He makes many good points.
(Hat tip: Instapundit)
----------
Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education
No comments:
Post a Comment