Albert Mohler notes the overt hostility toward homeschoolers on several recent occasions. This one particularly struck me:
A similar level of hostility is evident in an article published at the Web site of the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers’ union. As the author asserts, the union demands that the teaching of children be left to “professionals,” not parents:
So, why would some parents assume they know enough about every academic subject to home-school their children? You would think that they might leave this — the shaping of their children’s minds, careers, and futures — to trained professionals. That is, to those who have worked steadily at their profession for 10, 20, 30 years! Teachers!
Because those teachers are doing such a bang-up job educating the kids they already have control over. ::cough:: No Child Left Behind! ::cough:: While people complain about the fact that now they’re teaching the test – at least now they’re teaching that much. They have a track record of years of graduating functional illiterates, but they say our choice to opt out is
because they don’t want their children to be subjected to such dangerous doctrines as evolution, abortion, global warming, equal rights and other ideas abhorrent to the evangelical mantra.
That may be true for some people as a secondary reason, but everyone I know who homeschools does so primarily because they want their child to be ready for college and for life. The NEA wants us to unquestioningly surrender our children to a system that not only will indoctrinate them into ideas we prefer to either protect them from or to teach in our own way, but as a bonus does a crappy job educating them. Homeschoolers are not the ones who are taking remedial english and math when they get to college.
Thanks for the offer, NEA, but I really have to pass. Of course I have a problem with my daughter being taught that abortion is an acceptable “choice,” that global warming is a manmade, serious threat we should to change our lifestyles and risk our economy for, and that equal rights means special rights for preferred groups. If the NEA laid off all the socio-political garbage, they’d find more time for reading and math, and a lot of us wouldn’t be bailing out of the system.
Not everyone who goes through the public school system is a “functional illiterate” (I submit myself for evidence). And for what it’s worth, NCLB is the worst idea ever. Cutting funding to schools that need it the most? Yeah, real smart.
The “schools that need it the most” are almost always the ones getting way more tax dollars per student than local Catholic or private schools charge per student, where discipline is enforced and a good education is attained. The problem isn’t the money, and it’s not the students, even when they do come from single parent homes. Visit a charter school in the crappiest part of town to see what I mean, and compare their test scores to the scores of the school they replaced.
I’m not the biggest fan of NCLB because I prefer the most possible local control over education – hey, I homeschool, you can’t get more local than that – but I’m curious to know why you think it’s “the worst idea ever.”