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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Why My Mum Chose Homeschooling

I was reminded today of the kind of non­sense that made my mother search out alter­na­tives to the pub­lic school sys­tem here in the U.S.. My younger brother, Alex, was edu­cated at home for the entire equiv­a­lent of the K-12 pub­lic sys­tem, while I only had to endure one year in “Pre-1st”, an exper­i­men­tal grade (at that time) intended for kindergarten-aged stu­dents who were more advanced than the stan­dard pro­gram was intended for. The rest of my stan­dard edu­ca­tion was man­aged by my dear mum, and chat­ting with her today she men­tioned one of the typ­i­cal run-ins she had with a school offi­cial dur­ing my “Pre-1st” days.

About my mum

Allow me to fill you in on my mum a lit­tle before I go on: she has a degree in edu­ca­tion from Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity in Eng­land (she’s a native brit, and I’m lucky enough to share US and UK cit­i­zen­ship), approx­i­mately equiv­a­lent to a Mas­ters degree here in the U.S. In addi­tion, she spent a few years teach­ing in the UK before meet­ing and mar­ry­ing my dad (now that is a fun tale I should get them to write down some­day…), so she has prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence to boot. When she arrived in the United States, she was informed quite bluntly that her edu­ca­tion in edu­ca­tion was not worth the paper it was so nicely printed on, and that was the first sign of the idiocy fre­quently dis­played by the pub­lic school sys­tem in this country.

But the pur­pose of this lit­tle remem­brance is not to bash the school sys­tem — I’m cer­tain if teach­ers in the U.S. were paid more (and school admin­is­tra­tors less) that would go a long way towards fix­ing some of the issues (per­haps excel­lent teach­ers would enter the pub­lic sys­tem rather than the pri­vate? Maybe peo­ple with star-teacher qual­i­ties would actu­ally become teach­ers instead of enter­ing other pro­fes­sions so they could pay the bills?), but I seri­ously digress.

Oh yes, the point

While chat­ting with mum about some sim­i­lar dif­fi­cul­ties she’s expe­ri­enc­ing with par­ents of the chil­dren she pro­vides care for these days, she was reminded of her con­ver­sa­tion with the admin­is­tra­tor respon­si­ble for health and nutri­tion at the pub­lic ele­men­tary school I used to attend. Her mem­ory is of the administrator’s reac­tion when my mum enquired why ketchup was being counted as a veg­etable in school lunches (never mind the obvi­ous) — he acted as if his intel­li­gence had been per­son­ally insulted, and told mum she had no right to ques­tion that sort of decision.

Many sit­u­a­tions such as this occurred dur­ing my year at that school, and I’m glad they did, oth­er­wise I might have spent 12 more years of my life in an insti­tu­tion that cur­rently ranks 25th (Math), 12th (Read­ing) and 20th (Sci­ence) world­wide (source).

Have you had (as a par­ent or stu­dent) any sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences with the edu­ca­tion sys­tem in your country?

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Thursday, March 31st, 2005.

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23 comments on “Why My Mum Chose Homeschooling”

  1. Posted by Kevin Tamura on Thursday, March 31st, 2005.

    This reminds me of hav­ing to fight with my high school admin­is­tra­tion to allow me to take a col­lege level Japan­ese class to ful­fill my for­eign lan­guage require­ments. The school offered was Span­ish, French and Ger­man only, and I really had no desire to learn them.

    Nowa­days it seems you can’t lis­ten to the news with­out some­one try­ing to short change our edu­ca­tion sys­tem (teach­ers), or throw it back 50 years (with regards to science).

  2. Posted by Robbert Broersma on Thursday, March 31st, 2005.

    Man, I love to see the Nether­lands this high in such research results! That doesn’t mean I love the Dutch school sys­tem tough, but that’s because I really sucked badly at being a reg­u­lar pupil. If small scaled alter­nata­tives were given a chance here, I would at least have fin­ished school, but in the Nether­lands you *really* must either stop wor­ry­ing and love men­tal tor­tur­ing or be absurdly rich.

  3. Posted by Joost van der Borg on Thursday, March 31st, 2005.

    Hur­ray for the Nether­lands! Although there are some prob­lems with our sys­tem as well, at least I’ve never heard of any school try­ing to list ketchup as a veg­etable here. But then there are no school-provided lunches either..

    Thanks for the source, I’ll remem­ber to move to Fin­land if I ever have kids, and thanks for another rea­son to never move to the US ;)

  4. Posted by Brady J. Frey on Thursday, March 31st, 2005.

    I had many of these expe­ri­ences — much of them pretty ironic.

    I remem­ber as a kid my kinder­garten through 1st grade was a Catholic school. My father, being the faith­ful catholic mil­i­tary man he was, loved it — how­ever my mom, being a psych doc­tor with a good sense of the world on her shoul­ders, was a lit­tle taken back by some of the twists of that school — most notably, they had lead pipes in their water sys­tem (Kit­tery, Maine, USA).

    Obvi­ously a bad thing for chil­dren, my mom, with a back­ground in nurs­ing, brought this to the atten­tion of the school heads and many of the teach­ers and/or nuns at the loca­tion. In short, they told her she didn’t know what she was talk­ing about, and that if she didn’t like how I was doing, I could go some­where else. Much to my sur­prise, my mom told the nuns ‘where to put it’ in a not so nice man­ner, and that was the last time I went to catholic school:)

    Next came pub­lic, and mostly because we weren’t in the best posi­tion to put me in pri­vate finan­cially. How­ever, I grad­u­ated with straight A’s through my four years, with high hon­ors in all of my tests, how­ever:
    1) I received 5 days sus­pen­sion for dis­re­gard­ing ‘play­ing games’ dur­ing study hall. That game would be chess.
    2) 3 days in school sus­pen­sion for read­ing dur­ing eng­lish class — books that were not on the cur­ricu­lum. I had taken a speed read­ing class, and noted that there was no rea­son for me to read the book over again in class, when I had already read it — and that we were in advanced eng­lish for christ sake, I should be able to enjoy Kurt Von­negut. Didn’t mat­ter.
    3) I received numer­ous meet­ings and pun­ish­ment for not actively read­ing my books (mark­ing your books with nota­tions) — of which I received an F for that por­tion of the class. I received an A+ on all the tests and home­work assign­ments, it aver­aged out to an A-. How­ever, this did not stop the school from telling my par­ents that I was a ‘prob­lem stu­dent’ not apply­ing myself.

    In short, my senior year of pri­vate high school, I skipped 32 days of school, lost over 2 weeks to in and out school sus­pen­sion, and had numer­ous deten­tions. Not one was for fight­ing, van­delism, fail­ing — the stan­dard issue stuff. I will take one deten­tion I received for telling my teacher she was full of it, when she tried to stick a lame theme to a writ­ing work.

    I don’t know — I wasn’t a per­fect kid, or a per­fect stu­dent by the text book; but I was con­stantly frus­trated by the lack of com­mon sense pub­lic schools seem to be dri­ven toward. My mother, and I, agreed on many of the same issues you explained above — it was more pol­i­tics, beau­racracy and ego than edu­ca­tion and advanc­ing… when I think of my edu­ca­tion, I think of the per­sonal time I took to learn and explore on my own. Not the time I spent going through the motions.

  5. Posted by Jeremy Hubert on Thursday, March 31st, 2005.

    I can’t even begin to count the num­ber of absurd issues that arose at my school in Sechelt, BC, Canada.

    — Grade 7: Four class­mates and I were given deten­tion for sit­ting on the “young kids side of the play­ing field.” 10 of us were sit­ting in the cen­ter of the field in a cir­cle, and the TA came and pulled the 4 of us that were in the “pri­mary” side away to the office.

    — Grade 10: After prac­ti­cally teach­ing the grade 11 com­puter sci­ence course (Turbo Pas­cal, hur­rah!) and get­ting over 100% on all tests (includ­ing bonus points), my com­puter sci­ence teacher gave me a 92%. His rea­son: “Nobody is perfect.”

    — My par­ents were called and had to come into the office to talk to the prin­ci­ple. They were then told that I had been deal­ing drugs on school grounds. My mom laughed at him. My real crime? I gave vit­a­min C to my friends.

    There are a ton of them. I could go on for hours.

    I firmly beleive that all school is inef­fec­tive due to their attempt to reach “As broad a range of stu­dents as pos­si­ble.” By doing so, they effec­tively restrict most student’s nat­ural abil­ity to learn. Schools should be bro­ken into learn­ing style, not age and residence.

    Teach­ers also need to start under­stand­ing that some kids are actu­ally quite smart, and they should drop the ego and let the kids progress as fast as they can… even if it means the kid excells past the teacher’s own level of knowledge.

    Just my hum­ble opinion. :)

    Jeremy

  6. Posted by jordan on Thursday, March 31st, 2005.

    I’ve had a bit of an odd expe­ri­ence in regards to schooling…

    K-5: Pri­vate
    6–8: Home­school
    9–12: Back to Private

    I much pre­ferred going back to the pri­vate school. It was many times more expen­sive (over 3k$USD my last year, and still going up), but it was the first time in my life I actu­ally made friends with more than two peo­ple at a time.

  7. Posted by Lanny Heidbreder on Friday, April 1st, 2005.

    I agree with a lot of what’s been said here, and I think that bash­ing the US ed sys­tem is per­fectly fine. :) (I’m Amer­i­can, incidentally.)

    I dis­agree with this:

    Schools should be bro­ken into learn­ing style

    because the con­cept of “learn­ing styles” is off­spring of idiot psy­chol­o­gists, prop­a­gated by teach­ers who don’t accept that their crappy teach­ing is the rea­son stu­dents are abysmal. Real edu­ca­tional psy­chol­o­gists (of the behav­ior analy­sis vari­ety) will tell you — and you’ll agree once you’ve heard it, and won­der why you never thought of it before — that a favored “learn­ing style” is just a set of learn­ing skills that that child has developed.

    There­fore, what you do is teach them how to learn all those other ways just as well. Then you can focus on high-quality, fast-paced instruc­tion more than accom­mo­dat­ing and rein­forc­ing their learn­ing skill deficiencies.

  8. Posted by Lanny Heidbreder on Friday, April 1st, 2005.

    And a fresh com­ment to relay my per­sonal story:

    In 11th grade Chem­istry, we were learn­ing to do all the con­ver­sions back and forth among grams/moles/element IDs.

    See, that stuff is really just math. It’s just sim­ple mul­ti­pli­ca­tion and divi­sion, with the num­bers given to you by the Peri­odic Table instead of a math book. So, once you had the con­cept, you could work out all the steps on your own.

    Well. Our teacher (whose field was Biol­ogy) was giv­ing us all the steps to do the con­ver­sions. On one, though, he took an ille­gal short­cut. He skipped a step that just hap­pened to usu­ally result in the right answer.

    So I raised my hand and brought it up; big mistake.

    After fail­ing to under­stand me, he sent the rest of the class to lab. I went up to his desk to explain what I meant. After sev­eral rep­e­ti­tions, he con­ceded, along with a com­ment about how much eas­ier things would be if I “weren’t so obsessed with cor­rect­ing everyone.”

    That’s the day I truly gave up on peo­ple. :P

  9. Posted by Robbert Broersma on Friday, April 1st, 2005.

    Just to explain why pri­vate school­ing in the Nether­lands isn’t really an option: they cost about 12.000 EUR, and that’s why there’s only a hand­ful of ‘em.

  10. Posted by Jeremy Hubert on Friday, April 1st, 2005.

    what you do is teach them how to learn all those other ways just as well

    I still stand by what I said before. If you break schools up into learn­ing style, instead of just age and dis­trict, then you can pro­vide much more direct edu­ca­tion. I entirely agree that it’s impor­tant to teach peo­ple mul­ti­ple styles of learn­ing, but in today’s school sys­tem, there is no bench­mark. All stu­dents are expected to per­form with the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor, and if they try to forge ahead, they get pulled back down or shunned.

    I agree that learn­ing styles are favored skills, but a kid who can already speed read actively (with notes) doesn’t need to be taught how to read slowly with the rest of the group. They should be taught how to han­dle speaches and other forms of learn­ing. If you group every­one together and dis­re­gard their tal­ents, you are going to get a lot of kids who think that school is just wast­ing their time and will lose focus. It really slows down the learn­ing process for everyone.

    Mind you, as a North Amer­i­can, I really think the edu­ca­tion in our con­ti­nent needs an over­haul. When I was 14 I went to spend 2 weeks in France. I couldn’t even under­stand the math in the grade 9 math class, and I was one of the best math stu­dents in my school back in Canada. North Amer­i­cans are WAY behind on their education.

    Also, I per­son­ally think that schools spend too much time teach­ing how to be a good employee, and not enough time teach­ing kids how to sur­vive or be a good man­ager / boss / entre­pre­neur. I think this may be get­ting bet­ter nowa­days, but it sure was unbe­liev­able back when I went to school.

  11. Posted by Jan Willem on Saturday, April 2nd, 2005.

    I can give you some insite into my own school expe­ri­ences but I won´t.

    Over the last cou­ple of years there has been een grow­ing num­ber of, still pri­vate, schools who have taken great inspi­ra­tion from Sud­bury Val­ley school in the states. From their website:

    At Sud­bury Val­ley School, stu­dents learn to think for them­selves, and learn to use Infor­ma­tion Age tools to unearth the knowl­edge they need from mul­ti­ple sources. They develop the abil­ity to make clear log­i­cal argu­ments, and deal with com­plex eth­i­cal issues. Through self-initiated activ­i­ties, they pick up the basics; as they direct their lives, they take respon­si­bil­ity for out­comes, set pri­or­i­ties, allo­cate resources, and work with oth­ers in a vibrant com­mu­nity. Chil­dren ages 4–19 explore the world freely, at their own pace and in their own unique ways. Trust and respect are the keys to the school’s success.

    Build­ing on this the ieder­wijs schools are imple­ment­ing this idea.

    My girl­friend and I have been struggeling with the dutch school­sytem for about 7 years when we encoun­tered Ieder­wijs and Sud­bury. We got so inspired we set up our on school based on these prin­ci­pals in our home­town (Tiel).

    What I have seen hap­pen­ing with four of my kids (ages 4–11) now attend­ing the school for about a year is that they needed some time to close the chap­ter of their for­mer edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence. Hav­ing done that they now are grow­ing towards taken their own respon­s­abi­ity for their lifes and learning.

    My point is that there are alter­na­tives and they don´t have to be very expen­sive. Our school is EUR 1200,00 a year.

    I´m very happy with the fact we now are work­ing on edu­ca­tion with 100% input and inspi­ra­tion from our kids.

    I could go on for­ever on this subject.…

  12. Posted by Lanny Heidbreder on Saturday, April 2nd, 2005.

    Jeremy,

    Chalk one up to my “being an unrea­son­able zealot” tally. :) I’ve found that when “learn­ing styles” are men­tioned, a load of hog­wash usu­ally fol­lows, and I didn’t stop to make sure this time wasn’t different.

    I’m still not sure what I think about your sen­ti­ment — I guess I think that ide­ally, it shouldn’t be nec­es­sary. But it might be a really good idea for the real world.

  13. Posted by Henry Blackman on Tuesday, April 5th, 2005.

    I remem­ber a par­tic­u­lar teacher when I was 8 hav­ing an argue­ment with my mum, a few years ago, the mem­ory sur­faced and I asked my mum about it. She remem­bered that the teacher was actively hav­ing me re-read the same books, and do the same maths exer­cises over and over because I was going too fast, and the girls couldn’t keep up.

    What I remem­bered after that was that before I entered her class I was the fur­thest ahead in read­ing and maths, and leav­ing I was strug­gling to keep up. I never did recover, doing my “A” lev­els I found I’d never been taught long divi­sion (because I missed it — being so far behind) and because of that I missed matricies in the “A” lev­els, mean­ing I couldn’t cope with degree level Com­puter Sci­ence. Whilst it’s prob­a­bly a bit unfair to blame this one teacher, my mum believes it was in fact her fault, because of some sort of jeal­ousy that I didn’t strug­gle and was bet­ter than the girls at that age.

    Per­haps this was because my par­ents actu­ally took an active role in my edu­ca­tion and helped me learn more quickly. I didn’t have a child­hood filled with games and play, but I’m so glad. Even now, I can’t thank my mum and dad enough for push­ing me, when teach­ers held me back.

  14. Posted by jonas on Friday, April 8th, 2005.

    I went to a pub­lic school in a small sub-urban town; my grad­u­at­ing class was around 150, and the num­ber of peo­ple in the school (from 7th to 12th) was below 1000 at that time.

    Classes were con­sid­ered “crowded” any­way, but by and large the teach­ers (most of whom had been teach­ing for many years) rec­og­nized intel­li­gence in stu­dents and did not try to per­pe­trate on me many of the brain­dead pun­ish­ments many peo­ple describe.

    I don’t know why this is, but I have a feel­ing it was more related to school and class size (most of my classes were below 20 stu­dents) and teacher pay (many of my teach­ers being around for so long were mak­ing $80k plus) and *not* teach­ing methods.

    Still, I’ve noticed a MARKED dif­fer­ence between my out­look on life and my abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate with oth­ers and that of those I have met who were home schooled. I had a roo­mate in col­lege that was home schooled, and (although this wasn’t the only dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing fac­tor) he seemed to have an odd per­cep­tions on respon­si­bil­ity (read: almost none).

    The fact of the mat­ter remains, the US school­ing sys­tem was designed to make fac­tory work­ers, not aca­d­e­mics. The academic’s rise to the top and get to go to col­lege, where this is (was) more fos­tered than in high school. Pub­lic School in the US teaches you the “val­ues” of time­li­ness and dis­ci­pline; not math­e­mat­ics and lit­er­a­ture. If you don’t believe me (but you prob­a­bly do), ask your­self how many deten­tions and sus­pen­cions are handed out because of some dis­ci­ple­nary issue (being late to class, skip­ping class, etc) and how many are due to an aca­d­e­mic issue: even in my school, nobody cares if you get a C or a D, but when you don’t show up to class, you’re par­ents are called.

  15. Posted by yowanka on Saturday, April 9th, 2005.

    Hi!Can you please show me how to get phots on my blog?(I’m sorry my eng­lish is very weak:P)I’m very sad, cause I cant put my pho­tos on my blog!help me(zaczarowaneciasteczko@wp.pl)

  16. Posted by blah blah on Wednesday, April 13th, 2005.

    Wow, a lot of whin­ing from a lot of self-professed bril­liant minds. Maybe the schools aren’t the prob­lem, maybe you’re all just a bunch of spoiled pussies. Schools shouldn’t have to bend to acco­mo­date every learn­ing style, and taxes shouldn’t be wasted bussing kids from all over to “learning-style” themed schools. Get a grip, if you’re so bril­liant that your teach­ers couldn’t even under­stand you, I’m cer­tain an aca­d­e­mic schol­ar­ship would have been avail­able from a bet­ter school (in the event that your fam­ily couldn’t afford the tuition.)

    I think you all of have over-inflated egos and a dis­torted per­cep­tion of your child­hood. I bet every­one where you work is stu­pid too, and you’re smarter than your boss, and all the dri­vers around you suck, and…

    You are all ego-maniacs, the cen­ters of your own lit­tle sad pathetic worlds. Learn how to inter­act, maybe you could have devel­oped impor­tant skills by HELPING the stu­dents that weren’t as advanced as you. Alter­na­tively, you could always test out of any grade in the US with parental con­sent and move on to the next grade.

  17. Posted by charmdolphins on Saturday, April 23rd, 2005.

    oh. my mum did not choose home­school­ing for me. so was it fun????

  18. Posted by Lelia Katherine Thomas on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005.

    As a child, my fam­ily moved around quite a bit. Prob­a­bly half, if not more, of my elementary/primary school life was done in home­school­ing. I don’t regret it. Not one bit.

    The polit­i­cally cor­rect, of course, are going to tell you that the pub­lic and pri­vate edu­ca­tion sys­tems can offer so much more, and per­haps–and that’s a big perhaps–that was the case “back in the day,” espe­cially when class sizes were smaller and teach­ers were bet­ter. Now, though, there are so many meth­ods and ways to teach chil­dren at home or in smaller groups, as you said, accord­ing to their level, not their age.

    Hav­ing expe­ri­enced the pub­lic, pri­vate, and home­school teach­ing styles in sev­eral states, I know which one was bet­ter for me per­son­ally. Being eigh­teen now and able to look back on the time I had at home under my mother’s teach­ing, I real­ize that I was a lot bet­ter off then and now. I moved at my pace, which was a faster pace than what the pub­lic or pri­vate edu­ca­tion sys­tems worked, and I was able to actu­ally get the sleep and food that I needed as a child. I also have a much bet­ter per­son­al­ity in pub­lic. I thought I might men­tion that, con­sid­er­ing so many who don’t know a thing about home­school­ing are con­vinced we are all nerdy, uptight, and intro­verted peo­ple. At least I know how to act decently in pub­lic; pub­lic and pri­vate school cer­tainly never tried to teach my for­mal­i­ties. Thank God my par­ents did.

    When I ended up going to pub­lic school in fifth and sixth grade, I was so bored. They couldn’t believe that I had had an eleventh grade read­ing level since I was eight-years-old (despite printed, phys­i­cal proof of that with national stan­dard­ized test­ing which put me in the top 2% of the nation when it came to read­ing and my age), so they imme­di­ately started me at the fourth-grade read­ing level. They were con­vinced that I could not pos­si­bly be even up to par with my peers, much less lightyears ahead. My peers were not much bet­ter, as they were sure that I couldn’t have pos­si­bly spent my time learn­ing at home, when I could have lived dead­beat lifestyles, like many of them were.

    When I told my par­ents this, they spoke to the teach­ers and prin­ci­pal of my school. These books based on “read­ing level” were ones I was required to read and take tests on to “improve” my read­ing skills. Sadly, I was so bored with the child­ish con­tent that I would only skim the books and then do poorly on the 10-question elec­tronic tests.

    My par­ents, when con­test­ing this absurd behav­ior, man­aged com­pro­mise; the school allowed me to read at one grade level above my own–grade six. When I had read all the books of inter­est in that grade, they began to let me move up, but only then.

    Like in your mother’s sit­u­a­tion, this just goes to show how igno­rant the pub­lic (and many pri­vate, in my expe­ri­ence) edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions can be, even while main­tain­ing their arrogance!

    I stayed in pub­lic edu­ca­tion for mid­dle school and my first two years of high school due to friend­ships more than any­thing. My last two years of high school, I opted to switch to inde­pen­dent study. Why? Because I got sick of the extracur­ric­u­lar B.S. that gets shoved down one’s throat in pub­lic schools (they sort of for­get the objec­tive of learn­ing amongst all the foot­ball games). I also got sick of the baby day­care that existed in the school for all the unwed, teen moth­ers; also sick­en­ing was the fact that these knocked-up (usu­ally more than once, at that) girls could go in an hour a day to see their chil­dren and get a full class credit. They could do this every year. This, while my 4.0 got knocked down by a psy­chol­ogy teacher who just didn’t like me. That’s not a huge issue to me, but there seems to be a prob­lem in the bal­ance there.

    I agree with you on the fact that the admin­is­tra­tors should be paid less and the teach­ers paid more, but I also think, too, that the teach­ers should go through more rig­or­ous train­ing, espe­cially those who teach upper grades and are sup­posed to have some gen­eral skill and focus to the spe­cific classes they teach. In the state I reside in, teach­ers can teach up to three years with­out a license (it’s sup­posed to be for while they’re pur­su­ing their license); this is because there is such a short­age in teach­ers vs. stu­dents. Classes are over­crowded; sex, drugs, and vio­lence runs rampant.

    Nat­u­rally, it is unlikely, though not entirely impos­si­ble, that an unli­censed, poorly-skilled teacher is going to be able to han­dle a class of 30 stu­dents who want to act like ani­mals. More­over, how can peo­ple of that nature teach chil­dren well? And most assuredly, how can they try to tell us that more per­son­al­ized learn­ing insti­tu­tions of small, more focused groups, be that at home or some­where else, aren’t as good as what they can “pro­vide?” It’s infuriating.

  19. Posted by William Stewart on Wednesday, April 27th, 2005.

    Due to the poor qual­ity of schools and the neg­a­tive envi­ron­ment, my par­ents chose to home­school me. I started a graph­ics design busi­ness before I fin­ished High School and haven’t looked back since.

    Over­all, it was a pleas­ant experience.

  20. Posted by lizzy on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005.

    First of all, sorry if my eng­lish isn’t very good.

    I opted for home school­ing if my par­ents were able to pro­vide every­thing needed. But my par­ents weren’t edu­cated peo­ple and they don’t know what is home school­ing is. For them, able to send me to school i.e pub­lic school is con­sider some­thing very good enough because that is what they can afford.

    In my coun­try, dur­ing my school time, i.e. + — 20 years back so as today, even­though there are many pri­vate school, school was 100% man­aged by gov­er­ment and half of the cost was by gov­ern­ment. This makes the fees cheaper than pri­vate school & per­haps home school­ing. So, that’s the only option my par­ents have to enabling their daugh­ter edu­cated. That’s the rea­son why I ended up in pub­lic school.

    Though I not con­demn pub­lic school, like I said ear­lier, if my par­ents are able to home school­ing me, I will choose that.

    As bad expe­ri­ence is school, I am sure every­one will have one. As for my self, dur­ing 5th grade, I was being slapped by my teacher because I am not fin­ish­ing my home­work. It is Maths sub­ject. But as an 11 years old girl and just mov­ing to that school for 5 months, I don’t know any­one much and I don’t even close to any teacher.

    I admit that I am not very bright in Maths but what makes me regrets & dis­s­a­pointed with that inci­dent is that not because I get slap because I don’t do my home­work. But for some other rea­son . The teacher said it is the rea­son but another teacher and some other class­mate said the teacher got angry with me because I was slap­ping one of my classmate.

    Nah.. dont get excited… I know maybe you peo­ple would think I am a bad girl or bul­ly­ing. But NO! the fact is that the class­mate is the one who dis­turb me 1st. He is con­sider as a clever stu­dent by that teacher though every­one knows that he is very naughty. Because of that, none of the teacher will stop what he is doing. Being a new girl, I dont know that fact & because I can­not stand him who always bul­ly­ing me & dis­turb me, one day I slap him back after he pull my pony­tail (I had a long hair those days). If com­par­ing our size that time, I am the small­est in the class.

    I guess he’s com­plain­ing about that inci­dent to that teacher & guess what, the inci­dent that I got slap by the teacher is not imme­di­ately after the inci­dent I fight back the boy. But, it is dur­ing that teacher class i.e Maths class.

    Being naive & new & also no one I can tell the inci­dent, I just keep quiet. I don’t even tell my par­ents. But the scar from that inci­dent makes me hated Maths sub­ject & also that school. I was deter­mine to go to board­ing school doesn’t mat­ter if it is a good or not as long as it is a board­ing school. It is bea­cuse those days, board­ing school is a hot things & any­one who are able to entered will be con­sider a clever student.

    Gosh! I really can’t for­get that teacher & that inci­dent though I don’t know where is she about now. It is because it makes me feel very down & I became an intro­vert & no self con­fi­dence for a very long time.

  21. Posted by Taryn on Monday, May 9th, 2005.

    I was home­schooled 7 years. I’m back in pub­lic school because my mom had to get a job. It really sucks. But, I’m happy I was home­schooled for the time I was. It was the hap­pi­est days of my life so far.

  22. Posted by Frank McClung on Friday, May 13th, 2005.

    Here’s a pop quiz for every­one. Please pick out the word that has not changed over time from the list below (think of them in a sort of his­tor­i­cal order from old­est to newest):

    a. Pub­lic School
    b. Pri­vate School
    c. Reli­gious School
    d. Home School

    Stumped? Here’s a hint: the word is only 150 years old in the United States (can’t speak for other coun­tries). School as we know it today is a prod­uct of the Pruss­ian mil­i­tary state and was really designed to dumb peo­ple down into fol­low­ing orders (if you work in a cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment, you might rec­og­nize this feeling).

    I think that school robs us of the most valu­able cre­ative resource on earth, time.

  23. Posted by Chad Small on Friday, May 27th, 2005.

    My father was a teacher for 30 years (died in his 30th year try­ing to make sure he could retire with full pension…should have quit). We would dis­cuss the edu­ca­tion issue con­stantly, but he felt the biggest rea­son for the fall of edu­ca­tional stan­dards was the lack of parental inter­est. He could not get par­ents to do their part to make sure their chil­dren did their work, kept in line, and were good stu­dents, since teach­ers no longer have any author­ity in the class­room due to the threat of law­suits. I also think the best thing for all chil­dren, white, his­panic, black, etc. would be to have school choice. I live in Ari­zona where we have char­ter schools and I can send my kids to the school of my choice wether it be pub­lic or char­ter. With this avail­abil­ity the pub­lic schools have had to “step up to the plate” and imple­ment harder cir­icu­lum. I grew up, how­ever, in Las Vegas and there was no school choice, you went to the school you were zoned for or went to pri­vate on your own dime. This meant if I was zoned for a crappy school (and their were many) I had no other choice but to attend the run down school I was “zoned” for. I was never chal­lenged and if it wasn’t for my father always hav­ing NOVA and other PBS sci­ence shows on I would never have grown in knowl­edge as much as I have. I com­mend those who home school, it gets a bad rap, and the NEA hates it! When you have no choice avail­able to you it’s really the only alternative.