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DadDude
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« Reply #16 on: March 10, 2009, 01:16:23 AM » |
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[soapbox]
Personally, my main reason for wanting to homeschool is the same as my reason for doing early education: I want my boy to have the level of knowledge and understanding I feel I could have had, but never achieved in my (reputedly excellent) public schools. And now that we have started an "early education," of sorts -- of course, he's still doing self-guided play for most of the day -- it's even harder to imagine putting him in school, let alone public school. I just can't imagine what it would be like for a very early reader, who was at the first grade level or above at age 2, and who was otherwise made familiar with the entire grades K-2 curriculum before age 5, to go into an ordinary Kindergarten.
If there were a really great school nearby, especially a free one, one that would let our boy progress at exactly his own rate, without either having to wait for others or being pressured to catch up, we might use it. But I pack a lot into "really great school" and I doubt we'd be able to find any school that could do the job properly.
It's not just teaching enough or teaching in an individualized way, my concern is that it's a crapshoot. You don't know what teacher the kid is going to get, no idea if the person is going to understand your kid's needs, etc. If you do it yourselves, you know your child is getting educated by someone who loves and understands him better than anyone.
Then, of course, there's the whole matter of bad socialization, as Nikita illustrated. People wonder about how homeschooled kids are socialized. Very well, studies now show. Actually, what I think people are realizing more and more -- the homeschooling literature is full of this argument, and I haven't come across any interesting reply to it -- is that the "secondary lessons" of regular school, learned from institutional schooling and from being thrown in with a lot of immature kids exactly your own age, are very bad, at least in our present culture. Maybe in the past, when the larger society subscribed to various healthy values, you didn't have to be worried about the bad influence that school itself had on the character of children. (Personally, if it were 1900, I'd still want to homeschool because I wouldn't like all the values of the surrounding community--but that's just me.) But today, we definitely do have to worry about school as a bad influence. This isn't because of school per se, it is because school brings together people from, and greatly reflects the values, of a society that is ailing in many ways.
For me, this has nothing whatsoever to do with religion (in fact, I'm agnostic). It has to do with character, which are relatable but also distinguishable things. I want my child to be a responsible, hard-working, kind, honest, etc., person, and I think that putting him in school risks surrounding him with a lot of bad influences. I don't mean only, or even mainly, drugs and sex, etc. I'm actually more concerned about deeper, more insidious influences, like pressure to conform, to turn off your mind, to think in prejudices (not just about race, etc., but about everything), to be "cool," etc. These are childish vices that you have to overcome, and which many people sadly never seem to overcome entirely, but which you won't learn from your parents at home (or, at least, that my boy won't learn from his parents, I hope).
[/soapbox]
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