So I'm reading up on a case of
homeschooling. I think that the
case is simple. The father fears that his daughter is not being properly
socialized by her mother's homeschooling and the mother is trying to turn it into a case of religious discrimination.
I'm not a fan of homeschooling. I couldn't have imagined having to spend the day learning from my mother, especially now that I realize how much she doesn't know. I decided in
high school that the point that parents start saying that "teens think they know everything" is really just when the teens realize that the parents know nothing.
There is no test for parents to homeschool. I can see parents who decide that they aren't going to
teach algebra because they (the parent) are not good at it and don't like it. There are so many things that public and private education forces kids to look into, such as literature,
drama, and history, which could be considered optional and I fear what a most adults would decide is enough. I know that their are some exams that the students have to take, more now than before, but I fear that someone might not be exposed to
Romeo and Juliet because the parent couldn't understand Shakespearean or
Animal Farm because the horse dies (sorry for the spoiler) and they thought it upset them (the parent, not the child).
The real concern I have is that when you hear about successful homeschooling the kids are already taking
community college classes by the time they are sixteen. There is a flaw in the current system of
public education is that they slow down the class for the worst students, who might be a slow learner or might be just stupid, then the smart kids get bored, and their grades suffer for it. I know that is how it works because it happened to me and to both of my brothers. Our antagonists in elementary school were not other kids, but the teachers themselves, who fought battles with our parents, trying to convince them that we were
retarded troublemakers.
Once we got out of there we were awarded our proper status as "gifted", we acted out because we were bored and had incompetent teachers. I've been out of that place for ten years and I still hate it with an passion.
My point is that they don't want to hurt the feelings of the stupid kids by leaving them behind, and therefore they damage and slow the education the the smarter kids. Then they waste time with dumb activities and organization, I'm trying to compare the eight hour public school day to the three hour homeschooling day and failing.
But my elementary school said I would never be able to string three sentences together so I've proved them wrong.
-X
