In, “Home is no place for school,” an article written in the September 3rd, 2003 edition of USA Today, Dennis L Evans argues that, “there are compelling reasons to oppose home teaching both for the sake of the children involved and for society.” Although Evans makes a few good points, his reasons lack validity.
His first point is that parents are incompetent to teach. He starts out stating that home-schoolers think that, “anyone can teach.” Home-schoolers believe that some parents can not teach their children and some children can not learn from their parents. They know that home-schooling does not work for everybody. He supports this statement by telling about how “some of our best, brightest college graduates…failed as teachers because they lacked training.” This support is not very good, because many parents that home-school, including my own, know that they could never teach a whole class. There is a big difference between teaching your child and teaching a classroom filled with other people’s children. There are many more dynamics that come along with a big group of children.
His next point is that children will be deprived socially. His support is that “Schools…are the one place where ‘all the children of all of the people come together.’” He is mistaken here, because children can be involved with other children of many different people at church, sports, or through home-school support groups. He also throws in a red herring fallacy when he states that, “Such virtues and values cannot be accessed on the Internet.” This really has nothing to do with the point he is trying to make.
His last piece of advice is that parents should, “heed to the words of the Roman educator, Quintilian (A.D. 95)…, he wrote, ‘It is one thing to shun schools entirely, another to choose from them.’” Home-schoolers are not against public schools, they just prefer home-schooling for their own children.
