| Response to D. G.:
Now that I know and understand what teaching is all about, D.
G., I cannot possibly imagine that it takes place in public
school on a level equivalent to that which occurs at home,
one-on-one. I am taxed to conceive of a public school being
better able to tailor a learning program specific to each
child’s learning style or individual abilities and
limitations. It is difficult for me to envision a public school
teacher reaching the depth of commitment the parents of
home-schooled children accept, revere and nurture as a part of
the daily endeavor to educate their own children.
You mention “many people pull their children out of school to
home school because of over crowded classrooms and stressed out
teachers who cannot give the “individual attention” their
child needs.” You are correct. It is a fundamental right and
obligation of a parent to choose a course of action for their
child, which in their mind is best for the child. Any
consideration beyond the immediate impact on their child is
purely secondary. As far as your contention that pulling out the
child from the untenable situation in the public school
exacerbates the problem, you provide no evidence to support that
statement. Further, common sense would lead one to believe that
reducing the number of children in the classroom would reduce
the overcrowding. I would argue that a teacher seeing a child
being removed from such a situation and placed in the attention
intensive environment of home schooling might feel some sense of
relief that one less child has to be subjected to a situation
which is so obviously harmful and beyond his or her control; I
think this would tend to reduce that teacher’s stress level as
well. In fact, taken to its logical conclusion, if a
significantly larger segment of the population decided to home
educate their children, public school class sizes would
decrease.
Therefore, home educators cannot be held responsible for
exacerbating the problems of troubled public school systems. We
are doing you a favor. That favor is reducing class size while
not reducing the funding the systems receive. Oh, that’s
right, we are still required to pay our property taxes. Home
schoolers don’t get to check off some little box on our
itemized property tax exemption form even though we don’t
“take advantage” of the recognized disaster we are forced to
subsidize. We have no choice but to pay and we have no chance to
effect significant change in these systems before our children
would no longer be enrolled in them. That leaves few options
open for the concerned and proactive parents for whom doing
nothing is not an option.
Private schools are an option and the costs can range anywhere
$3,000 – 15,000 per year or more. While that is expensive,
it’s nowhere near the cost of home schooling. Parents choosing
to home school usually choose to forego the earning potential of
one of the parents. That income loss could be as much as $30,000
– 40,000 or more, while still being required to pay taxes to
support their public school system. Not only do the parents
forego the current income, they make future income and career
paths much more difficult to create once the child is no longer
being home schooled. This indicates an extremely high level of
importance being attributed the goal of educating children.
Perhaps the value of ensuring these parents’ children receive
the “individual attention” they need is not one you share.
Should we take no stand on who or what is responsible for public
schools being insufficient to the task of educating our
children? If we were not required to pay for it, then we should
have nothing to say about it. Of course, we are required to pay
for it. Therefore, we have every right to have something to say
about it. We do express ourselves to government. More
importantly, we put our money where our mouth is. We live by
example and our example is to not put up with inadequacy by
leaving our children in schools that cannot do the job we think
they should. We express the value that our children are more
important than an inherently defective educational paradigm.
By expressing our values we are also standing up for all kids.
The controversy that the home schooling movement has created has
brought with it the acknowledgement that the underlying reasons
for it are valid. There is very little public dissent that our
children not educated well enough to be effective competitors in
the free market of employment they will enter once disgorged
from the primary and secondary school systems. Since it will be
a free market they will be asked to succeed in, it should be a
free market in which they are educated. The employees of the
future will still have to compete in order to succeed, so the
teachers of these future employees should also have to face
competition in order to acquire, maintain and enhance their
teaching positions.
Tenure is anathema to the pursuit of excellence. Competition in
a free market is the only possible solution to the crisis of
complacency in which the school systems are mired. Competition
is the natural state of human existence and if it is removed
from a mission, the mission will fail. The drive to succeed is
not fed by the promise of security. The need to succeed is
sustained by the specter of failure. A true sense of
accomplishment can only be experienced by those who are
personally responsible for it. The need for a true sense of
accomplishment is one of the most fundamental needs human beings
can hope to provide for themselves. Tenure removes the specter
of failure and thereby the need to succeed. Removing the need to
succeed removes the aspect of personal responsibility required
for a sense of accomplishment. Tenure doesn’t secure a career
– it undermines its potential.
I am legally responsible for my children until they reach
eighteen years of age. That personal responsibility is a
fiduciary. It is not the government’s fiduciary – it’s
mine. It’s not the government’s job to raise my kids –
it’s mine. If it were the government’s job and
responsibility, then you could sue the government when they
accidentally damage someone else’s private property. That’s
a ridiculous assertion. It makes clear the absolute relationship
assumed by responsible parents when deciding to have children.
The fiduciary of my children may hold the need for spiritual
values being taught. Luckily, the United States Constitution
puts that completely off limits to the government. The right to
believe in a Supreme Being is very specifically protected and
the ability of the government to influence that belief is very
specifically denied. If the spiritual beliefs I have happen to
require a belief in right and wrong, then my fiduciary requires
that I inform my children of those beliefs. If I believe that
sex before marriage is wrong, then the government has no right
to inform my children otherwise. The government not only has no
responsibility to give my child other options, it has no right.
If the government run schools teach concepts at variance with my
beliefs, then I have the responsibility – not just the right
– to insulate my child from those teachings. Anything less
would be an abrogation of my fiduciary responsibility.
Home schooling is a protest, a kind of social disobedience.
It’s a protest of the socialist and Marxist ideologies that
have invaded our nation’s political fabric. Those ideologies
are illustrated by your belief that I should “stand up for all
kids.” The village doesn’t stand up for all kids. It stands
up for those kids whose parents are outspoken and in positions
of authority. Those parents will promote an agenda to have bonds
approved for the construction of new schools without addressing
the needs of the teachers. This benefits the contractors who
build the new facilities and all the subcontractors who perform
the work. This benefits local economies in the form of income
paid to workers and their increased ability to pay more taxes to
fund the bond issues and it provides better window dressing for
the municipalities to attract new businesses and their relocated
employees, thus increasing the tax base. However, it does
virtually nothing to enhance the students’ actual education.
While I have routinely voted against any increases in bond
issues for the construction of new schools, I would be eager to
vote for a bond to fund doubling teachers’ pay, eliminating
tenure, providing for accountability, merit pay and the creation
of real competition between schools for students. This would
benefit teachers and, most of all, students, but it is not
likely to be presented to me as a choice. It doesn’t provide
the sort of ancillary economic benefits construction bonds do.
Additionally, it would ultimately create such a well educated
population that the politicians would be unable to get away with
the kind of chicanery they are used to practicing with impunity.
It is an appropriate question to ask whether political machines
anywhere would welcome an extremely well educated population or
if they are content with the general level of ignorance the
current system now provides.
The teachers’ unions stand up for teachers with the kind of
lobbyists our children ought to have. I thought it was the
school board that was supposed to stand up for the kids;
that’s what they’re paid for. Locally, a news organization
recently discovered that the school board was not screening
school bus drivers well enough to prevent two sex offenders and
four felons from securing positions driving buses. The Board
protested that it was too expensive to obtain $20 background
reports on every applicant, a decision that was surely supported
by the superintendent whose salary approaches $260,00 per year.
Enough money was saved somewhere that they were able to spend
almost $1,000 on three sets of color photographs to enshrine the
office staff of those three schools on their hallowed halls.
Pardon me if I don’t seem over sympathetic, it’s just that I
find a certain degree of irony in the situations outlined in my
response to your response to the article.
I know there are many talented and committed teachers whose good
works and efforts are under appreciated and underpaid. I salute
them for being able to hold their noses and their tongues long
enough to have as effective a career as the politics in the
systems allow. It is not these teachers with whom I have a
contention, but the ones who just want to get in their twenty
years, get their pension and the students be damned; there are
more of the latter than of the former. Qualifications are also
important and I hope like Hell that you are not an English
teacher, but then you are a product of the current system and I
rest my case.
Now that you and others know and hopefully understand what home
schoolers are all about, you’ll have an increased appreciation
for what I and thousands of other dedicated teachers spend our
lives doing.
Thank you,
R. E.
P. S. : Please consider that this is not only an attempt to
bring my light out from under the bushel, but an effort to raise
a torch as a standard to bear. |
