An Update on the Continuing Dialog
December 22nd, 2009
Ms. West, who is a faculty member at Georgetown Law, replied quite promptly to my response to her journal article. She informed me that her study of home education is part of a larger project she is working on and said she would look into some of the sources I provided her. She acknowledged that Texas did not fit in her alleged pattern of criminalization of home education, but still asserted that the basic pattern remained. I poked around a bit, educated myself on the history of home education in other states and discovered that she is still wrong. I’ve addressed that in my next response to her below. And I’m not the only one who thinks so, as you will see. She, then assured me that she actually knows real life home educators and has a “quite positive perception” of homeschooling. How this is possible when her article stated she believes we are either all conservative Christian extremists living under tarps in parking lots or over-educated (how can someone be over educated, by the way?) bored rich housewives, is beyond me, but that’s what she says. She went on to push her case for heavy regulation of homeschoolers to ensure the protection of an unknown number of potentially abused children. She also clearly feels that the education of a child is primarily a government responsibility and not a parental one.
Needless to say, I was incapable of leaving this alone. Especially after she left the door open for me by inviting me to keep the conversation going if I would like to. I would. And I did.
This has been fascinating for me to look into and I actually highly recommend other homeschooling parents do, as well. You come to appreciate the tradition of home education in the best interests of your children when you know the history of how we got where we are, nationwide. Plus, as I told, Ms. West, this will make a fantastic jumping off point for an outstanding civics study at some point and time for my own children.
*****************************************
Ms. West,
I am extremely curious about this larger project you are working on. Would you care to elaborate on it at all? Is the focus the justification of strict regulation of home educating families based on the concerns alleged in your UMD piece or a different slant to researching the home educating population in the United States?
I’d like to continue discussing three main issues right now. Two directly address large sections of your original article and some of your response to me. The third is an issue that I feel passionately about that clearly colors my opinions on the other two issues that I feel is often severely neglected by those researching home education and home education regulation. The first two issues are the question of the history of homeschooling’s legality across the country and the proposal of strict homeschool regulation. The third is the particularly alarming situation playing out in Texas with our lackluster, to say the least, State Board of Education.
First off, I strongly recommend you examine the work of Milton Gaither. Mr. Gaither is a published author who conducts scholarly research into American home education. He actually has his own critique of your UMD piece on his blog and points out the severe weaknesses of your historical grasp of the legal history of American homeschooling. You state in your original piece “Dating from the mid 19th century, with the advent of mandatory attendance laws, until three quarters of the way through the 20th century, it was a crime to keep one’s children home from school.” This is directly after a statement that posits home education “over the past thirty years would have been illegal everywhere.” I have already shared with you that this is completely untrue in the state of Texas where home education has never been criminalized. He also shares that, “In fact, prior to the movement activism of the mid 1980s, fourteen state compulsory education statutes said nothing at all about home based education, fifteen explicitly accepted it in one form or another, and the remaining twenty-one states allowed for ‘equivalent instruction elsewhere’ than public schools or ‘instruction by a private tutor.’” This is a dramatically different picture that the one you attempted to paint in your article which severely undermines you argument that home education needed to be legalized and deregulated in every state in the first place.
I would also like to clarify that Texas did not have to, as you said in your email response to me, come to “full legalization through judicial decisionmaking.” Home education was already legal and fully protected prior to the judicial challenge of the Leeper case via the Texas State Constitution which prohibits any state regulation of any school not funded via public funds.
One day’s worth of research on my part and I was able to turn up all sorts of information relating to this issue that illustrates many states do not follow the oversimplified pattern you propose they all do of criminalizing homeschooling via mandatory attendance laws at the turn of the last century, then legalizing them in the 1980s. For example, in the state of Oklahoma, the state constitution, drafted in 1907, allows for homeschooling as a legal and bona fide method of home education. No further legislation has needed to be passed to legalize what was already an accepted alternative in education. Judicial challenges to the status of home education still occurred, however. But in three major cases, the already legal status of homeschooling was continuously confirmed. (School Board District No. 18 v. Thompson, 1909, Sheppard v. Oklahoma, 1957, and Synder v. Asbery, 1993) In the case occurring in 1909, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that “the home is considered the key stone of the governmental structure.” and that “parents rule supreme during the minority of their children.” The state’s Supreme Court stated that parents could absolutely “withdraw them entirely from public school and send them to private schools, or provide for them other means of education.” In 1907. Seven and a half decades before you state “in the 1980s, all fifty state legislatures… legalized homeschooling.” There is also case law in Illinois that set a precedent for legal home education thirty years prior to the period of time you propose all states decriminalized it. People v. Levisen, 1950 was the landmark case in the Illinois Supreme Court that ruled homeschooling parents had not violated the state’s compulsory education laws. Since the Levisen case, no other legislative or judicial challenges have been made to the legal status of homeschooling in Illinois. In 1904, in the state of Indiana, the Indiana Appellate Court heard State v. Peterman and ruled similarly to how the Illinois court would rule almost a half century later. They also found that home education did not violate the already existing compulsory attendance laws. A school was determined to be “a place where instruction is imparted to the young” and the ruling states that they did not “think that the number of persons, whether one or many, make a place where instruction is imparted any less or more a school.”
As far as your proposed regulatory standards, first off, I still take issue with this idea that there is a primary responsibility on the state’s part to ensure a child’s education and welfare that justifies heavy regulatory intervention. You claim the states have committed “total abdication of responsibility” for home educated children’s education and welfare. I claim the states do not have the primary responsibility for the education and welfare of any children. That responsibility has always rest with every child’s parents. Even though there is no US Supreme Court decision confirming a specific “right to homeschool,” I find this to be somewhat misleading since there are Supreme Court rulings that put forth the primacy of a parent’s right and responsibility to provide for child’s welfare and determine how that child is educated, not the state, in cases not directly related to home education. You actually cite one such case at the end of your UMD piece; Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972. This case actually has basically nothing to do with the legality or constitutionality of home education, specifically. The Amish families in question were supporters of public education, but only until the completion of eighth grade, after which they felt no further formal education was needed for their children, institutional or otherwise. So the crux of the case addressed their right to make that determination primarily based on First Amendment claims which were upheld. But the Court did state in the opinion written by Chief Justice Burger that “This primary role of the parents in the upbringing of their children is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition.” Admittedly, his opinion also asserts that “the power of the parent…, may be subject to limitation… if it appears that parental decisions will jeopardize the health or safety of the child or have a potential for significant social burdens.” This statement makes me curious if this is why you cited this case in support of your claims. However, there is no significant data to illustrate that homeschoolers represent a consistent danger to home educated children’s health or safety across the board or that we are creating “significant social burdens.” If anything, I believe a case could be made with data to support it that would illustrate examples of public educational institutions doing just those things– endangering the health and safety of children and creating significant social burdens. I thought it was also interesting to review the majority opinions from Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925 and Meyer v. Nebraska, 1923. In the Pierce case, Justice McReynolds finds the Oregon legislation in question “interfere[d] with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” Also very useful was the statement in the same ruling that “The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.” Now, this case specifically addresses private education in an institutional setting, but I still find the verbiage to be very telling, especially the phrase excluding “any general power of the State to standardize its children” as this reads to me as evidence against the primacy of a core state responsibility for a child’s education. The opinion continues with the following statement: “The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” Here the Court clearly places the responsibility for a child’s education and welfare primarily on the parents, not the government.
In addition to a lack of responsibility on the part of the State to completely control a child’s education, the regulatory tools you propose in your piece are wholly unproductive, wildly expensive and seriously unnecessary, some of which I already addressed with you previously. All of your alleged harms of home education come from a place of automatic distrust of parents. The Supreme Court, however, seems to feel differently and gives parents the initial benefit of the doubt. For example, the ruling in Parham v. J.R, 1979, which was actually a due process case addressing flaws in Georgia’s mental health statutes concerning minor and cites Yoder, Pierce and Meyer, states that “The statist notion that governmental power should supersede parental authority in all cases because some parents abuse and neglect children is repugnant to American tradition.” This seems to me to be a compelling example of case law arguing against heavy handed, state regulation of parents making independent decisions about their children’s education and welfare. I also appreciate Chief Justice Burger’s statement that our judicial system “has recognized that natural bonds of affection lead parents to act in the best interests of their children.”
Concerning the risk of child abuse in home educating families, in a Florida survey conducted by their State Department of Education in 1996, forty-two percent of the respondents cited concerns with the public school environment as their reason for home education. Do parents that are concerned enough about violence, drugs and adverse peer cultures to fully assume the responsibility of their children’s educations really sound like a high population of potential child abusers and neglectors? There is no data that successfully links home education with child abuse. They are two separate issues. The primary connections made are by sensationalized media reports of the most tragic cases. Home educated children may not be under the observation of a classroom teacher, but they do still come into regular contact with other members of the community that are also required by law to disclose suspected abuse. The off chance that home visits, curricular reviews and standardized testing might help catch the occasional child abuse case, which is in no way guaranteed, is not justification alone for such policies. Any discussion of attempts to link child abuse to home education must also examine exactly what percentage of anti-homeschooling cases alleging child abuse were actually found to bear enough evidence to successfully support the claim versus being a thinly veiled attempt by the local school authorities to bully a home educating family back into the classroom. I have no statistical data that examines that question unfortunately, but there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that points to the need to differentiate between cases of true abuse hiding under the claim of home education and cases where local or state authorities were clearly overstepping their legal bounds. Tragic cases are out there, I know. But there are tragic cases in the non-homeschooling population also, yet no one is proposing home visits for public and private school families or families with children who have yet to reach school age.
I’d like to take a minute to explain to you why I feel home visits, curricular reviews and standardized testing would be problematic to our own home education program in our family. This may be a perspective you have yet to consider since your focus seems to be on aggressively criticizing conservative Christian homeschoolers. As I mentioned previously, we are neither conservative, nor Christian. But we live in a state that is chock full of them with a State Board of Education that is heavily saturated with conservative Biblical literalists pushing a disturbing agenda further into Texas public education with each passing session. Last year, they successfully hacked away at Texas science standards, weakening them substantially especially in Life Science where they predictably objected to any evolutionary content. This year, they are at it again with the social studies standards and are attempting to manipulate the standards to reflect their religious and political agenda. Members of the SBOE have issued statements calling for the removal of Thurgood Marshall and Brown v. Board of Education from the Texas curriculum and thereby from the material students could be subject to standardized testing on. There are other notable historical figures they have taken aim at also, all of which do not fit their narrow definition of good role models of American citizenship like Rush Limbaugh who apparently does. Their goal is to produce a state curriculum that reflects a conservative Christian agenda. It is already required to teach the Bible in Texas public high schools with no provisions to ensure it is taught in a scholarly and critical fashion as a culturally significant, historical work of literature. Schools are free to implement this requirement however they see fit. As a non-conservative, non-Christian family, there is no way I would want to submit my chosen home education curriculum for review against these blatantly agenda-laden state standards. Nor would I want to subject my children to annual testing that required me to teach them this garbage to ensure they passed well enough to allow us to continue home educating. And I certainly have no intention of giving up my Fourth Amendment rights to guard against unreasonable search and seizure by being required to allow government officials to enter my home looking for issues without any probable cause whatsoever. I feel the efforts of those most critical of home education would be better suited addressing the massive flaws in public education as a larger number of children are falling victim to that educational path’s shortcomings that the three percent of the American school-age population that is homeschooled.
I understand that your intent may be noble at its root, but that does not mean your proposals aren’t discriminatory and overly litigious towards the vast majority of the home educating population who, as you freely admit, are doing a more than adequate job. Would government home visits, state mandated curricular reviews and annual standardized testing have improved the adult contributions of notable home educate Americans like Thomas Edison or Andrew Wyeth or for that matter, pretty much all of the Founding Fathers? I firmly believe Confucius is right on this one. You don’t use a cannon to kill a mosquito.
This has been profoundly educational for me to look into this situation more deeply and for that I am grateful to you for presenting the challenge. I am saving this material and am fully confident that this will create the basis for an excellent civics study for my children one of these days. Thank you for taking the time to continue to engage in a dialog about the past, present and future of American home education with me.
Sincerely,
The Very Same, Still Very Vocal Non-Religious Homeschooling Mother
Thank you so much for taking this issue on so logically and calmly. You are obviously over-educated and have lots of time while your kids are out skateboarding. Ha! I haven’t decided whether to join the circus or the church in order to justify our homeschooling practices. Seriously though, I’m so offended by Ms. West’s articles and its implications. Another statistic I’d be interested in seeing is how many of the allegations CPS deals with are homeschooling families. Seems to me that almost everytime I hear of some heinous child abuse, the kids are enrolled in public school and no teacher, counselor, principal, is able to save them.
Thank you from all secular homeschoolers for publishing your response to Robin West publicly. I believe that all Democrats and liberal homeschoolers should read this. I will be passing it along.
Although it’s a bit long, and most will not read it all the way through, they should. Your arguments are sound, logical, and valid, with quotes and references. This is what Ms. West’s article should have looked like.
Please keep us posted.
TAmmy
Awesome. Now I need to go find the original piece and see how this started:) For the record- we are not religious homeschoolers at all. My husband is rather conservative, I am rather liberal and our kids benefit from our debates tremendously:)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jennifer Casey, TammyT. TammyT said: Secular #homeschool mom responds to anti-hsing piece with research, logic, and shows why regs are bad for libs too. http://bit.ly/6u4jnr [...]
Lisa- you can go back one post here and I have it linked in the blog entry titled “My Response to ‘The Harms of Homeschooling’” Also, if you have trouble loading that link (some folks have) simply search Google for the title and author and it will come up for you. Brew some calming tea or something before you read it beacuse it is a doozy.
yeah, I, too was wondering about the “over-educated” comment of hers. How is it a feminist professor can label some women as over-educated and what makes her different from the paternalistic professor of the 60s who pointedly asked the women in my mom’s class why they were there, taking up a seat that could have been filled by a man? The irony of it all. And I’m a homeschooling mama who is, was, and always considered herself to be a feminist. Why do some feminists think that all women need to listen to them and do as they say and what makes that any different from the current paradigm of male-domination? Sorry, but I don’t see it as an advancement for women to stop doing what men say in order to do what some “feminist” tells us to do. Makes no sense – isn’t feminism about women thinking for themselves? And I choose homeschooling for my daughters.
What a delight to be challenged and awed at the same time:
challenged by genuine, articulate and seemingly effortless discovery: we all benefit! I could never have produced this rich, intuitively kind and informed treatment of a floundering surge of prejudice towards the mystery and challenge
of those being led by their students into undiscovered methods and joys of sharing knowledge and secret growth at home.
I am awed by this teacher’s patient informing and loving care for her student, Ms. West, who I was inclined to judge after reading her article,that left us Catholic homeschoolers out.
With The Diosa Dotada’s Endeavor to include Ms. West
in a compassionate and informed stage of discovery,
perhaps we can look forward to her joining the quest for education no matter where the school room is or what is said before we eat.
What a great present under the tree of “religious” discussion
in that it makes it mute.
Love
Happily activist, religious, Catholic, homeschooling Dad
for 13 years (maybe I’m the minority)
PS- let’s get the funding to put metal detectors in every house
that home schools young people over the age of 13.
Then let in the inspectors.
Thomas and Tommy
[...] also http://diosadotada.homeschooljournal.net/2009/12/22/an-update-on-the-continuing-dialog/ from a secular [...]
As always, I’m stunned by supporters of yet more standardized regulation despite overwhelming daily evidence that standardization of education has been holding children back in intellectual and social development. So many public school teachers complain that they’re spending all of their time teaching the test, unable to branch out into any tangents of interest, unable to individualize their lessons according to this or that student’s desire for more knowledge, and ultimately, unable to exercise their own ingenuity or creativity, since the scores of exams based on an incredibly narrow scope of information are all that count. So why this continued cry for more standardization? Most of the homeschoolers I know cite the ability to teach to the student’s interests and strengths as a primary reason for homeschooling in the first place. Why then desire to strip this benefit in the same manner that has left public schools sadly institutionalized and emotionally bare?
Thank you for stepping up to the plate and offering a well thought out response . Home education goes way beyond bible thumping and denim skirts if one were to look past the stereotypes.
I can not fathom that the fear of abuse and neglect can be seen as a reasonable argument against homeschooling as if parents are only able to beat and neglect their children during school hours or that teachers are the only responsible reporting adults in a child’s life. With this reasoning then shouldn’t public school be year round? Who is going to protect these children at night and on the weekends?
Throwing my hands up in frustration and disgust,
Sandy Walker
Christian (more of a bible tapper than thumper)
Homeschooling mom of two
Ms. West’s proposal to restrict home education has nothing to do with protecting the safety of children or to ensure their academic progress. Her display of interolerance towards Christians makes it clear that she has another agenda. That is to use education to advance her position on certain social issues, and she sees conservative Christians evading this.
Furthermore, I think it is a big mistake for secular homeschoolers to respond, “but we aren’t all Christians!” Of course we aren’t all Christians. But by responding that way, West has already won the argument because you are allowing her to shift the focus away from the true issue which is our freedom.
Why cede your freedom to home educate to some bureaucrat? Even if you agree with West’s political ideology today, in the future there will be a new political hot topic du jour that they’ll try to impose on you that you’ll dislike.
[...] Crunchy Mamma: Uno y dos [...]
Architect– I think it is actually important to point out to her that homeschoolers are not all Christian. It enlightens her to the fact that if her motivation for pushing regulation is to punish fundamentalist Christians for their religious and political beliefs, she is actually punishing families whose values may reflect her own.
However, I do agree that it is very important to focus on the issue of freedoms and not just the diversity of the home educating population. This is why I continue to point out to Ms. West that the courts have, many times, confirmed that parents have the right, responsibility and FREEDOM to direct the upbringing of their children, to include their education, regardless of their personal religious or political beliefs.
Call me a new fan. I responded to the original post and also love your response. But did I miss her response? Or did you just summarize it above? I wonder if she will be encouraged at least to rethink her ideas. The whole “homeschooled=more likely to be abused” thing is so completely slippery slope arguing that it is ridiculous. How do people come up with these arguments that are completely unsupported by any FACTS? And again, I am frightened that something this inflammatory could be published in a supposedly scholarly journal without someone, an editor, an advisor, SOMEONE, pointing out that the facts and data to support her argument were incredibly…absent.
As another non-Christian, liberal Texas homeschooler, thatnk you for your response. In addition, I am not an “over-educated suburban” housewife. I am in fact a full-time working attorney. My husband, who is a stay at home dad, educates our children at home.
Hannah– now wouldn’t that just blow Ms. West’s stereotypes and assumptions right out of the water? How wonderful for you both that you are able to follow the path that best suites your family in freedom!
Totally excellent response, thank you!! I’m a Christian mom who hs’d for other reasons. You are very well spoken and intelligent and I thank you whole heartedly for responding. I never cease to be amazed at how much ignorance still remains concerning our right to hs and why we do it.
Thank-you for taking the time to share this conversation. I am a moderately-liberal, homeschooling, mom from Texas. I do happen to be in a pastoral-ministry program (Christian)and work at a Boys and Girls Club. We are an interfaith (Jewish and Christian) religious family that happens to home school We do not home school for religious reasons.My children are some of the children that have skateboarded for years. Today one of these skateboarders is studying electrical engineering at UTAustin and one is entering Full Sail to study internet-marketing.Our youngest hopes to study culinary arts in New Orleans upon his graduation. While there were many factors in our decision to home school, high on the list were the limitations within our school districts to service various styles of learners. These schools were limited as a direct result of state mandated standardized testing. I truly hope that Ms. West rethinks some of her stereotypes as she continues to research the homeschooling community at large.
Thanks for posting your reply – i did write to her as well, just to point out how her article comes across to home schoolers
– but i loved your article and that you found the time to do a little research and present your case which is much more coherent.
for what it’s worth, we’re Christians and we have seven children but don’t live in a trailer park
and homeschool for a zillion different reasons – BUT my husband works in the public education sphere and we are “aligned” which means i agree to meet (or exceed) the provincial program of study in some areas, and to have my children take a (ridiculous) standardized test every three years. We are also supposed to have three visits a year, but we don’t as we live in a remote area…
This results in more money for me (1350$ per child per year) so i don’t mind jumping through some hoops. But i would hate it if my friends were forced to do the same thing as i am doing, when they feel standardized testing is a joke (it is) or if they just felt that they didn’t feel like covering what the public schools are covering (which is why i choose language arts and math instead of science and history – the scope and sequence in the basics is pretty much the same across the board, and if you exceed their minimums, no one minds…)
It may be worth considering that Ms. West may not have strong opinions about Christians, homeschooling, regulation or anything else she has written about in her article. By and large, faculty are required to write and to publish for their current jobs and their jobs aspirations. If she is hoping to be hired by a conservative law school, this article may simply be a political move to both meet a publishing requirement and establish her in a particular niche. Without footnotes, and citing primarily other articles, it hardly counts as a scholarly work.
As an over-educated, yet gainfully employed and previously homeschooled Law School Librarian, I do wonder that Ms. West, an Associate Dean (not a Professor of Law) in Research and Academic Programs does not have access to better research skills or better peer review.
Sounds like it will be a fun civics project.
Apparently West has been traveling the country giving a talk titled
“Religious Rights as Protected Wrongs: The Case of Homeschooling”
apa-pacific.org/current/group-program.php
http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/events/details.cfm?StartDate=09/01/2009
http://www.villanova.edu/artsci/english/
That’s quite a provocative title, I would be interested in the transcript or video to know the focus.
So would I.
I may not agree with the religious, political and scientific beliefs of fundamentalists, but parents who do choose to home educate primarily for religious reasons should not have to suffer the sorts of abuses Ms. West seems intent on slinging at them. They are not stereotypes either. They are real people with real children who are acting in what they passionately feel is the best interest of their children and every one of their families are unique.
Ms. West is, indeed, a law professor in addition to being an Associate Dean. She taught at Georgetown last semester and as a matter of fact, she is co-teaching a class in the Spring semester at Georgetown that addresses this very issue.
Law and Philosophy: Citizenship and Education. From the online course catalog: http://www.law.georgetown.edu/curriculum/tab_courses.cfm?Status=Course&Detail=1834 One of their topics of discussion will be homeschooling and regulation.
It looks to me like she wants to attack fundamentalism, and is using homeschooling as a weapon.
I hope this isn’t the case as to me it comes down to freedoms and her regulations would affect us all, including those who agree with her politically.
Liberty is either for all or for none, we can’t trample people’s rights because we disagree with them.
Oh, and in this economy, when states are out of money, how does she expect them to afford new regulations and enforcement procedures, anyway? Our state is closing schools, taking over failing schools, shutting down programs, firing teachers, and scrambling to put a Charter School law on the books so they can compete for a few million in Federal funds. No way could they add a whole new set of regulations!
[...] comprehensive rebuttal was submitted by a homeschooling parent (here), and the follow-up response (here) as well as a comment by a homeschool legal scholar [...]
Crunchy Mama – Thank you for defending parents’ right to home educate by correcting West about the law. It looks like you put an effort into a convincing arguement.
You responded to my original post by saying that it enlightens West by telling her that not all homeschoolers are conservative Christians, because it may have been her motivation to target conservative Christians. Unfortuanately, she could still justify regulating all of us if she thinks that there are just a few conservative Christian homeschoolers. So, it should be irrelevant as to what percentage of homeschoolers are from a particular faith, especially considering that she is proposing government regulations, in part because of religion. I thought there was supposed to be a separation of church and state! I applaud West for revealing her own bigotry; it makes it easier for me.
Secondly, there are some home educators who wouldn’t mind mandatory government testing. Secret desires to prove that their children are advanced or to convince doubtful relatives that they know what they’re doing, are both poor reasons for regulation. I already test my kids without any government mandate. So, does West think that my tests aren’t good enough? Why such distrust of individual freedom?
Moreover, West’s choice of words makes it clear that she is trying to convince the reader that we are being evasive. She called home education “unregulated homeschooling”, and we have “little or no oversight from public school officials”. It all implies that we’re evading oversight by the public. Readers might think that home educators are getting away too easy while they have to endure No Child Left Behind tests and teacher layoffs. It’s not fair! Regulate thos homeschoolers (just to get even)!
Finally, in West’s conclusion she proposes periodic tests and visits for “college and career counseling” so that parents can have access to information that they wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s all a pre-internet kind of world to her.
Here’s another anti-home education news article that deserves a response:
http://miller-mccune.com/news/don-t-tread-on-me-i-home-school-1686
As a liberal, non-Christian mom (new to homeschooling), I took all sorts of offense at the innuendos that all parents who hs are religious fanatics. Of course, as an American who believes in religious freedom, I took even greater offense that she implied that Christians who ARE “extreme” are incorrect in their practices. We are SUPPOSED to have the religious freedom to practice as we see fit; am I correct? Or is this only if it fits into the government’s agenda? How incredibly offensive is it for her to state that just because someone teaches their children to be “Bush’s soldiers”, or extremely conservative, anti-feminist “propaganda” that it is any less harmful than subjecting their children to the cold and unfeeling world of a public school system that honestly doesn’t care about the individual? Can Ms. West ACTUALLY believe that my children would be better off learning at the same pace that has been set for them at the public school? My incredibly intelligent, yet socially awkward child? Or my social butterfly who struggles to read and needs the continued attention of a one-to-one teacher? Would they REALLY benefit from this mythical teacher who exists at her magical public school? This supposed teacher who has too many children with IEPs, special needs, and differing educational abilities is ACTUALLY able to meet their educational needs better than I AM?!?
Ms. West, I am offended. I am writing in my desk chair on this day after Christmas, where I sat down to enjoy a few quiet moments as my children play with their Christmas toys. I had intended on printing out new lesson plans and interesting information on the topics my children to study next. Instead, I am (yet again) disappointed in the public and government’s opinions of the “greatness” of the public school system. IT IS BROKEN. It has been stated NUMEROUS times that No Child Left Behind is killing the education of every child in America. It is OBVIOUS that the public school system pales in comparison to other countries, but that homeschooled kids (on average) have greater opportunities to excel. Why mandate that our kids waste their time taking silly tests to prove that they are learning what the kids in public school are learning if it is already obvious that most kids in public schools AREN’T learning enough?!?
Ooooh…. I am burning up. I may have to write my own post because I am taking up Crunchy Mama’s comments.
BTW, Crunchy Mama. I’m a new fan. I LOVED YOUR RESPONSE. Thank you for speaking up for so many of us homeschooling families. Bravo.
“topics my children CHOSE to study next”
There I was, calmly reading through Ms. West’s article, spotting this or that fallacy of logic, until I came across this paragraph, which had me laughing out loud:
“Third, public and private schools provide for many
children, I suspect, although I have yet to see studies of
this, a safe haven in which they are both regarded and
respected independently and individually. Family love
is intense, and we need it to survive and thrive. It is
also deeply contingent on the existence and nature of
the family ties. Children are loved in a family because
they are the children of the parents in the family. The
“unconditional love” they receive is anything but
unconditional: it is conditioned on the fact that they are
their parents’ children.
School—either public or private—
ideally provides a welcome respite. A child is
regarded and respected at school not because she is her
parent’s child, but because she is a student: she is valued
for traits and for a status, in other words, that are
independent of her status as the parent’s genetic or
adoptive offspring. The ideal teacher cares about the
child as an individual, a learner, an actively curious
person—she doesn’t care about the child because the
child is hers. The child is regarded with respect equally
to all the children in the class. In these ways, the school
classroom, ideally, and the relations within it, is a
model of some core aspects of citizenship.”
I don’t even know where to start, except to say that if schools were such a haven of respect for the individual (as West “suspects”) why the rush toward homeschooling over the past 25 years, as she points out in the first paragraph of the article. And school provides a “welcome respite” from the unconditional love of the parent? I don’t even know how you argue with statements such as these.
And yes, it would be an ideal teacher indeed who would “regard all children with equal respect” and “care about each child as an individual, a learner, an actively curious person.” That would be fantastic, and I’m sure that’s every teacher’s goal, but where will they find the time when they’re evaluated only on how well they prepare students to pass all these standardized tests that Ms. West is so fond of?
Wonderfully done! You rock!
From Ms. West’s response, she doesn’t seem to care about what you have to say. She seems very determined in her opinions.
I am very impressed with your well thought-out, logical responses to her!
Thank you sooo much for posting your response to Ms. West. I am a homeschool teacher for a family of an 11 yr-old with ADHD. She is a bright and intelligent child who was floundering and needed to be homeschooled….BUT in a way that is tailored to her. If the public school classrooms that ARE regulated are not able to meet the learning-needs of each child, then what would happen to those parents and homeschools that become regulated in the same way??
The population of children with special learning needs or at least individual learning styles, are growing. Also, with so many people wanting their children to stay connected with their culture and beliefs, it is and will continually be more desirable to educate children at home. Therefore, if we do indeed live in a diversely populated country, then it scares me to think that diversity is being attacked by regulating or (heaven forbid) forbidding the schooling of children at home.
Also, as an educator for over 30 yrs, it is highly unlikely for an abusive parent to want to have their kids around 24/7. Most abuse is stress and anger-based…so parents that would have a tendency to hit and over do it want their kids out of the way most of the time. Also, if kids are seen skateboarding during school hrs I think there would be at least one nosey neighbor that would say something!
All-in-all most of what Ms. West said is absurd!
WOW! Thank you for standing up for us. Your letters are some of the best I’ve seen.
Congratulations!
Another non-Christian, non-conservative, non-rich homeschooling mom in Texas,
Michele