Slow Schooling Chapter Five

Why Not Government Schooling

Monday, June 30, 2008

Three More Reasons To Homeschool

1. Reading

2. Writing

3. Arithmetic

When I was a child, I LOVED everything about going to school. I loved my teachers, my college-ruled notebook paper, homework, and peers. I was bored out of my mind during the summer, and spent much of it trying to convince my little brother that playing school was not only fun, but actually very necessary. I couldn’t wait to go shopping with “The List” that I needed for school: full-size nick-free pencils that smelled sharply of cedar, crease-free Crayola boxes, scissors that didn’t stick, and oh! that paste! My memories of schooling are mostly positive, and I was a good girl who not only did all her homework, but sought out the Student of the Month awards, which I won multiple times.

All my memories of my education are just that: childhood memories that have not only filtered out the negatives, they didn’t even realize that certain aspects of my schooling were negative. Later, as I began to teach elementary students, I began to understand how much I had missed. I also saw that even by the fourth grade, many of my students had already been funneled into the different statum of “good” students, “below grade level” students, and “behavioral problem” students. I also saw that it was near impossible to change those classifications, and that in every circumstance, attentive and loving parenting in a safe and happy home about guaranteed the success of any student. It was never a matter of having the most experienced amazing teacher (and there were--and are--plenty of them!); the foundation was--and is--involved and concerned parents.

Presumably, the reader IS an involved and concerned parent. Moreover, the reader probably already has a good deal of doubts or misgivings regarding the appropriateness or profits of government schooling, so perhaps much of what is in this chapter will come as no surprise. However, full disclosure seems to lack forthcoming in what a “public education” really entails in all of its glory, and my desire is to simply point them out.

To begin with, classes by design have a lot of students. Most have between 22 to 34 students, but let us begin by supposing the class your child will be entering into has 12. Perchance, you are excited about this, because the teacher-to-student ratio is so low, that you know your child will get all the attention he needs. The truth is that your child will still be one of twelve children, even if he is involved in an alternative multi-age program. I know you feel overwhelmed at times, thinking, “I can hardly handle the ONE five year old I have,” but have you honestly weighed the enormity of the task to care for, teach and train TWELVE small children all at once? Why do you believe a starry-eyed 23-year-old, fresh out of college with no mothering experience, would better meet your child’s academic, social and emotional needs not only better than you, but with eleven other children pulling upon her skirts?

The reality, from my short experience as a government school teacher, is not any different from the experience from the gentleman I know who has served in the system for almost 40 years.

If your Suzy is a good girl, a sweet girl, one who loves her teacher and does her best, she will receive warm smiles and awards. Her report cards will be glowing. I’d be surprised if she ever got a hug from her teacher (especially if he were a male), given the environment of trepidation over abuse charges. If she is quiet, she will be largely ignored, relegated to the back row because the teacher needs to give her attention to the rowdy children who will sit up front and center. Suzy may spend time in a room with her head down for 15 minute spells, because certain other children misbehaved to the point of bringing the teacher to frustration. She won’t be able to read her teacher as well as she reads you, and at some point may get a stern rebuke that was inappropriate. She will try to tell you her side of things, but...you weren’t there....so you’ll need to take sides (hers or the teacher?) She will want to be liked, and although students and teachers will give her their approval, peers with strong leadership personalities for good or bad will draw her like a magnet.

Perhaps what you have is a Sam. Sam is a normal, all-out boy. He is the one that jumps out of bed to dive into the peanut butter jar, and makes carpet-ring tracks around your sofa as he pours out fire truck wails from his lips. If you send Sam to school, he will be expected to SIT DOWN. The best you can hope for is that he will have not only a teacher, but one every single year that will understand him and keep him moving: running errands, hall passes, passing out papers, gathering supplies. But, alas, that would be unfair to the other children not to have their turns, so he must SIT DOWN and STAY THERE. And the request made upon this will not be made with eyes full of an eager teacher’s understanding and hope past the first day of school. Trying to restrain Sam will be like trying to get a baby tiger to sit in an invisible cage for hours at a time, and then sending it a tazer shock when it moves. Meetings with you will be made, and after a multiple of behavior contracts and positive/negative reward systems come and go, you may become presented with the choice of drugging your baby, or sending him to a special needs classroom. You know, however, that all he really needs are short 15 minute segments of bookwork interspersed with 45 minutes of run-around play and chores time, and that in those short spurts he will learn. A lot, in fact.

It will take the average child 25 minutes to do a simple handwriting task. It will take 40 minutes to get through a math page. Three minutes to get everyone’s attention and five minutes to get into a line, if everyone (including Sam) is cooperating. Suzy will spend a lot of time just waiting. So will Doreen, Eric, Justin and Chelsea. Waiting to begin. Waiting for everyone to catch up to everyone else. Waiting for the class to give the teacher their “eyes and ears”. Waiting for the story to begin. Waiting for the teacher to begin. Waiting for recess to get here. Waiting, already, for the last day of school. It is because of all of this waste of time that students need to give time to afterschool homework, despite having already spent five or six hours in the classroom.

Study materials will not be geared to your child. As much as the teacher wants to individualize instruction, that can only go so far. I sometimes joke with my husband that I had a more difficult time teaching because I was trying to “homeschool” each of my 34 students before I even knew what homeschooling was. In the typical classroom, some children will just fall through the proverbial crack, and it may take four teachers before Cindy gets her spellings lists off the SAT prep guides, which is where she is at. Teachers don’t worry too much about this though, because at the end of the year, if they are at all mulling over disappointments in scholastic achievements, they all have hope that “the next teacher” will succeed.

Teachers for the most part will listen to you and share with you a desire to help your child reach the stars. But it will be all on their terms, and if you have a problem with a book, a program, an assembly (and, oh boy, there are a LOT of them), it will be just that: your problem. You will get head nodding and understanding if you don’t want your kindergartner to learn about condoms, but eyes will roll and tongues will wag about you in the teachers’ lounge. And your five year old will still learn about condoms. Your child has ceased to be yours, even if you are the president of the PTA. This will dawn on you in a whole new way when you try to help your child with her homework, but your help won’t be good enough because “it’s not how the teacher does it”. Parents generally have a great respect for teachers and their training, but years of sitting in the lounge at lunch have taught me that the feeling, unfortunately, is not mutual.

The curriculum seems to change with the winds of culture. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are not the foundational blocks, as evidenced by the growing need for remediation even at the collegiate level where one in four students find themselves in (and paying for) classes such as Basic English or Basic Math (1). These are, presumably, students who were at a certain academic level just to gain acceptance into “higher education”. Unfortunately, that academic level of scholarship continues to decline as evidenced by standardized testing, and the reasons leaders in the industry seem to come up with are weak at best: the focus on teacher quality (2), the quantity of tests students are required to take (3), the economy or immigrant children (4). The best scenario, they say, is to give it time. What they don’t explain is why, even if a child learns to read, the complexity of the language and vocabulary has continued in decline in the last two hundred years plus (5), still plainly evidenced by lay folk today simply by comparing current newspapers and text from those of a hundred years ago. I have even heard the King James Bible is “too difficult to understand”, but the Flesch-Kincaid research company’s grade level indicator placed it at an average grade of 5.8 (6), requiring less comprehension than the current USA Today newspaper (7).

Another reason children may not be meeting their academic potential may have to do with the fact that schools are also spending time teaching them how to be salespeople instead (or, rather, recruiting their mothers to be salespeople for them). Just a simple Google search for “fundraising school assemblies” turned up more than a million hits (8), and from the look of things, far more were concerned with how to turn principals into clowns or who to hire in order to rake in more money for the school. I cannot simply understand how a system can garner more than $9000 in tax money per student on average and still cannot somehow afford to buy schoolbooks, computers, and swingsets (9). As a teacher, I hated marching my students during their writing workshop times to gather for assemblies where hired entertainers tried to whip everyone up in a frenzy to sell $5000 worth of overpriced goods no one needed in order to win a $15 boombox. And as a taxpayer, I’m appalled.

Now, when I was in kindergarten in 1975, I don’t recall a lot of assemblies. But I do remember cutting out barns from red construction paper, dressing up as a butterfly, taking nap time on a cot, and finding myself enveloped in the hugs of my teacher who smelled like ivory soap. By the time I was teaching kindergarten, nap time was long gone, five year olds were expected to read before spring, and hugging was taboo. More recent developments include story times that are now going to involve more than Dr. Seuss. Books that promote traditional family units are now discouraged at best (banned at worst), including anything that can be "perceived" as being discriminatory, up to and including references to "mom" and "dad" or "husband" and "wife." What this means, in essence, is that if a teacher reads a book with a traditional family unit (“traditional” in the sense of more than 6000 years of human history across every culture in the entire world), he or she will need to also read a book that highlights an “alternative”.

What is the necessity of introducing topics to children that are hardly beyond learning letter sounds and counting beans? Well, as Adolf Hitler said in 1922, “When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,' I say calmly, 'Your child belongs to us already. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community'.” (10)

The issue is not simply teaching about topics that parents may not agree with or even endorse at any age in an arena outside of their own family and faith, it is the forceful and persuasive instruction from a mindset that denigrates parental authority to the point of not allowing parents to even opt out of sessions that they deem inappropriate for their own children. (11)

There is no respect for hunger, sniffles, or fatigue. I’m not real sure that “snack time” exists anymore, and school lunches still are not as healthy as they need to be for a child getting so many of their calories there. A healthy school lunch would consist of quality protein and fats for starters, but doing so would be cost-prohibitive and a losing battle with the offerings by the fast food businesses already embedded into the schools. Even if a parent were to provide a healthy sack lunch, trading (or tossing) is not an art lost on the young. A case of the sniffles might get a smidge of sympathy, but it won’t be served with tea and a smile. And even though a child’s natural rhythm is to slow down and regroup in the afternoon (especially sometime between 2 and 4pm), many children are pushed to more extracurricular activities after school.

Perhaps you are thinking that the school needs your child, that your child has professed Jesus and that out of deep-felt concern for the lost you ought to send her to proclaim Him. I find this to be rather incredulous unless the family is accustomed to openly witnessing to people in the open air. Unless there has been a great deal of role modeling, a five year old or even a fifteen year old is generally not going to speak freely about spiritual matters, even if they were allowed to do so. Graduation prayers, witnessing, and even passing out tracts is strongly discouraged; recently, a deputy showed up to warn a 7 year old to stop sharing the Bible verses his mother had put into his lunch box (12). Think of a child in a classroom who is pressed and chided by the teacher she SO loves. Why would that child not be one of the majority to abandon the faith by her sophomore year in college? (13) To assume or even hope that a Christian child in a staunch secular school system will not only overcome the pressure to quit Christ, but in the process convert a mass of peers, is hopelessly naive, or choosing to be ignorant of the tragic facts.

Lastly, there is a great temptation to blend even independent homeschooling with alternative “school-at-home” programs (which, legally speaking, means a homeschool is no longer considered “independent”). Virtual schools and parent partnership programs promise and provide funds for curriculum, computers, outside lessons, in exchange for...something. That something, however, is insidious, and the price won’t necessarily be paid for by our own children, but by our children’s children. Once there are enough homeschoolers enrolled, the state will look to impose more regulations upon what homeschoolers can do to be eligible for the (at that point, decreasing) cash allotments. In the end, children still end up belonging to the government school system. Such is the challenge now in Alaska (14), and ought to be a warning bell to families.

I’m reminded of Numbers 11:4-6: 4 And the mixt multitude that was among them fell a lusting: and the children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat?(or computers to use? or math workbooks? or music lessons?) 5 We remember the fish, (ready lesson plans) which we did eat in Egypt freely; (“free” with your tax dollars) the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick:(bulletin boards, projector screens, multitude of science equipment) 6 But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna,(nothing but this Bible) before our eyes. What do you really need to home educate? A Bible, paper and pencils, life skills, and the great outdoors. But God is gracious, and He does provide even the lesser things. I recall deciding that my children ought to learn an instrument of some kind, mainly because I had not. When my then five year old daughter requested to learn to play a violin (a violin?!), I asked around and discovered a lovely group of volunteers that were teaching homeschooled children all sorts of stringed instruments, for $1.50 a week, with a $15 a month instrument rental. If the funds are not there to provide your child for whatever your family deems necessary for their education, I would encourage you to first ask (Matthew 7:11), and second to accept whatever the answer as the most wise. Plenty of families I personally know have been blessed with all manner of provision, and there is no real reason why a child of God ought to look to the state before kneeling before his or her Father first.

It may be overwhelming to think of keeping your child home. Maybe you don’t think you can teach math. Maybe you don’t even WANT to. I know you have a list of projects you cannot wait to delve into without children wanting to take over your lap with storybooks. But, dear Christian mother or father, consider this: a 100 years from now when you are gone to that place of glory, the legacy of what you have sown will reap a hundred fold. I would encourage you to pick up your Bible, glean from Him what is truly important, and have the courage and quiet strength it will take to pull your baby closer to your side as you both watch the yellow school bus pass your home sweet home by.

Is sending your child to a government school a sin? I don’t rightly know, but at the least it seems unwise. But if it is to be, let it be a rare and tragic situation that makes their attendance a temporary exception for all involved.

1. Sept 2 2016 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/04/06/remedial-classes-have-become-a-hidden-cost-of-college/

2. Sept 3 2016 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/us-student-performance-slips-on-national-test/2015/10/27/03c80170-7cb9-11e5-b575-d8dcfedb4ea1_story.html

3. Sept 3 2016 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/study-says-standardized-testing-is-overwhelming-nations-public-schools/2015/10/24/8a22092c-79ae-11e5-a958-d889faf561dc_story.html?tid=a_inl

4. Sept 3 2016 http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/28/452550976/test-scores-are-falling-is-the-sky

5. Sept 3 2016 http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/01/were-colonial-americans-more-literate-than-americans-today/

6. Sept 3 2016 http://www.av1611.org/kjv/kjv_easy.html

7. Sept 3 2016 http://www.impact-information.com/impactinfo/newsletter/plwork15.htm

8. Sept 3 2016 https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrT6V33UMtXqugAVgcnnIlQ;_ylc=X1MDMTM1MTE5NTY4NwRfcgMyBGZyA3locy1tb3ppbGxhLTAwMQRncHJpZAN6OFZaS3VTRVJyT1hwaHl0dWI1T2hBBG5fcnNsdAMwBG5fc3VnZwMxMARvcmlnaW4Dc2VhcmNoLnlhaG9vLmNvbQRwb3MDMARwcXN0cgMEcHFzdHJsAzAEcXN0cmwDMzMEcXVlcnkDZnVuZHJhaXNpbmclMjBzY2hvb2wlMjBhc3NlbWJsaWVzBHRfc3RtcAMxNDcyOTQyMzM3?p=fundraising+school+assemblies&fr2=sb-top&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-001

9. Sept 3 2016 http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html

10. Sept 2 2016 http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/hitleryouth/hj-timeline.htm

11. Sept 2 2016 https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/ontario-school-board-tells-parents-they-cant-opt-out-of-gay-lessons

12. Sept 3 2016 http://www.wnd.com/2016/06/school-sends-deputy-to-warn-7-year-old-about-bible-verses/

13. Sept 3 2016 https://answersingenesis.org/christianity/church/yes-we-are-losing-millennials/

14. Sept 3 2016 http://www.wnd.com/2006/11/38704/

If you’re looking for a simpler, more purposeful life outside of the rule of technology, perhaps you can glean from my experimentations in seeking a more present life. Learn more about the book (and how to get it) by clicking on its image.