Why Homeschool? Part 3

Today I’ll deal with another aspect of homeschooling that affects this public school teacher’s decision to homeschool his own children: the social/emotional one.

Usually when a fellow school teacher gets into a discussion on homeschooling the first thing out of their mouth is something to the effect of, “they’re going to miss out on the important process of socialization!” It is interesting that this seems to be the major negative that school teachers bring up against homeschooling. First of all, a vast portion of our energy as school teachers is spent trying to squelch kids “socializing” so that we can instruct them. We want them to talk of course, but we want them talking about the academic subject we are teaching them at the moment we are teaching it to them. We do not want them simply socializing unless they are at lunch or waiting around before or after school. I find the unconscious double-speak in that situation amusing. However, let’s take a more serious look at this issue.

What exactly is meant by “socialization?” Preparing one for entry into adult society I would think. Now who knows more about acting properly in adult society, an adult or a 10 year old classmate… I fail to see how fellow students help each other prepare for adult society. They don’t have a clue how they’re supposed to act in an adult world. They have nothing to offer each other on that subject beyond speculation.  Left to themselves they are a detriment to socialization. To prove this, all a classroom teacher has to do is walk out of his classroom and leave his students unsupervised for 30 minutes. Besides getting fired, said teacher will emphatically prove the point that students are not qualified to socialize each other. Saying that third graders train each other how to behave properly in society is like saying third graders can get together and decide they’re going to teach each other Kierkegaardian Existentialism… Good luck… The socializing forces at work in a school are not the students. They are the teachers. We teachers are the ones who constantly train the students to act properly towards one another. We are the mediators of all the immature spats they get into. If it is the teacher in the classroom who is the real socializing agent, then once again you have the same issue you have with the purely educational realm. The division of the attention of the teacher between 30 students once again comes into play. So even though we are the major socializing agents in school, we are very limited ones at best. This is why it is very rare that a teacher can overcome the negative influence of a poor parent in a child’s life. Once in a while it happens, but it is extremely rare. Children receive most of their social training from their parents regardless of what some teachers (invariably the ones without children of their own) think. If the child has a horrific parent then that child will have major social issues in school. If the child has parents who take their job seriously then that child will behave better in the social environment of school. So now we see that our train of thought has led us to the fact that it is the parents who primarily socialize children. It is not really the schools. It certainly is not the fellow students at the school.

Now I am not saying it is not beneficial for children to hang out together. Far from it. But we must be honest about what the purpose of it is. The purpose is for positive friendship. For fun. It’s to have someone to argue about Bakugan with. An average child in school will end up with maybe 4 or 5 actual friends. They will probably end up with just as many bothersome acquaintances (hopefully these will not develop into full blown enemies). The rest of the students will be really just neutral fellow travelers with them. Unfortunately many children can’t even manage to pick good friends. Why? Because they’ve never been taught who to look for as a friend by their primary socializing instructors (their parents). You see, in a school the parents are not around to scope out the children and direct their child toward toward the proper playmate. Instead little 5 year old Jack is turned loose in a room with 20 other 5 year olds and left to his own devices for friendship. Look! Little Paul knows how to stick 10 macaronis up his nose! He’ll make a great friend! We teachers certainly don’t go around in our classrooms playing matchmaker. It’s not our job and we wouldn’t be very successful at it. Now this ties in somewhat with the issue of private and religious schools. Some parents might well hope that by sending their child to one of these schools that little Jack will have much less chance of making a bad choice about who he’s going to hang around with. That’s the hope anyway. I really don’t know if it works out that way or not in those environments.

Homeschooled children have the advantage of their parents having a very direct influence on who they hang around with. From churches or other positive community groups to local athletic teams to homeschool  groups, there are plenty of places for friendships to form. However, if it turns out that the local soccer league has a bunch of hoodlums-in-the-making attending it the parent can switch their child to a different organization. This type of control is not available to a parent sending their child to school. I’ve taught classes where most of the children were well mannered. I’ve also taught classes where I exceedingly pitied the couple of nice children whose extreme bad luck placed them with their current classmates.

Children learn to make good friends by having good friends to use as comparisons. Little ones especially need strong guidance from their parents to ensure they find these good friends. As they age they will learn to make their own good choices based off the successes they had when they were younger. Learning from failure is what you do when you don’t have the opportunity to learn from success. At least you’re learning, but it certainly isn’t the optimal environment. It’s hard to know when you’ve found success if you’ve never seen it before.

All the current research on homeschooled children shows they do just as well socially as their schooled peers and many times much better. They also tend to have higher self esteem. When you think about it, why wouldn’t they?

So in the end, rather than being an argument against homeschooling, “socialization” becomes an argument for it. I saw a bumper sticker that said “Socialization is the reason I homeschool!” I’m not a bumber sticker slogan person by any means, but I have to admit that one makes me grin.

Why Homeschool? Part 2

Back to the question of why a public school educator would homeschool his children!

There are a few purely educational reasons and I’ll cover them in order of importance to me.

The most important reason is the one-on-one attention a homsechooled child receives. Teaching a class of 20 or 30 youngsters is a very tough job. I happen to enjoy it (most of the time) and a majority of people just aren’t able to do it. Most of the training we receive as educators can be divided into two subjects, curriculum and classroom management. Classroom management is what separates a classroom teacher from everyone else. Classroom management is an art, a science, and even an inborn talent. I enjoy being in front of 60 eyeballs and wrestling with them for their attention. In my mind I often get the picture of surfing while doing it. Riding the ebb and flow of energy in the classroom is quite fun. Keeping enough excitement in the classroom to get the students to pay attention and remember the content without creating too much energy and then losing control as the excess spills over into misbehavior… But for all that, I am well aware that I am wasting a lot of time dividing my attention 30 ways. I am not able to modify my pace to suit individual students. I do my best to modify my pace to suit small groups of students, but then doing that splits my instructional time. It is an unavoidable aspect of classroom instruction that the more you individualize your instruction within a given group of students, the less time you spend delivering instruction to any individual. It’s the nature of the beast. This is the primary reason that homeschooled children outperform their public school counterparts. The massive increase in enganged time with an adult instructor far outweighs any general lack of curricular grasp that adult might have. A homeschooled child can realistically receive 20 or 30 times the fully-engaged adult attention a public schooled child receives. As long as the homeschooling parent is minimally competent in looking up somewhat passable curriculum, there is no way even the most talented and driven classroom teacher can compete with him or her. It’s simply not mathematically possible. We are not superhuman. It is no slight of classroom teachers or public education to recognize this fact.

Secondly, homeschool parents have the ability to totally control their child’s curriculum. As a teacher, I get really jazzed about curriculum. I love comparing different curriculum approaches and weighing the relative merits of each. I am also, of course, rather opinionated about what I think is the best. Unfortunately, as a public school teacher I have minimal input into the curriculum. Those decision are made by others higher up the food chain who don’t teach my students themselves. It’s a rather frustrating situation we classroom teachers deal with. The ability to completely control the curriculum of my own children is a very exciting idea to me. It’s the chance to “do it right”. Now I realize my curricular choices aren’t going to match the curricular choices of anyone else exactly. I realize that it’s my own opinion, but then again it’s MY opinion. It is not the curricular opinion of a politician or another educator. It is mine. I am the one ultimately responsible for the education of my children and therefore I want the opportunity to have absolute control over how and what they learn. More on my opinions about curriculum in later posts…

Next the state of education for very intelligent (“gifted”) students in the school system is particularly depressing. In a school setting, they are the ones who are usually sacrificed for the sake of the struggling ones. This is a necessary aspect of a society concerned with minimum competencies and “success for all”. Once a student meets a competency then he is no longer a real concern. It is not that we school teachers do not care about the bright students. It is just that we don’t have the resources (time and personnel) to truly challenge them. Some in my profession may claim that they meet the needs of bright students… Really what they mean is that they assign them to do projects of various sorts that keep them busy. “They’re learning… See!” However, the fact of the matter is that no child can learn as fast on their own as they can with direct oversight by an adult. Perhaps instead of doing a diorama or a PowerPoint on dinosaurs the child might be better served by learning more rigorous curriculum they have to mentally stretch to grasp… “Oh but my projects are demanding! I have detailed learning contracts and rubrics for them!” Let’s be real. If the child can learn on their own without your direct explanation then why are you there? You (teacher) could just as easily be replaced with a computer program (cough, cough, Renzulli website, ahem) that spits out project ideas and a disinterested babysitter to maintain discipline. Another approach is to ship these students off to a “gifted” classroom once in a while. There are drawbacks to this approach as well (not the least of which is that it is not all day) that I will save for another time. Suffice it to say, that advanced kids simply aren’t adequately challenged no matter what approach is used. Don’t get me wrong. These approaches we use in the school environment to help these particular students are better than nothing and they’re really “the best we can do under the circumstances”, but I want better than “the best we can do under the circumstances” for my own children.

A seemingly minor but important reason is the amount of untold hours that are wasted in a school setting doing things that do not relate to anything educational. These hours are spent in transportation logistics. We line the kids up. We march them to music. We march them back. We march them to lunch. We march them back. We march them to the library. We march them back. We march them to the restrooms. We march them back. If the students are old enough to switch core subject classes they lose even more time. Probably about an hour is spent every day in school just getting to places. All that wasted time spent in lines… Add to that commuting to and from school… It’s unavoidable, but it’s sad. My child could be learning rather than standing in line!

Another thing is the fact that we barely ever take field trips anymore in school. When I first started teaching we took several of them every year. Now you are usually limited to one a year. This is a necessary result of high stakes competency testing. I’m not saying we should go back to them in the public schools. Our lower students need the extra classroom time unfortunately. But I want my children to visit museums, science centers, fine arts performances, zoos, and aquariums. All that time spent standing in line and riding buses or waiting in car loops could easily be collected and re-purposed into hands-on experiential learning of this type. I realize that a parent of a school attending child can do those things with their child on the weekends or holidays, but then that child loses time to do non-educational, purely no-redeeming-value-other-than-stress-relief stuff.

Those are the major pluses that come to my mind in favor of homeschooling from a purely educational standpoint. I’ll deal with the social/emotional side of things in the next post.

Why Homeschool? Part 1

An interesting question to ponder for a public school teacher…

I believe in the public school system’s worth. If I didn’t I wouldn’t have spent the last decade and a half working in it. I may well retire from it. I really don’t know what the future holds.

So why homeschool?

Contrary to what the media (looking for ratings) and politicians (looking to manufacture a crisis that needs solving) would have you believe, our public education system is not broken. It is not second to any other country’s public school system. I am firmly convinced it is the best public school system in the world. What other public school system takes every single child, regardless of any physical, mental, emotional, or economic handicaps they may have, and educates them? It is always important to factor this into the supposed validity of any polls or lists ranking the school systems of the world. There are many other variables not factored into those rankings as well, but perhaps more on that later. Unfortunately, very few ever bother to dig deep into these ridiculous rankings and see exactly how they are supposedly comparing their apples and oranges.

So why homeschool?

As for private schools, they are beyond the reach of most people financially. This tends to ensure a certain makeup of the student body. This in turn tends to ensure a certain performance of those filtered students on various tests. How do you create a school with students who perform phenomenally on standardized tests? Only let in the students who would score well on standardized tests… Just to make things appear a little more fair you might offer a few scholarships to some economically disadvantaged students who show promise… For the sake of the student test averages, however, be sure that the vast majority of your students are of a certain mold… Public school teachers have a common joke among them regarding the standardized tests. The joke is: How do you become an ‘A’ teacher? Answer: Transfer to an ‘A’ school. Question: Why is Harvard an “elite” school? Answer: Because they only let in “elite” students. Half of my teaching experience has been in a true inner city school. Half of my teaching experience has been in lower middle class schools. There is a world of difference between those students. I love both groups, one is not “better” than the other, but the middle class clientele is far and away easier to teach. Every teacher I’ve met, who has taught for an appreciable length of time in two very different environments, says the same thing. The point of this is that I do not believe private school educators are better than public school educators in any way. Parents of private school children are really just paying to have their child associate with a certain type of child. Being surrounded by a higher percentage of scholastic achievement oriented children tends to produce peer pressure on a child to achieve in turn. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. But one should at least be honest about the situation. So due to the unmanageable expense (at least for a school teacher’s salary) combined with the fact that the private school educators themselves aren’t any better than public school teachers, I am not interested in sending my children there.

But why homeschool?

I happen to be of a certain religious persuasion. Some in my religion believe that public schools are “evil” or “anti-whatever-faith” and that therefore their children should be sent to religious private schools. Clergy without enough real content to fill their sermons tend to glom onto sensationalistic stories about an aberration of some kind and then try to scare their parishioners into thinking the aberration is the norm. And thus, some story about a wacko teacher or principal in who-knows-where school banning a kid from bringing his religious literature to school is turned into a horrific description of the entire system. The subsequent part of the story about the staff member being summarily fired, or perhaps the fact that the religious child was constantly interrupting the teacher’s instruction to read aloud from his book, or maybe that it ended up in a court battle with the school rightly losing (assuming no extraneous issues) is never told. To be fair it’s the same thing the nonreligious do when they characterize churches as being full of a bunch of charlatans, hucksters, and deviants. It’s fun for people to get their dander up and feel outraged about something. It’s more entertaining than a summer blockbuster movie. To the point, however, once again the teachers in religious schools are certainly no better at educating than their public school fellows. They do have the advantage, according to some people’s point of view, of being able to teach about their faith as dogma during their classes. But any parent that can’t manage to train their child to listen respectfully and critically to intelligently presented, yet alternate, theories on existential matters is really failing in their own job. Those parents have decided to settle for raising children that are simply unreasoning parrots. Public school teachers by and large are very good at treading softly around issues of existential import. The ones that aren’t tend to get fired or simply move on when their fellow teachers shun them. I’d bet that the same percentage of public school teachers fall within any given religious persuasion subset to the extent that that subset exists within the general populace as a whole. Teachers of various religious faiths at a school tend to get upset when they hear one of their colleagues of a different religious persuasion straying into proselytizing waters with students. That’s been my experience. To be clear, I am not saying that religious schools are wrong in teaching their faith as dogma. What I am saying is that it really is of no great benefit over public schools, except to parents abdicating their own responsibilities. So once again we have a situation where the only actually arguable pedagogical benefit, is the issue of what type of children your child is surrounded with. My choice against sending my children to religious schools therefore boils down to the same reasons as those against sending them to secular private schools. The greater expense for the lack of any superior education…

But then why homeschool?

Stay tuned…