Though Penelope and I hold a different worldview on many levels, I admire her for her brains and her boldness, particularly as a homeschooling advocate.
Having seen THREE children just over last weekend, all who have been drugged by “professionals” because they are “resistant to authority”, my heart breaks for what school does to so many children. And that’s just one negative aspect, as Penelope candidly explains:
“It’s pretty easy to see why school is terrible. And even though parents can’t imagine they’d ever do a good job homeschooling, it’s pretty easy to see that bad homeschooling is better than going to school. The kid has eight extra hours a day to figure out what to do with himself instead of being told what to do. How can this not be an improvement? Adult life is not about being told what to do. Why prepare a kid for that?”
Read the rest of How to Convince a Parent to Try Homeschooling
19 comments
Wow. She’s pretty succinct. I had to chuckle as I read it, but she’s so right. And as I like to say, “Just reasons number 1,265-1,285 why I homeschool!” Thanks for the link!
While I I used to just love Penelope Trunk’s thoughts and reasoning concerning home education…. and even linked to many of her articles on my FB…. I seriously can no longer respect a word from her… When I saw her post on how she knows that her 7 yr old son has viewed pornography and she does nothing to try to limit that or discourage it! All in the name of “sel directed learning”…. I call it child abuse…..
SELF directed learning…… Sorry for the typos…. 🙂
Teachers really do say the learning is bad. I homeschool and both my public school teacher parents support it. In addition, they are now retiring early because they cannot, in good conscience, water down their teaching anymore.
My dad was given an honorary fellow at Johns Hopkins years ago because of his new style of Physics teaching in which all his students who took AP passed. Yet he is now told it is too hard on the kids and not to give so much homework—at a MAGNET school! It is the same with my English teaching mom who was told she couldn’t give as many essays, when she bucked the system and asked how these kids would get into college, she was relegated to 9th grade studies the next year.
Public schooling is certainly a viable choice, but public EDUCATION seems to be slipping away.
Upon reading the book Fascinating Womanhood, by Helen Andelin, I’ve been convicted about many of my own attitudes as a wife, a mother, and a woman in general. One of the things she encourages is to learn to be serene and content…and I think this is one thing that is missing in training our younger generation (myself included). We in America seem to think that all our unhappiness comes from our circumstances not quite being right yet…when in reality it stems from other things…including ingratitude, selfishness, and materialism(and an unregenerate heart)…why do I bring this up? Because as a homeschool mom who sometimes feels “stuck” homeschooling (because public isn’t an option for us, but we can’t afford private school), I can get resentful about homeschooling…but that isn’t because it isn’t wonderful…it’s because I’m SELFISH…I think too often, people aren’t open to trying homeschooling because they haven’t worked through their own discontent OR repented, and are innately grumbling, unthankful people, especially when faced with any challenge that includes great self-sacrifice…How spineless we are…
Laura,
I went only to private schools and IMHO and in no disrespect to my parents; it was the biggest waste of money. I asked mum twice if I could be homeschooled she just said it was illegal but the real reason is that she needed her brake from me (I’m an intense person and I’m not sure my parents like my personality.) She told me this as an adult. If I didn’t/couldn’t homeschool I would rather they went to a public school were the difference is obvious no pretending to be Christian to get the all mighty dollar KWIM?
I disagree with the paragraph here, if not the overall sentiment. LOL Adults have jobs, which is often twelve hours a day of being told what to do. The school system by no way ill prepares them for adult life. Plus, little by little there’s more freedom; by the time highschool came around, we could eat anywhere on campus that we wanted, including empty classrooms and the hallway. By junior and senior years, we were allowed to leave for lunch.
wow. we were never allowed that kind of freedom. we couldn’t even go outside during lunch for fresh air. There was no leaving school premises and we had to eat in the same place everyday where there were hall monitors. I remember my first year of college and experiencing the freedom to go outside and get some daylight in between classes. Talk about a serious vitamin D deficiency lol.
My husband has this problem at work, if he isn’t watching his guys at all times, they slack off and take no initiative. He has to tell them what to do every single step of the way.
Ech! I was very blessed in my schools.
Jennifer you’re right the school system was designed from the outset to make nice obedient employees in an industrialised society as well as indoctrinate children against Christianity; mainly. The ones that do well in school make excellent employees for the main but they do best when someone else is making all the hard decisions and they just follow. If you want your children to be more self directed (or to borrow that buzz word entrepreneurial) then school prepares fairly poorly for that. The main problem for Christians though is that it is contrary to what the Word tells parents to do when we send our children to an environment to be taught in a system obviously hostile to Christianity. If you by law cannot (in the US anyway) pray then there is a BIG problem, end of argument. How do you “pray without ceasing”? You have to ignore this illegal law and obey God and not man in this instance; just like Chinese Christians who in all good conscience attend the “state church.” Just my .2c and of course I may be incorrect this is just the way I see it or you may not care what the Bible has to say.
Well said, Hayley. It’s hard for us to even get our heads outside the box when it comes to what adult life should look like. Decades of this stuff has us believing that we are *supposed* to operate like assembly-line robots, believing and doing what we’re told, regardless of its wisdom. Thus the state of our country.
There is no law against prayer in schools in the USA; the law is against state-sanctioned and/or mandatory prayer. Students are free to pray on their own and form clubs like Teens for Christ & Fellowship of Christian Athletes and participate in student-led events like See You at the Pole.
A–Did you mean to post this comment on this post? I’m just not sure how it applies to the post.
I think A was referring to the comment that was made that by a previous commentor that you can’t, by law, pray in schools. Which is not true in the way the commentor phrased it. Individual prayer is legal, state sanctioned, teacher led prayer is not.
And although we homeschool our children and do not plan to ever send them to public school, I personally am glad they do not have state sanctioned prayer in public schools. It frightens me that so many well meaning believers truly think that the cure all for social ills is to allow a teacher to lead their classes in rote prayers. If my children were in public school, there is no way I would want a teacher, who I probably would know very little about, teaching my children how to pray. I truly don’t think people understand what they are asking for when they clamor for “prayer in schools.”
And no, prayer in schools was not the topic of your post, so I apologize for taking it even more off topic. I just got to typing and couldn’t stop. 🙂
I was responding to the bit of Hayley’s comment that said “If you by law cannot (in the US anyway) pray then there is a BIG problem, end of argument. How do you “pray without ceasing”?”
Even if it was forbidden to pray out loud, we’re encouraged to pray silently.
Not every job requires robots Hayley, and this country thrives on people leading and growing in their work. But simply put, most people begin with a boss of some sort; to say otherwise is not realistic.
I want to homeschool my children because of how hard they push them these days. Because of the testing, my kindergartener has homework every night, must be able to write a paragraph, add & subtract, all before the end of the school year. Not complicated tasks but a whole lot to be pushing on a 5 year-old. Until the last year or so, my husband has been completely against homeschooling. If ever our life changes in such a way that I can quit working and homeschool, I’ll jump at the chance.