Saturday, July 11, 2009

Interesting quote on homeschooling

I am almost finished with Why We Love The Church and have a lot to say about it, but after that is done there are a couple of other books I am going to work on. One of them is a book by Charles Murray, Real Education. Dr. Murray is best known for his book The Bell Curve which caused a huge stink back in the 90's. Dr. Murray tends to cut through the rhetoric and focus on reality, and the education system in this country could certainly use a lot more reality and a lot less rhetoric. I liked this quote regarding home-schooling:

Home-schooling has open-ended growth potential. To home-school when a parent (usually the mother) must work out a curriculum and teach it to her children without help requires exceptional motivation and effort. But when parents can purchase an excellent curriculum off the shelf, including books, lesson plans, and lectures on DVD, home-schooling suddenly becomes easier. When it is possible to teach that curriculum with the help of classes conducted online, home-schooling gets easier still. When a few dozen other children living within driving distance are being home-schooled, one of the major disadvantages of home-schooling-the social isolation of the home-schooled child-can be neutralized. Home-schooling is getting so much easier, and is evolving so quickly, that it suggests another provocative possibility: School choice might be driven not primarily by vouchers or charter schools, but by the evolution of home-schooling into thousands of small private schools operated through a combination of parental effort, one or two professional staff members, and the exploitation of increasingly sophisticated Internet educational resources.

I am not sure that home schooling is "getting so much easier" but I understand his point and recognize that it is a lot easier than it used to be. I think that his statement above is very prescient, and Dr. Murray is not really a home-school advocate as such. This book is not about homeschooling at all. In fact he is advocating reform in the school system through four points (the subtitle of the book is: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality) These are his points...

"...children have different abilities, half of the children are below average, too many children go to college, and America's future depends on the gifted."

So you can see he is not the typical homeschool advocate but he does recognize that something is wrong and throwing more money at the problem is not going to fix the education system in the same way that throwing more "stimulus" money out there is going to fix the economy.

Conservatives have been fighting the vouchers battle for a long time, but the war might already have moved past that. I think Dr. Murray is right in that while the teachers unions are fighting vouchers, the education reform movement is moving on to homeschooling.

Hmm, moving past a traditional, entrenched institution and moving on to a small, home and community based group. Where else have I heard that?

1 comment:

Steve Martin said...

My pastor often says that "church is God's idea of a good time, and not necessarily our's".

If it weren't for worshipping Christ together and gathering to share in the Sacrament of the altar...I don't think I'd go out of my way to spend any time with 90% of the people in my congregation.