Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Home Schooling 1: Problems I Have With it

The issue of Home Schooling just won't go away. Indeed, it grows hotter with every year, with more people doing it.

Here are some of the problems I have with it:
  1. Who are the kids going to socialize with? Part of the problem is that these kids generally don't meet up with the neighborhood kids during most of the day. Plus, with the different schedule and lack of similarity in the education (more on that later), the kids have no one to chat with -- especially no one to chat with whom they HAVE do deal with. This is the way the world seems to be going with its embrace of technology and living arrangements -- the utter lack of a middle ground in anything resembling pubic debate is proof of that -- which is the pity, since it's having to deal with the whole range of humanity which makes humans of us.
  2. The parents are control freaks. After all, anyone wishing to control their children's education to the point of withdrawing them from any sort of school must want them to believe in a strictly narrow window of knowledge, with nothing outside their belief system to bother them.
  3. While at present it's mainly a religious conservative movement (complete with nothing over 6010 years old in the world), there will develop a lack of consistency in what's taught if the movement expands beyond that. How will people begin to talk to each other, if the only thing they share is sports move and simple arithmetic? That, I believe, is a strength of public schooling -- the shared knowledge that allows people from all over the nation to be able to talk to each other, and not just their political compatriots.

Next: Fears I have over Home Schooling

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