Spluttering Indignation

I can't believe I'm doing this, but I'm going to fisk a teacher. OK, I can believe it. This article was posted online, but then deleted from the page. Poor Ms. Flynn doesn't seem to understand that on the Internet, you can't take back what you say. Because the article is no longer online where it was originally posted, I am going to quote the entire article, even the parts I don't say anything about directly.

FLINT JOURNAL COLUMN

GENESEE COUNTY

THE FLINT JOURNAL FIRST EDITION

Sunday, April 13, 2003

By Kelly Flynn
JOURNAL COLUMNIST

The public school system takes a lot of bashing at the hands of the media and politicians. Some of it's justified. Most of it's not. And having taught there for almost 20 years, I'm certainly aware of its strengths and weaknesses.

Apparently you're not.

But when it comes to a well-rounded education that prepares students for the world of work and for functioning in a global society, the public school system can't be beat.

It can, and you can, and I shall.

They take everyone.

For a ride...an expensive and meaningless ride.

Blind, deaf, learning disabled, mentally impaired or non-English speaking,

Yes, that describes the public school system in general.

public schools take them all and provide the services they need.

Except, say, a well-rounded and in-depth education covering such useful topics as the structure, theory and practice of our governance at the State or Federal levels, US and world history, American and European literature, math and science, creative and practical writing, economics, logic, foreign languages or for that matter the English language, or indeed any of the critical knowledge required of adults in a free society. Which is necessary, of course, to prevent those students from realizing what a bad deal government schools are.

And in my experience, that's exactly what some parents don't like about the public school system.

Yep, you nailed it. We don't like that you are incapable of educating our kids to the point that they could, by the end of 12+ years of schooling, pass the 8th grade test from Salina, KS in 1895. Part of this is the fault of mainstreaming, which puts children who are unable to learn at a given level and those who are well past that level in the same class, thus preventing the children who are more advanced from learning while assuring that those who need special attention won't get it. I suppose that it is opposition to that particular practice that you meant. If so, you've guessed wrong. If there are going to be government schools, they should accept all comers. But teachers and administrators shouldn't be stupid about how they attempt to provide an education for those kids.

And for that matter, the government schools should be tax advantaged only to the point of provision of infrastructure. The per-child costs should be given to the parents of the children (in voucher form, if you want to ensure that the parents don't use the money on new cars every year or two). They can then be given back to the public school (which would by law have to provide an education for exactly the amount given to the parents, and would use that money for teacher salaries, textbooks, classroom materials and administrators' salaries), or used to defer private tuition, or used for homeschooling supplies and educational trips. Yes, yes, I know that this would vastly reduce the number of government-employed teachers, and make it necessary for teachers to actually be able to, say, teach in order to hold down a job (otherwise, parents won't allow their students (and the associated money) anywhere near those teachers).

Still, I believe that parents should have choices when it comes to educating their children.

How nice. We are allowed to be responsible for our children...

Charter schools and parochial schools are great options.

The educational choice that confounds me, though, is home schooling.

...as long as we do it your way, that is.

Why would parents choose to isolate their children from a rich and varied learning environment?

We don't. Government schools do not necessarily provide a learning environment that is either rich or varied. Keller (TX, where I live) public schools are something like 87% white.

Why would parents choose to pull their children out of the real world and shelter them from the very society that they will ultimately have to live and work in?

School shootings, bullying, forced conformity to government norms, short attention spans and the other "real world" experiences of school my children can do without. I am happy for them to make the society better, rather than to settle for the least common denominator.

It's perplexing.

Go study history, logic, the Enlightenment. Then compare the achievement levels of homeschooled children to publically schooled childern. Then consider that Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Edison were all schooled at home. Then you won't be so perplexed. Or, simply realize that you are an ignorant and seriously misguided person who has no business telling me how to raise my children. Either way works for me.

In extenuating circumstances home schooling is the only viable alternative, such as in the case of a long-term illness. I'm not talking about those situations.

If it's OK in those situations, then why not as a matter of course?

But many times in my career I observed parents choosing to home school to keep their child away from a certain "element" in the public school system that they deemed to be unsavory, to isolate their kids in what seemed to me to be an unhealthy way.

Ah, but there are unsavory elements in the government schools. There are the druggies, the gangs, the bullies, the neglected kids who go on shooting rampages, the honors English teachers who put on movies for the kids so they can work on their aerobics routines (10th grade for me, thank you) and so on. And I would rather my boys not be exposed to them until they are capable of resisting the mental and emotional vampirism that such people radiate. And if that seems unhealthy to you, you can bite me.

School is more than just academics,

I would settle for academics, if government schools could provide it.

and parents do kids a disservice when they try to protect their kids from the real world.

So it's my public duty to make sure my kids are ignorant, blindly obedient and unable to resist those in authority, or even just their peers with slightly more power, in order to satisfy your vain notion that you live in the real world? Let me tell you about the real world. In the real world, I don't work with people who are all my age, or all of my same general financial class, or all of my same general background. In the real world, I have the authority to think and act for myself. In the real world, I have the ability to speak out against the injustices of arbitrarily or malevolently wielded authority, and to resist by many different means those who would take power over me. In the real world, I cannot do my job without using language, rhetoric, math, logic and a host of other skills I was barely, if at all, introduced to in the public schools. In the real world, every day is an economics lesson, and many days are hard lessons. In the real world, my actions have consequences and I have to live with them. If I screw up, my family doesn't eat, or loses our car or our house or (in extremis) me. None of this has any connection to anything I learned in the public schools I attended. So I'll be glad to talk to you about "the real world" once you've joined it.

Wouldn't it be more logical to teach them to function effectively in it?

That is the very reason why we homeschool, as it so happens.

To me, the most compelling reason for sending a child to a public school is because the public school environment reflects the real world: competition, teamwork, cooperation and simply interacting with a wide variety of people are part of the experience, as they are in society.

I have four boys, ages 1 to 7. Their friends are mostly, but not entirely, girls ages 1 1/2 to 12. My oldest son is on a baseball team. They know about competition, and teamwork, and cooperation. They interact with as wide of a variety of people as they would if they were at the government school, except that they have to suffer fewer idiots. And though they don't interact with people of different races very often (the suburb we are in is just beginning to get black and hispanic residents in any real numbers), my eldest son asked my wife, a little before our fourth son was born, if our new son was going to have brown skin or be pink like us. Skin color, for my children, is no more differentiating than hair color.

The social setting in a school is ripe with learning experiences.

But suffers a paucity of actual learning.

People from all walks of life go to public schools: rich, poor, smart, dumb, bullies, sissies, all cultures and ethnicities. And guess what? When kids grow up they are going to have to work with people from all walks of life: rich, poor, smart, dumb, bullies, sissies, and all cultures and ethnicities.

Yes, and my kids will be the rich smart ones who treat the dumb bullies with the contempt they deserve, ignore the sissies and don't understand why anyone makes a big deal of cultures and ethnicities. We don't do identity politics and victimization studies in my house.

Even with the help of home schooling organizations, home-schooled children are often shortchanged.

Evidence? Argument? Anything? Did you know that homeschooled students are banned from competing in most national spelling bees and academic tournaments? They were constantly winning, and the public schools and teachers unions got angry about that. Shortchanged? Nope, not my kids.

The worst public school has more to offer in the way of resources than most parents can offer at home, such as science labs, technology, foreign language, theater, large and varied curriculums, textbooks, a variety of multi-media lesson support, clubs and sports.

I barely know where to start! Clearly, I can only offer the examples of myself and those friends and relatives I know who have homeschooled. That is, I suspect, more than Ms. Flynn can offer.

Science doesn't come from a lab. While we will provide the equipment and facilities necessary to basic experimentation in science (more, in fact, than I was provided in government schools), the more important part of science education is learning the method, and knowing when to trust scientific claims and when not to do so. This doesn't require a lab, and in fact the lab can detract from it, by putting results from experiments with known answers before (and in most cases in place of) understanding.

OK, we don't have a Dukayne projector. We do have multiple computers (one just for the kids), videos and DVDs, and will get what we need when we need it. I am hard-pressed to think of any technology that the public schools can provide that we cannot.

I speak German, though I am woefully out of practice. My wife speaks Spanish somewhat, though she is out of practice there too. There is a smattering of Irish and Welsh between us. We are going to teach the boys Latin, and we will learn along with them. We will likely also teach them other languages, particularly Spanish, which is in wide usage in this area.

A friend's daughter was in several plays at the local children's playhouse. We'll probably do the same, if the kids are interested. All of the sets, stages, costumes, scripts and so forth are available. No government sponsorship required.

I cannot begin to go into the curriculum resources available to homeschoolers. There are hundreds of curricula, on dozens of major and many more minor subject areas. We probably have a half-dozen curricula in our house right now, and we use the bits and pieces of them that work to help us teach our boys. Admittedly, we don't have the tendency of government school teachers to stick rigidly to a curriculum regardless of its ability to convey meaning to our kids, but I think we'll be OK on that score, too.

I refuse to use textbooks which ignore the important basics while striving to offend no one and manipulate the truth in order to make political points. Since this covers most textbooks, we prefer to rely on encyclopedias, real books, and source materials. The bedtime story for my two older boys for the last couple of weeks has been Jim Lovell's Lost Moon, about the Apollo 13 mission. We have libraries around us, and our own book collection, and we are constantly buying books as well. I somehow don't think the kids will suffer for lack of textbooks.

It is true that we don't offer a wide range of "multi-media lesson support," as we prefer to rely on actual teaching rather than gimmicks. But then again, I suppose it matters how you define "multi-media lesson support." While any given lesson may not have a movie, followed by computer games, followed by reading from a textbook, followed by discussion, followed by drawing a picture of how solving for a variable makes the kids feel about the necessity of defining a numeric problem space in such a way that it makes sense to talk about "solving for a variable," the lessons are repeated over and over again in different media. Not only is Lost Moon their current bedtime story, but the kids have toys of rockets and astronauts, and they have seen both movies and documentaries covering the space program, and we have a variety of other space books around, and I'm seriously considering building an Apollo command module from plans I found online.

My oldest son is playing baseball this year. For a while he was going to chess club as well, but he kind of lost interest in that. Maybe later. In any case, there are a variety of clubs and sports available to us; probably in the end not much different than what's available to government school students - certainly not much different than what was available to me when I was in school.

The teaching staff in a public school can be colorful, too.

Yes, but colorful does not imply competent, which is far more important to me.

A variety of teaching and evaluation styles forces a student to grow as a learner.

The semantic content of this sentence is zero, so I guess I'll just skip it.

Teachers are even trained to teach to multiple intelligences.

Sniff! Sniff! I smell a fad, here. If I refuse to use terms like "word smart" and "self smart," and instead use "literate" and "sentient," am I teaching multiple intelligences? It's hard to tell, apparently, without spending a lot of money.

How many parents can say the same?

With a straight face, you mean?

Although I have a teaching certificate,

A piece of paper, signifying nothing.

I know that I couldn't come close to giving my children the education they could get in a public school.

Then what were you doing teaching in one???

I couldn't possibly offer the depth and breadth of education that I know my colleagues offer every day.

OK, I can buy that you are an incompetent teacher. Your total lack of logic, and apparent inability to do reasearch (you could have, say, called a homeschooler and asked some questions) shows that very well. Don't project, 'kay?

Sure, I could go to the home-schooling store and buy a book on say, history, and I could read the chapters and assign the accompanying assignments. I could check the answers using the answer key. We could even take a trip to Greenfield Village. But could I offer the same depth of understanding as someone who chose to teach history because of a passion for it, someone who is an expert in the field?

Let me assure you that people who teach history in government schools do not have any different coursework or requirements than people who teach math in government schools. Before you teach history, perhaps you should try understanding it, so that you won't need answer keys and such. Perhaps instead of traipsing around some site of ostensible historical importance, you could imbue your students with a sense of how history influences our lives today, and why that is, and how our knowledge of history can inform our view of the world. I know, I know; that would require effort, intelligence, patience. I realize it is hard. But if we can do it, I'm sure you can too, with a little effort. Oh, and while I'm thinking about it, forfend you should get someone passionate about history from, say, a Marxist viewpoint to "teach" your kids. You never know when they might be paying attention, and pick up on a very, very bad idea. If they were government schooled, they won't have any defenses (such as knowledge, reason, logic, skepticism or inquisitiveness) against such bad ideas.

Of course not. I would be a weak substitute, and I know it.

I know it, too.

Parents who home-school their children have their reasons, of course. But the effects of what these students are missing remain to be seen.

Well, given that we've already seen the effects of government schooling, I'll take my chances.

All in all, a public education is the best deal around. It's a great training ground for the real world and, even better, it's free.

Where "great training ground" means "babysitter at best" and "free" means "costs you thousands of dollars per year in taxes, even if you don't have children going to school," that statement makes sense. In "the real world," it's just an example of how pathetically deluded you are.

***

Kelly Flynn, a former area teacher, lives in Fenton Township. You can contact her at flynnkelly@earthlink.net.

A special thanks is owed my wife, who showed me this article as she headed off to bed, thus guaranteeing that I would be up way, way too late responding to it.

Posted by Jeff at April 30, 2003 02:48 AM | Link Cosmos