Here’s another example of the inability of the public school system to appropriately deal with homeschool students.
A bright homeschooler wanted to participate in a Philadelphia-area homeschool spelling bee and she was declined because the first round of the spelling bee is a “classroom activity” rather than an extracurricular activity.
Is there any reasonable way that the school administration can justify this behavior? What positive outcome can this decision yield? I can see only negatives. I am forced to assume that the school administration doesn’t like to see homeschoolers put their students to shame. The hostility that school administration has shown homeschooling families (especially ones with bright kids) is well documented. When a homeschooler comes into a classroom and shows everyone up it embarrasses teachers and administration. There is no other explanation.
The law says that home-schoolers must be allowed to participate in public-school athletics or in any other activities outlined in Section 511 of the Pennsylvania School Code, a definition that includes “exercises, athletics, or games of any kind, school publications, debating, forensic, dramatic, musical, and other activities related to the school program.”
Meghan, the student in question, says it best: “It’s not right. They should be saying, ‘Fine.’”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had run-ins with public school teachers, guidance counselors, and principles because of situations like this. Now that we have a law designed to prevent this from happening, schools are trying to skirt around the law by arguing over semantics. This is exactly the kind of situation that the law is trying to prevent. The school is actively looking for a way to exclude her rather than include her. It’s not an issue of whether or not they can include her; it’s whether or not they want to.
I would encourage all parents to read Steve Olsen’s heartbreaking account of his experience in the public school.
Here we have a brilliant young mind that is systematically stifled and neglected over the course of twelve years. He went to one of the best schools in one of the most highly regarded states in terms of education: Minnessota. Here was a student that had a real burning curiosity for learning. His passion was stifled by uncaring teachers and peers.
Two years later in Jr. High, I took an Apple II computer class. On the first day of class, I looked through the syllabus, found the last lesson, loaded the 5 1/4 inch floppy, and completed it. I beamed with pride and arrogance. The teacher looked at my program, turned bright red, yanked me out of my seat by my ear, and I fell to the floor humiliated. He pointed to the door and said, “get out of my classroom.” He forced me to sit in the hall the rest of the semester and failed me.
Tragically, that was the breaking point for young Steve. At this point in his education, he lost interest in learning. He phoned it in for the next fifteen years. I felt that the most inspiring part of his long post was the declaration that “abuse and self-denial is not a normal part of growing up”. This is so true. Parents often excuse the public school system because they feel that children need to suffer like this in order to grow. And it’s worse today than it ever was when we were kids. Olsen tells of a harrowing conversation with his former high school English teacher. Today’s teens are so disenfranchised by the system that they just don’t care anymore. We have turned the majority of students into mindless, indifferent drones.
Fortunately, Olsen was able to overcome his crippling self image issues and has chosen to enroll his child in a small private Montessori school.
This Business Week article takes a fascinating look at a growing number of upper-class folks who have embraced homeschooling to avoid the intellectually stifling atmosphere that they endured as children. These are families that could afford expensive private educations, but choose to make sacrifices, such as dad working his office time around the kids, or even (gasp!) mom staying at home full time. Religion, generally thought to be the primary impetus for homeschooling, comes in a close second to concerns about the learning environment itself. This includes peer pressure, bullying, irresponsible teachers, self-esteem pressures, and boring class work.
Many of today’s parents are realizing that the public school no longer has to be a given. Many don’t want their children to suffer through the boring busy work and drawn-out lectures that they did as kids.
The best part of the article is the comparison made between the public school system and old assembly-line driven industry. It’s a bitingly accurate analogy. Refusing to adapt, churning out the same mass-produced curriculum and conformist students, the model is outmoded.
Furthermore, today’s leading professions demand a level of creativity and ambition that is not just not nurtured in public school; it’s sucked out of children day by day. When employees demand innovation and perpetual “thinking outside the box,” they will look to homeschoolers to provide the creativity they need to stay on top.
The end of the story contains the obligatory, “But not everyone is so wild about homeschooling…” blurb. Going so far as to hint that homeschooling retards socialization, the story doesn’t tell us anything we haven’t already heard a million times over.
The Louisville Courier-Journal ran a recent story on the growing popularity of unschooling. Unschooling was the hot topic of the homeschooling world in 2006 and it shows no signs of slowing down. Self-taught learning, educational autonomy, child-led learning, are all names for what is now considered “unschooling.”
“It’s an awareness that learning is always happening because it’s part of living,” said Jane Van Stelle Haded of Hobart, who unschools her two children. “It’s almost trying to capitalize on whatever your children are interested in.”
Whether that means baking bread with mom or playing an education video game with little brother, learning can happen anywhere. This type of learning stands in stark contrast to the rigid structures and testing formats of the public school system. Educators are currently unable to tell if unschoolers can stack up against their public school counterparts academically because unschooling is such a nascent phenomenon.
However, unschoolers would argue that they aren’t necessarily doing it so that their children will be able to score well on standardized tests. They want their children to love learning in every form, enjoy life, and pursue their imaginations to their hearts content. After all, what is an education good for if you can’t use it to pursue something you love in the first place?
When I first heard about unschooling I imagined my sons playing video games all day instead of working on schoolwork. I’m sure that most unschoolers would not allow this kind of behavior. There have to be boundaries. Providing boundaries to guide the child’s imagination is a necessary parental function.
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