Creative Class Turns to Homeschooling
By Mimi Rothschild
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.
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