A crunchy-con teacher writes
[Rod Dreher  03/16 03:46 PM]

Wonderful insights from Rob, who teaches in a Utah public school:

As a public school teacher, you have given me lots to ponder. I appreciated the fact that the chapter deals much more with the benefits of home-schooling than with the ills of the public school system. We teachers can be a sensitive bunch - not because we don't see the problems, but maybe because we get so much criticism from outside of education that we see no sense in "piling on".

My wife and I have a five-year-old daughter who will start school next year, and a baby boy whose adoption will become final in four weeks. I taught school for quite a while before having kids, and I will confess that I think about some things differently now. Kids definitely get exposed to things in school that you want to protect them from if you can.

I take your point about protecting your kids from the worst elements of the culture and agree with you completely about the "hypersexualization" of American culture. As a teacher though, what has me walking around in a funk all the time is the fundamental dishonesty and pervasive cheating that takes place. I want to raise honest children and it is so frustrating to see so many kids from good, conservative, church-going families who see no problem with regular, systematic cheating. What is most upsetting is the attitude towards it - they don't see it as wrong. Many parents seem willing to defend or at least try to rationalize the cheating when their children are caught.

Every now and then students will try to pin me down on whether or not I ever cheated in high school. I tell them that I did on occasion, but that I had the decency to be ashamed if caught, and never told myself that what I was doing was right. So, if I was going to homeschool my children, I think that would be as big a factor as any.

I'm thinking now about your liberal friend who worried about what would happen to the public schools if good people give up on them. Definitely a valid concern in my mind. It's also hard to refute your response - our children are our first responsibility over and above any, admittedly more vague, societal responsibilities. Still, I don't think you can ignore the larger issues. As a rule, most of the kids being homeschooled are kids that I would love to have in class. Give me a class full of kids from two parent homes who are eager to learn, with strong moral values, whose parents are active and engaged in their education, and watch many of the problems associated with public education disappear.

We are concerned about the lack of community and rightly so. You point out in your book how homeschooling families form their own tight-knit bonds.

That is fine, but I really question whether it serves the community as a whole. In small towns across America, the local high school is the community. It's the glue that holds the town together. I'm thinking about movies like "Hoosiers". In Wendell Berry's recent novel, "Jayber Crow", he writes eloquently about what the local school meant to the "members" of the Port William community and about how its eventual closing to consolidate with another school in Hargrave was so devastating. I'm sitting in my classroom right now thinking about the problems with my school, but also about how last week when we had parent-teacher conferences and were here late in the evening how our PTA group came around to each classroom with a hot home-cooked meal for all 97 teachers. I'm also thinking about all the things that make this job so rewarding despite the fact that I make 38K with a Masters degree and ten years in the classroom. No matter how close and loving a family is, kids (especially teenagers) greatly benefit from having more adults in their lives that care about them. Teenagers actively search for role models outside of their families. If you are sensitive to that as a teacher, you can do much good and it more than makes up for the headaches and frustration that comes with this job. If you all homeschool, you deprive me of that!

Well, I must now go deliver my lecture on the New Deal to 44 eager AP U.S. History students (large classes, big families here in Utah ) who I thank God their parents don't choose to homeschool. I'll try and go easy on FDR.