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Another teacher writes
[Rod Dreher 03/16 03:57 PM]This time, Dave from Georgia: Hating to quote liberals, but A. Stevenson, "The best thing about America is our system of free public education," and K. Vonnegut, "The most American thing about America is high school."
You old enough and Southern enough to know the racial baggage that private and home schooling carries with it. It's the strategy of defeat and retreat. It's not standing athwart history, it's sitting on the sidelines.
Most people simply aren't competent to teach their own children at home much beyond spelling and the multiplication tables, and even then that can be a struggle, depending on parent-child relationships (I can teach my 9-year-old grandson anything; he and his mother end up snarling after ten minutes of homework). See how much sense home-schooling makes when your kids reach those awkward, teenaged years. You start looking at a breeding-ground for adolescent rebellion (which is not a modern phenomena, but ages old — a century ago we sent 14-year-olds to "help out" for a year on their uncle's farm, to avoid strangling them).
School is a community thing — it makes us. My Dad had as much fun going to my Mom's high school reunions in Michigan as he did going to his own in Pennsylvania. I share a common ground with everyone who graduated from high school in 1973.
My e-mail gives me away as a teacher (one of "them"), but my conservative creds (Retired US Army, never voted for a Democrat, grandparents who cast 16 votes against FDR, great-great-great-grandpa who voted for Fremont in 1856) probably cast me as an "Ur-Con".Re: the racism thing, that was the previous generation, not my own. Did you know that there’s a such thing as the National African-American Homeschoolers Alliance? I do agree that many, perhaps most, people can only go so far with homeschool instruction. In my family, we are not ideologically committed to it, and we are pretty sure that our boys’ educations will depend on a patchwork of homeschooling and more conventional schooling. Still, if homeschooling is “a strategy of defeat and retreat,” it could well be a tactical retreat behind defensive borders, based on a realistic assessment of how far gone the culture is.
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