Charles Murray proposes bold changes for our education system in a piece entitled "The age of educational romanticism" at the New Criterion.
It's a rather lengthy piece, but briefly, Murray contends that our one-size-fits-all approach to education isn't working, and is detrimental to children.
He examines several of the educational trends to which we've subjected our children over the years as we've attempted to improve education. He doesn't have kind words for No Child Left Behind, but neither does he for the idiotic self-esteem approach, either.
The entire article is an interesting walk down educational-policy lane, but these paragraphs perhaps best sum up Murray's contention:
For the good of our children, educational romanticism needs to collapse, and quickly. Its effects play out in the lives of young people in devastating ways. The fourth-grader who has trouble sounding out simple words and his classmate who is reading A Tale of Two Cities for fun sit in the same classroom day after miserable day, the one so frustrated by tasks he cannot do and the other so bored that both are near tears. The eighth-grader who cannot make sense of algebra but has an almost mystical knack with machines is told to stick with the college prep track, because to be a success in life he must go to college and get a B.A. The senior with terrific SAT scores gets away with turning in rubbish on his term papers because to make special demands on the gifted would be elitist. They are all products of an educational system that cannot make itself talk openly about the implications of diverse educational limits.
There is much more to be said about these harms (and I have said it, in a book that will appear in a few months). For now, it is enough to recognize that educational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top. It short-changes all of them.
In this last paragraph, Murray nails one of the greatest benefits of homeschooling.
Many of us homeschoolers do so because we don't want our children indoctrinated by the secularist mindset forced on our public schools. We don't want our children being led to the conclusion that their faith is something to be ashamed of, that it's something irrelevant in the "real world," in fact that it has no place in the "real world."
We also may not want them exposed to so much of the pop peer pressure that dictates immodest clothing, foul language, and too often involves substance abuse. These enticements are strong enough in and of themselves, and from neighbor children and other peer groups, without immersing our children in this type of herd instinct for eight hours a day.
But homeschooling also allows the parent/teacher to tailor educational methods and materials to the child, which is something simply not possible in a diverse class of 15-30 or more kids.
If a child is having trouble with a particular subject or in general, the parent/teacher can take more time with the child. If the child "gets it" and is about to become bored with learning, the parent/teacher can move on to new material. This way, neither the "slow learner" nor the "fast learner" get short-changed--a sad prospect for either.
When I started first grade (I didn't go to headstart/kindergarten), I was way ahead of the other kids. I had been reading since I was four, and by the time I started first grade, I had read countless books...though I could have counted them if I'd taken the time, because I could also count and perform other basic mathematical functions. I didn't get seriously challenged until somewhere around the 7-9th grade, and even then, the challenge was fleeting. I was bored to tears through most of my school career.
My daughter, however, is homeschooled and moves at her own pace. She's 10 years old and recently took the standardized test required of 4th-grade homeschool children. She tested several years ahead of her grade in every area, with most at the "post high school" level.
My son is 5 and he's been reading for about a year now. He's known his numbers for about that long and can do simple addition and subtraction. He's currently learning to write, and he's actually doing better than his sister did at that age.
Can you imagine how bored my children would be if I suddenly threw them into a public school?
In the end, though, while I think Murray danced around one of the top if not THE top determiner of student success, he failed to bring it into the light, and it's one where homeschooling probably excels the best. It's called "parental involvement."
Whether a child is smart, slow, or somewhere in the middle, or whether they are more mechanically inclined than academically inclined...the attention, encouragement and support of the parents is the single greatest factor in the success of the child.
Even a smart child is going to have a hard time in school (and in life) if he/she comes from a home where they're treated like the cat that gets fed and occasionally petted for a minute, and is otherwise ignored.
And even a slow-learning child can grow up to be well-adjusted and self-sufficient if his/her parents provide a stable home life with plenty of love and encouragement.
We definitely should, as Murray suggests, take a serious look at a major overhaul of how we do education in this country.
But even more importantly, we desperately need to take a serious look at how we parent in this country. Children are always going to be at a great disadvantage if they spend most of their day in a daycare or public school, and only see their parents for an hour or two a day, with maybe less than 10 minutes a day actually interacting with them.
It'll take sacrifices to invest time and energy into our children. We'll have to give up some career goals. We'll have to forgo a bigger house or a new car. We'll have to give up some of our cherished personal recreations. We'll probably even have to bite our tongues and hold our tempers, sometimes.
But the course of a person's success, failure, or mediocrity is mostly determined in their early years, by what does or doesn't happen at home.
Aren't our children worth such an investment?
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