{"id":3340,"date":"2012-03-03T09:29:08","date_gmt":"2012-03-03T17:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/?p=3340"},"modified":"2012-03-03T09:29:08","modified_gmt":"2012-03-03T17:29:08","slug":"thoughts-on-some-liberals-homeschooling-our-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/03\/thoughts-on-some-liberals-homeschooling-our-kids\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on (some) Liberals Homeschooling our Kids"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The opinion piece, \u201cLiberals, Don\u2019t Homeschool Your Kids: Why teaching children at home violates progressive values\u201d<\/a>, by Slate magazine contributor Dana Goldstein, touched a nerve with political progressives on Daily KOS who strongly second Goldstein’s call and also others who as strongly disagree. Whatever you think about homeschooling, the piece touches on some fundamental issues about how those of us who believe in equality and justice for all (and particularly in the area of education and human development) can continue to work together to move our country towards realizing those goals.<\/p>\n

As I see it, the gist of Goldstein’s argument is that homeschooling is a selfish practice that is antithetical to concern for the entire community, a concern that authentically progressive people should share. \u201cLiberal homeschoolers\u201d in particular are naively undermining a crucial public institution (public schools) that needs not only their tax dollars but their kids sitting at desks in those schools, for those schools to survive and continue to serve the entire community and promote a truly democratic society. <\/p>\n

Writes Goldstein…<\/p>\n

Although the national school-reform debate is fixated on standardized testing and \u201cteacher quality\u201d \u2014 indeed, the uptick in secular homeschooling may be, in part, a backlash against this narrow education agenda \u2014 a growing body of research suggests \u201cpeer effects\u201d have a large impact on student achievement. Low-income kids earn higher test scores when they attend school alongside middle-class kids, while the test scores of privileged children are impervious to the influence of less-privileged peers. So when college-educated parents pull their kids out of public schools, whether for private school or homeschooling, they make it harder for less-advantaged children to thrive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Per Goldstein, though a middle-class family may believe they can improve their own kid’s development by pulling that kid out of public school, they are certainly doing a disservice to the less advantaged kids who are left behind, as well as the whole fabric of a democratic society that should not divide people into \u201cus and them\u201d or \u201chaves and have nots\u201d. This even if that middle-class family continues to pay taxes for public schools while educating their own kid outside of public school on their own dime!<\/p>\n

To get a sense of the scope of this issue, the latest U.S. Department of Education statistics I’ve seen show that some ten percent of kids in the U.S. go to private school, while only one to two percent are homeschooled. So I’m assuming Goldstein highlights homeschooling in her piece because it is trending upward, while private school enrollment is a longstanding reality (which is actually trending downward). <\/p>\n

As a person who generally considers himself a progressive, but also a strong supporter of homeschooling, I acknowledge her concern. I see it as the same concern that was one of the motivators behind \u201cNo Child Left Behind\u201d, federal legislation which most progressives would agree has gone horribly wrong in setting measures that have led to \u201cteaching to the test\u201d and will likely soon define the majority of public schools in the U.S. as \u201cfailing\u201d. (And as Goldstein notes in the excerpt above has encouraged some of that flight from public schools to homeschooling.) <\/p>\n

Ironically, it was no less than liberal icon Teddy Kennedy who co-championed the NCLB legislation. I wonder if he sent his kids to public school?<\/p>\n

I share with Goldstein a belief that we need to provide an opportunity for all our kids to get a good education. I would also hope she would acknowledge that what constitutes a \u201cgood education\u201d for one person may not be the same for another. Every human being is unique, and we acknowledge that different people have profoundly different ways we learn. We can’t simply require and ensure that every kid in America learns the same curriculum, in the same manner, on the same schedule, and then say we have done our due diligence in offering an education consistent with equality and justice for all.<\/em><\/p>\n

Promoting Educational Diversity<\/strong><\/p>\n

We progressives acknowledge that we live in a diverse society and that we should celebrate and encourage, rather than squelch, that diversity. We do not support promoting one religion as right while others are wrong. We do not celebrate one cultural heritage at the expense of others. So following that same logic, we should not promote one approach to education and human development to the detriment of all others.<\/p>\n

But unfortunately, our current public education system is not honoring educational diversity and is in fact promoting one educational approach, the method that involves sitting kids down in front of a teacher in a classroom who then presents academic material and generally stage-manages the entire learning process. Given that people do have a range of learning styles, this classroom approach really only works for some of our kids. Other kids wither away in a classroom and need more real-world settings (such as say apprenticeships) that provide more practical context for the knowledge and skills acquired. Still other kids are determined to direct their own learning and will continually butt heads with a teacher in their face constantly redirecting them from their natural instincts for self-directed inquiry.<\/p>\n

Is the human right to a good education served if we insist on providing a learning environment that suits the first group of kids but not the other two? Sure they are all getting the \u201csame\u201d education, but is that a \u201cgood\u201d education for all of them? Don’t we as progressives have common ground in promoting an educational system that allows for a diversity of educational approaches? Don’t we owe it to the fundamental human rights of a person to not force them to learn in a classroom at the direction of an orchestrating teacher if that is antithetical to how they naturally learn?<\/p>\n

The Recent Historical Challenge to Progressive Education<\/strong><\/p>\n

As progressives, it seems that we should take the words of the greatest American progressive philosopher of the 20th century, John Dewey, to heart…<\/p>\n

Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Candidly, I think Dewey would likely be troubled with homeschooling, since he saw public education as an institution to help build an active and effective adult citizenry for a democratic society. But given that, I think he would be equally troubled by what is going on in our public schools. Quoting Dewey again…<\/p>\n

The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.<\/p>\n

Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think Dewey’s words ring true today, since \u201ctraditional\u201d education has reasserted itself to dominance in the past 30 years. <\/p>\n

Since the 1983 publication of the profound critique of U.S. public schools by the Reagan administration, \u201cA Nation at Risk\u201d, policymakers, business leaders, academics, and the media have pursued a renewed campaign to harness American education to the values of the economic system \u2013 productivity, efficiency, accountability, standardization, and rational management. Students\u2019 intelligence and creativity have arguably been appropriated by the corporate state as \u201cintellectual capital.\u201d In line with that framing, federal and state governments defined \u201cgoals,\u201d \u201cstandards,\u201d and \u201coutcomes\u201d and demanded that all young people achieve certain milestones by predetermined ages. <\/p>\n

This shackling of public education came to a head with Rod Paige<\/a> and the \u201cHouston Miracle\u201d, which led to the George W. Bush administration partnering with Ted Kennedy to pass \u201cNo Child Left Behind\u201d. A compromise at best between \u201ccorporatist\u201d conservatives looking to exercise top-down control over the education system and progressives trying to ensure that that system would not continue to \u201cleave behind\u201d our most economically disadvantaged communities and their young people. A compromise that has led to our current state of increasingly regimented curriculum and teaching methodologies in order to \u201cteach to the test\u201d and avoid the coercive remedies built into NCLB.<\/p>\n

Our Path Forward & Its Historical Precedents<\/strong><\/p>\n

We come together here on Daily KOS because we see ourselves sharing a movement for human progress that acknowledges the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. As a veteran activist, I know that the most successful movements are multi-faceted and challenge an entrenched system from all angles including from within and without. For example, the eight decade U.S. movement for women’s suffrage<\/a> that culminated in final ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 comes to mind. Did not that movement finally succeed by leveraging the leadership of its \u201cgood cop\u201d Carrie Chapman Katt, lobbying respectfully in the halls of political power, while its \u201cbad cop\u201d Alice Paul and her followers challenged the status quo with provocative street actions and prison hunger strikes?<\/p>\n

When it comes to developing a truly humanistic education system, don’t we likewise need to fight the battles from within and without? And if we progressives just get riled up by Goldstein’s piece and take opposite sides, aren’t we guilty of fighting with each other rather than coordinating our efforts to continue to humanize and democratize entrenched aspects of our American culture?<\/p>\n

As a \u201cliberal homeschooler\u201d, I truly believe that I and my fellow homeschooling travelers are not part of the problem but can and should be part of the solution.<\/em> Not by forcing our kids back to school against our judgment of their developmental needs, but by sharing with the majority of other progressives (who continue to have their kids in public or even private school) a goal of transforming a recalcitrant American institution towards achieving the goals that John Dewey envisioned.<\/p>\n

Those of us with kids who do well in that conventional classroom environment should keep our kids there to add their positive energy to that educational venue. This while at the same time lobbying teachers, administrators and school boards to move away from centralized and regimented curriculum enforced by \u201cteaching to the test\u201d.<\/p>\n

Those of us with kids who do not do so well in that conventional classroom environment, and choose another educational path, should continue to do so while continuing to raise our voices in the educational debate, playing a role as a sort of \u201cbad cop\u201d or \u201ccanaries in the coal mine\u201d. I really don’t think we are doing teachers and the other students any favors by forcing kids to be in a conventional classroom environment that is against their developmental nature, and which risks turning teachers into jailers and poisoning an important learning environment.<\/p>\n

We should honor those among us who are willing to be public school teachers by doing our best to ensure that the kids in their classrooms are happy to be there and resonate in this instructional academic approach to learning.<\/p>\n

We also need to be realistic that educational transformation towards a more holistic and humanistic vision of a John Dewey is a long-term effort. It will probably progress incrementally and not come to fruition until most or all of our kids in K-12 schools today are adults. Our American young people are not an abstract mass of humanity to be dealt with in abstract mass terms. They are over fifty million unique souls who we are individually responsible to to provide them with the opportunity for their own development towards achieving \u201clife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness\u201d within the context of our human community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The opinion piece, \u201cLiberals, Don\u2019t Homeschool Your Kids: Why teaching children at home violates progressive values\u201d, by Slate magazine contributor Dana Goldstein, touched a nerve with political progressives on Daily KOS who strongly second Goldstein’s call and also others who as strongly disagree. Whatever you think about homeschooling, the piece touches on some fundamental issues […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[1655,1792,23,1654,1653],"class_list":["post-3340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-ongoing-strategy-for-learning","tag-conservative","tag-our-ongoing-strategy-for-learning","tag-homeschooling","tag-liberal","tag-policy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t