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Part 43: Child Welfare:
Abuse and Nurturing:
March 24, 2003:
Now I want to get back to the home and education. Currently, there
is a new movement in education which I consider to be very dangerous.
Some people have got the notion that they can solve the problems
in our educational system with, so called, in-home-education.
There are an ever increasing number of people who are taking their
children out of the public schools and attempting to teach them
at home.
There are also a number of shabby politicians who are supporting this movement. It shifts the focus off of them and off of their greed and failures. One big danger I see in this political dishonesty is the danger of the theft of public funds. Many of these political mountebanks want to steal moneys from the public system and give it to these fools.
The most important thing the in-home education advocates overlook is the fact that the public education system is more than that. At its best, it is a rich mix of intellectual and social interaction. This kind of thing cannot be duplicated in the home. It cannot even be duplicated in the snob type, so called, charter schools. It's not just about learning the three R's. It's about family, community, and social structure. This is important to the development of the student and the community.
Home education is going to undo a lot of kids. We have too many, perhaps well meaning, but really selfish, egomaniacal parents. They seem to think that they can single handedly supplant the entire educational and social structure of our public education system. That is nonsense and egotism of the highest degree.
The truth is, most of these people are not equipped to educate at all. The potential for disaster is enormous. Home education cannot supplant public education because the home does not have the necessary tools. First, many of these fools don't have the intellectual tools or education. They do not have the basic training which is essential to teaching.
In addition, they don't have the physical tools, like books and reference material. I went to a bookstore and I went online to check out the home education movement. In both cases, I found the same thing. Real garbage! I found great numbers of documents and books with no educational value whatever. I found mostly lesson plans with no lessons or examples.
So, I have a suggestion. Let's spend our time and money fixing the system, not supplanting it. Just because the car came off of the track, is no reason to trash the car. That's stupid. Figure out how to put it back on the track and get it working. Begin by knowing what your individual kids are doing. Then get involved in the school. If there is a clique at the PTA meeting, don't accept it. Interrupt it. Interfere with it. Make the system work. Don't abandon it.
There is another segment of this home education movement which is beyond contempt. These are the religious fanatics who pretend that they can equip their children to function in the world simply by infusing some fundamentalist concepts into an inadequate basic education. Spiritual concepts are very, very important. They are much too important to be confused with basic education.
Religion and spirituality is about our core values and beliefs. Basic education is about intellectual competence. You cannot build intellectual competence by shouting about God. I seriously doubt that you can instill faith that way either. You can support intellectual competence by working to supplement the educational system. You can build faith and decency by talking softly about your spiritual values, with your kids. It is properly done, in the home, as a supplement to a full educational program. Not as a substitute for the public system.
The fundamentalists who are perpetrating this nonsense on their children are intellectual swindlers. They are swindling their own youngsters. Their children will end up intellectually and emotionally unequipped to cope in the larger community. They will be just as ignorant as their parents and will be a continuing burden on the entire community. Isolating your children from the larger community is stupid. That's all!
As I said, in home education is a more efficient way of creating performing parrots. The parent does not have the distracting influence of the natural peer to peer positive socializing activities of other children to contend with. These socializing activities are among the few good things that occur in the public educational arena. These activities will be among the influences the parents will most want to isolate "protect" their kids from.
Of course, we also want to protect our kids from crime and violence, but think about it. The fact is, you cannot protect kids and have them grow. That is a logical contradiction. You can allow kids to grow, or you can protect them absolutely. Everything else is a compromise. Isolating kids to protect them is silly. You do them more damage than good. The damage done will be irreparable. It's the kids emotional development which will be stunted. They will be emotional and social cripples. The kids will end up as emotional dwarfs.
Social behavior is an experiential learning process. It is not something that can be taught. It is acquired through experience. You cannot shout the principles of social behavior at a child and expect him to acquire the behavior that goes with those principles. In-home-education produces parrot like children who are good at spelling bees. They will run up against a social and emotional brick wall when they finally do leave home, as they must. Anyone who thinks you can isolate a human being and improve him by so doing should read Maslow's Farther Reaches of Human Nature. We are social animals. That should be clear to everyone.
Most of what I learned in school was not in the classroom. It comes under the broad heading of social skills. It's not just getting along. It has to do with emotional development and emotional maturity. It is not something you can teach, because you cannot even articulate it. We are not taught emotional development, we simply develop through our interaction with the larger culture. It cannot happen in a closed culture. I'm sad for the kids who get caught in this silliness. They will become extremely vulnerable. They will grow up poorly educated and emotionally naive.
In school, our kids get to participate with a larger community. There are plays, sports, music programs, and all of those extra activities, which are not official. It is not about whether or not they want to participate. It's about who is making the decision. It is just flat out wrong to take that decision power away from the youngster. The parent has no right to do that. Those are career choices in embryo. It is not the parents future. They had their chance for better or worse. It's the kids future which is at risk.
How could you even think you could substitute a closed culture of four or five people for the variety and richness of that educational community? That is brain dead thinking in the extreme. In-home-education is a rather profound form of child abuse. To pretend you can keep kids home and expose them as fully as an entire dedicated system can is pure egomaniacal bologna. That's what it is really about by the way. It's the parent's ego. They are willing to risk stunting their own kids growth to satisfy an egomaniacal notion.
Besides the cost to the kids in social adaptation due to their being isolated from the community, consider the cost to them if you should fail to teach them even the three R's properly. Does the public system then have any obligation to invest the time and effort it would take to bring them up to the level or the other kids? Would they even have the resources to do that?
There seems to be an ever increasing number of people who want to pretend they are intelligent adults. Yet, they have this strange bizarre notion that they can somehow isolate themselves from the community. They think they can abandon it. You cannot abandon your community. You cannot escape it. You are bound to the community like it or not. Its fortunes will eventually be your fortunes. You can forsake your community, but you cannot escape it. If you abandon it, sooner or later it will roll over you.
Parents need to give up the siege mentality and stop isolating themselves and their kids from the community at large. We should start trying to make the community work. We need to contribute to it. One thing that is a serious problem now is our loss of a sense of community. Our task is to restore the community. Any behavior which isolates us from the community is by definition wrong. It will be damaging in the long run, often in the short run also.
You cannot protect children by isolating them. You will destroy them be doing that. We can take reasonable precautions and hope for the best. We expose our kids in controlled environments. Our public schools are such an environment. Will some kids die? Yes. A young child died recently in a Flint area school. This is not new, by the way. Many years ago, a madman blew up a whole school full of children in Michigan. He drove a truckload of dynamite up to a school and set it off. It was a terrorist act similar in nature to what McVeigh did. The difference was in scale and the fact that the madman, unlike McVeigh, stayed with his truck. He died with the kids.
We are all exposed all of the time. Some of us get unlucky.
We get injured and sometimes killed, because of our exposure.
The alternative is a complete shutdown, total isolation.
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