Home schooling is probably a really good idea for a lot of people, but only for a certain (unknown) percentage of people who actually do it. And, among those who do manage to home school, I would guess that the effectiveness of home schooling varies from pretty good to dismal because homeschoolers are doing it for the wrong reasons, in some cases for just plain bad reasons, and/or they really don’t know what they are doing.I have yet to meet a teacher who would claim that they are generally happy with what shows up at their classroom door from Home Schooling Land … even though most teachers with whom I have had this conversation are actually in favor of home schooling in principle.The point here is that it is probably pretty easy to execute the process poorly and damage the child.An analogy might be flying. Flying is great. We get from point A to point B quickly. But it is also kind of expensive, and really, flying in a giant commercial airliner is not really that great of an experience. Some people have opted to fly themselves, kinda like the home school version of air flight … get a pilots license get a small plane (or get into a system where you can rent planes) and fly yourself around wherever possible. These people truly experience flight, because they are in a smaller plane, communing with the clouds and sky and shit, and they are doing it themselves. Private flying is the home schooling of air transport.However, being a private pilot requires a lot of training and there are quite a few rules to follow. So in this sense, the analogy is not exactlylike home schooling, which has almost no rules or training of any kind. (By the way, analogies are generally not exactly like that which they analogize. Otherwise they would not be analogies. They would be clone-alogies.) Nonetheless, private planes are way more likely to go down than commercial planes, and usually because of the dumbest reasons … oops, forgot fuel. Crash. Or, oops, got lost, no air strips, only forest or ocean … Crash. Or oops, I’m flying on instruments and never really learned to do that. So, which way is up again? Crash….One could say that homeschooling is like this … a version of education that ideally would be much better than the “standard” approach, but in practice, is often (how often, we don’t know) executed poorly.The reason that I think a lot of home schoolers are not doing a great job is because their motivations are not really in the interest of the child. Their motivations are often religious, or often political or often both. The children are being dragged along in the adult’s efforts to make some point, play some game, avoid some personal discomfort, get their jollies in one way or another, etc.The following items are items that came across my virtual desk since I went to bed last night regarding home schooling. I’ve culled from about 20 sources to produce a set of commentaries … one could call it quote mining, or one could call it selective editing … to provide a sense of what part of the homeschoolers discourse looks like. I think this proves my point. Continue reading →