Smarter, better & home schooled

By Alan Caruba
web posted June 17, 2002

As the school year comes to an end, I was reminded of the story
of a boy whom the teachers complained about, saying he could
not learn, seemed confused, and asked too many questions.
Today, that boy would have been required to take Ritalin or
some other drug. In his case, however, his parents decided to
home school him. He was Thomas Edison.

Home schooling worked then and it works today. In fact, home
schooling works far better than the deliberate stupifying of the
children passing through what is surely the most expensive and
ineffective educational system the world has ever known.

The American public education system today is not about
educating students; it is about indoctrinating them. It has less to
do with imparting information and more to do with instilling
politically correct attitudes. It is producing docile, ignorant
people who know little about their nation's history. This is
imperceptibly-and some say deliberately---weakening our
society.

Right now in America, public school enrollment is projected to
reach a record 47.3 million and peak at 47.5 million by 2005.
Private schools had 5.3 million students in the 1999-2000 school
year. By contrast, between 1.6 and 2 million students were home
schooled in the US during 2001-2002, taking in every grade
level from kindergarten through twelfth grade. There is, though, a
surprise in that number. It is an increase of 500 percent over the
number being home schooled a decade ago! The growth rate of
the choice to home school is estimated to be between seven and
fifteen percent each year.

In numbers, home schooled children are a minority among those
being shuttled through elementary, middle and high schools like
so much sausage. However, when they are in competition with
the products of those public schools, they leave them way
behind. The headlines tell the story. Put them in a spelling or
geography bee and the home schooled child usually takes top
honors. It's actually news when they do not!

Home schooled students in the US score 15 to 30 percentile
points, on average, above their school peers whether the subject
is reading, writing, mathematics or science or social studies. The
mediocre science scores of public school students were front-
page news in January. In May, the news that most US high
school seniors had a poor grasp of their nation's history was also
on the front pages. Diane Ravich, historian and education
professor at New York University called the scores "abysmal."
Bad as the scores were, they had shown no improvement since
1994!

Despite this obvious problem, President Bush recently signed an
education bill, dubbed "Leave No Student Behind", that
allocated $49 billion to a system so broken, so useless, that is a
national shame and a national sham. His answer? Testing, testing,
testing. But! If you are testing only the knowledge that is
mandated for the test, all the ancillary knowledge needed to
actually understand the subject is jettisoned for the sake of the
test score.

Currently, the US is spending about 72 percent more on
education than in 1980. After more than two decades, there is
no indication of any significant improvement. Instead, this huge
investment of US tax dollars has produced poor reading and
other subject scores, static dropout rates, declining parental
satisfaction, and mediocre US student performance in
international education surveys.
 
The home schooled student, notes Phyllis Schlafly, doesn't have
to study "fuzzy math, whole math, new math, new new math, or
rainforest math." They don't have to be taught "Whole Language,
which fraudulently teaches children to guess at words from the
pictures, skip over difficult words, and substitute any words that
seem to fit the context."

In the fall of 1999, Ridgewood, NJ students, aged 11 to 18,
were required to answer questions about their own drug use,
sexual life, and any illegal activity in which they had been
involved. The 156-question survey asked students to name how
many times they had tried to kill themselves, used contraception,
or made themselves throw up after eating. Parents took the
school system to court and, after a two-year battle, won a
victory for the First, Fifth, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Need it be said that none of the questions being asked had a
single thing to do with whether the students had actually learned
anything? Today's schools are about attitudes and behavior, not
facts and skills. In September this travesty begins again.

Alan Caruba is the founder of The National Anxiety Center and
author of a four-part series, "The Subversion of Education in
America" posted on its Internet site at www.anxietycenter.com.
(c) Alan Caruba, 2002

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