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| The public school teacher was offended that we took LI out of school to visit three Lincoln sites, the Patton Tank Museum at Ft. Knox, the site of Tillich's burial, and Trappist, KY, where Merton lived. I had public school teachers who took entire classes to Chicago and Springfield for similar experiences. |
Homeschooling is easier to do now than what is was 30 years ago. The homeschooling movement has been quietly increasing the number of students for decades now. The movement is decentralized, as opposed to some overbearing state departments of education. There is a local home school association in our area.
They function more like a mutual benefit society or a farmers' co-operative. Yet, they have field trips, extra-curricular sports, fine arts programs, etc. Textbooks and other teaching materials are easy to obtain from other parents or from the Internet.
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| Paul Holmer, Yale, was our favorite person there. When we visited, we looked up Holmer and Roland Bainton. |
My wife home schools our special needs son because we had no other viable alternative. She does not have a teaching degree, but only a diploma from a small town high school. She is able to incorporate our son's therapies into learning without being hindered by the structure of the classroom. Lutheran elementary schools are morphing into academies, following the Babtist model. The area Lutheran high schools are getting very pricey. There is an over emphasis upon sports and outreach. Some schools now take students through the government funded "choice" programs. For children, the best lessons are always learned at home.
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| There is a direct relationship between learning skills and homeschooling. |
GJ - I found three or four groups of homeschoolers on Facebook, with at least 100,000 "likes" among them. There are many supporting entities now, just as Mr. Schultz wrote. One local college has low-cost classes and group activities for homeschoolers. The college president said, "They are our best students in college."
Many American students do not get this fact - those digital devices they love so much have localized the job market. Workers can take jobs away from them while still living in India, China, or S. Korea.
Constant learning is needed to keep up. One computer science major said to LI, "Why do we have to learn another computer language? I already know one." And some were shocked to find out there was another operating system than Windows. Knowing the second one (Unix) was the key to getting the job.
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MUSINGS ON PUBLIC EDUCTION #3: "In the U.S. Steel company town of Gary, Indiana, Superintendent William A. Wirt, a former student of John Dewey's at the University of Chicago, was busy testing a radical school innovation called the Gary Plan, soon to be sprung on the national scene...in which school subjects were departmentalized; this required movement of students from room to room on a regular basis so that all building spaces were in constant use. Bells would ring and just as with Pavlov's salivating dog, children would shift out of their seats and lurtch toward yet another class.
"In this way children could be exposed to many nonacademic socialization experiences and much scientifically engineered physical activity...a curriculum apart from the so-called basic subjects, which by this time were being looked upon as an actual menace to long-range social goals...[The Gary Plan's] noteworthy economical feature, rigorously scheduling a student body twice as large as before into the same space and time, earned it the informal name 'platoon school.'
Early in 1914, the Federal Bureau of Education...strongly endorsed Wirt's system. This led to one of the most dramatic and least-known events in twentieth-century school history. In New York City, a spontaneous rebellion occurred on the part of the students and parents against extension of the Gary Plan to their own city. While the revolt had only short-lived effects, it highlights the demoralization of private life occasioned by passing methods of industry off as education."
--John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
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