Public schools and homeschools are two very different creatures. Every home is a school, but public schools are not—hardly—any sort of home. Does it cost very much to teach children at home? No. Does it cost very much to teach them at public school? Yes—a fortune. Many parents, in the United States, are awarding failing grades to public schools. There seems to be a growing movement toward claiming back children from what has been delegated, for so long, to disempowered strangers. Generally, public schools get poor to mediocre results, and homeschools are proving to shine with high marks.
Public schools spend more money than ever, while at the same time they are becoming academically impotent. Spending a lot of money does not seem to boost academic achievement. According to a 1996 study by Dr. Brian D. Ray, President of The National Home Education Research Institute, home educators spend a little over five hundred dollars annually, per child; these students’ average scores are about eighty-five percent on the Basic Battery. The same study shows that public schools spend, on average, over five thousand dollars annually per student; their students’ average scores are about fifty percent on the Basic Battery (Pride appendix 1). According to a U.S. Census Bureau 2000 – 2001 report, the states of New York, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia, spend over 10,800 dollars per pupil annually; the national average is about 7,300 dollars (United States xii). This is approximately 183,000 dollars per year for a classroom of 25 students across the nation. William J. Bennett, former U.S. Secretary of Education, writes that “the fundamental problem with American education today is not a lack of money; we do not underspend, we underproduce” (55). Home educators are continually proving that spending more money is not the solution to becoming less ignorant.
Parents, that take their children’s education into their own hands, choose curriculum according to specific needs; they strive to teach according to individual learning styles. The kids learn at their own paces—slow or fast—and have, vastly, more opportunities to understand before moving on. In public schools, students are threatened with getting classified into lower intellectual castes if they do not conform to its ways; children are drilled, tested, graded like lumber, and sent to market. Too often, they are moved on with inadequate skills; some students cannot even read by the time graduation comes. A sad thing is that normal graduation age is eighteen and students are usually not well trained for the work force. The home-educated often graduate at about fifteen, and they generally have a better education.
The conventional school institution may be contributing toward the breakdown of the American family. John Taylor Gatto, 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year, writes:
It appears to me as a schoolteacher that schools are already a major cause of weak families and weak communities. They separate parents and children from vital interaction with each other and from true curiosity about each other’s lives. Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea to develop—then they blame the family for its failure to be a family. It’s like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, then pronouncing the photographer incompetent (74).
Instead of these difficulties, the havens of homeschooling are more apt to strengthen the family because the children are home. Personal and moral difficulties are more often noticed and effectively addressed by moms or dads who are there at home with their youth. Parents get to know their kids, and they get used to having them around; there is no longing for the spring and summer breaks to end so that the kids can be sent away.
The public school system has become an animal of disaster. It feeds on public money like milk; it has become a ravenous mega-calf that is sucking the life from its mother. But, homeschooling is not the solution for everyone. It requires much dedication to be a teacher at home; as parents, do we not automatically become teachers when we decide to tamper with the powers of creation? Parents should get seriously involved no matter how their children’s education is approached. Parents should fight for what they want their sons and daughters to learn, and resist the frivolous time fillers the schools inject into classrooms—the “twaddle”. In an ideal education for a non-ideal world, a mother, father, older brother or sister, aunt, uncle, and grandparents would tutor each student. Teaching the children will always—truly—be the family’s responsibility, no matter what “hoops” our institutions put before us. Our common educational system is a perilous war zone, and many modern-day pioneers are saving their own, within the shelters of their Homeschool havens.
Works Cited
Bennett, William J. The Devaluing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our
Children. New York: Summit Books, 1992.
Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down: The hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.
Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992.
Pride, Mary, ed. The Big Book of Home Learning: A Practical Homeschooling Book. 4th ed.
Vol. 1. Unknown: Alpha Omega Publications Inc. 2000. 3 vol.
United States. U.S. Census Bureau. Public Education Finances 2001. March 2003. 13 May
2003.
<http://landview.census.gov/govs/school/01fullreport.pdf>