Responding to an earlier opinion column, Should evolution be taught in school?, Kalamazoo Gazette reader Lawrence Kapture throws out some thoughts on home education.
Homeschooling is essentially a protest movement. Regardless of motivation, homeschoolers believe public schools are unable to prepare their children to live in the world. mlive.com
Perhaps for some. Or perhaps it was at one time. Or perhaps we are falsely perceived by a public who only hears from us when we are protesting a proposed law.
I am full of criticisms of public education, as are many of my fellow homeschoolers. But then that is hardly unique to homeschoolers. We didn’t write “Nation at Risk,” or “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” Our measly 2% of the population hardly influenced President George Bush, Sr. to bill himself as “the education president.” And I know his son wasn’t listening to us when he drafted No Child Left Behind. Education has been a bit of a battle ground for some time, and homeschooling is only one (very small) part of that public conversation.
Being critical is not a protest movement.
Supporting reform is not a protest movement.
Choosing an alternative is not a protest movement.
It is only a protest movement if our decision to homeschool is directed at what is going on in public schools. Like an organized boycott, a sit-in or march of some sort. I can only speak for myself, but I did not choose to home educate because of what is going on in the public schools. I chose to home educate because of the virtues inherent in this form of education.
Some people garden as an act of protest. Most of us, however, just prefer the taste of homegrown produce or enjoy the hobby for its own rewards. It is the same with home education.
Unfortunately, what homeschooling can do is isolate children from the market of ideas, especially when it comes to biological science. There is a large amount of fringe literature published by religious groups that support the claims of creationists while providing no real information about the vast field of evolutionary biology. Ibid.
There is a large amount of fringe literature available on any topic imaginable and you don’t need to be a homeschooler to find it. I do find it interesting that we’re talking about the “market of ideas” in public school, although by and large there is only one idea presented, taught and tested. And that isn’t exclusive to the whole evolution debate. There isn’t enough time to present anything like a marketplace of ideas with testing looming overhead, and all the baggage students bring with them to school.
And again, this isn’t about homeschooling. We only account for approximately 2% of the population. Yet according to a recent Gallup poll, only 39% of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution, 25% do not and 36% don’t have an opinion. Education was a factor in the beliefs, as was church attendance. Surprisingly, a poll in Britain revealed that only 25% of Briton’s thought the theory of evolution was “definitely true.” This isn’t even an American issue.
If I were concerned about Americans’ lack of knowledge regarding Darwin and his theory, I would look first at why people are graduating high school…public high school…without this knowledge long before I’d jump on the homeschoolers.
Homeschooling allows families to isolate their children from good information by providing them only with information that is comfortable with their own biases. Ibid.
The potential is there. The potential is there anywhere someone has control over the curriculum. Should that control come from the state or the parent? What about when parents disagree? What about when students disagree with the content that is being taught them? One of the more interesting questions in one of my ethics courses dealt with this very debate.
The question was whether it was ethical to pass a student who demonstrated a knowledge of evolutionary theory that surpassed the course requirements, but who didn’t believe it.
There is a fundamental question about control here, but it isn’t about homeschooling. We are just a bit of a catalyst for the discussion.
Like homeschooling is a protest against public schools, creationism is a protest against anything that opposes a literal interpretation of the Bible. When it comes to the origins of life, creationism is not a scientifically educated movement. Ibid.
Kapture never supported his assertion that homeschooling is a protest movement against the schools, and now he’s claiming that creationsim is a protest as well. It isn’t. It is simply a belief. One that existed prior to Darwin and prior to his predecessors who had already begun to look at the world outside a religious worldview.
Back in February, academics and scientists across Europe got together in Germany to discuss difficulties regarding the acceptance of evolution. Some fear these lingering beliefs in creation are a danger to scientific thought in this country and the Western world in general. I don’t exactly buy that, but our schools’ ability to graduate students who can scarcely read just might.
I homeschool my children on a small hobby farm in rural Nebraska and write about life more abundantly, from the joy of a baby's smile to the almost unbearable grief of losing a son while seeking beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, a garment of praise instead of the spirit of despair (Isaiah 61:3)
Lynn,
I don’t have the comprehensive independent study at hand. However, you can look up the stats yourself at http://www.nbpts.org/resources/nbct_directory/nbcts_by_certification. The first is for high school, the second for middle school:
Science/AYA 3039
Science/EA 2201
These are the total numbers of board-certified science teachers in the entire US. In my area, Indianapolis Public Schools, the number for both is zero.
Here are the NSTA stats for the total number of science teachers in the US:
http://www.nsta.org/about/olpa/faq.aspx
NSTA estimates that the United States has nearly 2 million public school and private school K–12 teachers of science. The majority of these educators (1.6 million) teach at the elementary level, and NSTA considers all of them to be teachers of science.
Elementary: 1.6 million
Middle: 54,000 to 68,331 (teach science as a main or secondary assignment)
High School: 98,000 to 111,000 (teach science as a main or secondary assignment)
Also, you disparage my comment about being current. However, this criticism is from Dawkins and Myers, not me. I don’t care if they want to teach Haeckel and Eohippus and the linear descent of hominids. That will just make even more miseducated evolution advocates.
From Kapture:
“I am uncertain why protest movement as a phrase created consternation. It seems that any group who is withdrawing from social infrastructure because they don’t like it, regardless of reasons, is a group in protest.”
A protest group uses picket signs and Internet petitions to harass the establishment because they have no actual power to change its policies. Parents are required by the state to accept responsibility for their children’s education; therefore, if the state-run system has been a failure for the last 40 years, they are free to choose other options. If anything, it is public school advocates who are engaged in a protest movement against homeschoolers, since they have no actual power to impose their educational policies (in most places in the US).
“As you admitted, home schooling can be abused to isolate people from the world. If public education can do the same, I as a parent can counter that.”
This is patently false. The long-term objective of the modern public education system is to exclude parents from participation in order to create a unified and authoritative curriculum untainted by “private interpretations.”
Lynn, I hope everyone is alright. Having no computer through the weekend has made me feel very out of touch with everything!
I repent of my trolliness, Dana, and I think I finally came back to the topic of the original post.
Your trolliness? I didn’t expect to be able to post on this particular op-ed without a discussion of religion, evolution, etc. You’ve been entirely respectful and my only regret is that I haven’t had a regular computer to be able to actually discuss anything.
Dana, you’re not the only one who seems to have been unable to “actually discuss anything” –
Call its absence what you will, but being “entirely respectful” in human discourse involves more than literalist left-brain binary pronouncements. It requires understanding of and respect for “social constructs existing in your own head” too. Daniel Pink’s Whole New Mind concepts connecting the left and right brain, for example: meaning, story, play, design, symphony, empathy.
But we need not agree. Thus I’m always content and no one gets moderated so long as they remain respectful.
A dissertation written here by an active school system administrator several years ago, surveyed local homeschooling families and then posited two main motivations for homeshcooling, the “push” and the “pull” reasons.
Push reasons were negative things about the schools that families wanted to avoid or escape. These were correlated with lack of satisfaction with homeschooling too, and return to school, often an in-out-in-out pattern with truancy, relocations and other family stressors or instabilities.
Pull reasons were pretty much the opposite: positive aspects of home education as an alternative to school, that families wanted to fill their lives with. These were correlated with high satisfaction and sustained, successful, committed homeschooling for many years.
JJ,
I take your point that the “push” reasons point to parents who homeschool as a reaction to, and attempt to manipulate, the public school system. Those folks are what I would call “education protestors.”
They want a subsidized daycare system that costs them only $300 a year (in residential property taxes) for 180 days of relief, and guarantees plenty of socialization and sports for their kid. If the current system disappeared, they would build another one just like it.
No, as I recall, they were more the social misfit strata with many dysfunctions and troubles, and felt pushed out by “the system” — not just the school system itself but The System.
You know, folks whose own educational experiences didn’t equip them well for life, living on the margins with unreliable income and sort of hanging on by a thread and resenting that everything’s so difficult and full of red tape, with other social service problems and needs (free health clinics, food banks etc) and weren’t very skilled at managing or negotiating all their um, shall we say interfaces?
So pushed out but they weren’t “pushy” as in demanding PTA parents or whatever . . .
I think we should think mostly about our own lives rather than pronouncing judgment on all the folks. To me this study was a good lesson that to be a happy, successful home education family for life, it helps to focus on filling rather than emptying your life, and to stop resenting and begrudging and complaining about the public schools and all that you think is wrong with them. . .
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It’s interesting that homeschooling has produced some of the most thoughtful and intelligent people that I know. But then, so has public schooling. Often my homeschooled friends have perspectives that were very underrepresented in public school (I am a product of public education). The way I see it, students get out of their education what they want to get out of it.
Not all of my homeschooled friends are Christian, either, I’d just like to point out.
However, I do think it’s important that people be able to make their own decisions on the matter. Any parent that deliberately shields their children from evolutionary theory (of which I am a firm supporter) is committing something akin to a crime.
So, it seems to me that even Christian parents who homeschool should expose their children to evolutionary theory. They should be educated in the basic mechanisms that drive it (allele frequencies, convergent and divergent evolution, sexual selection, mutation, etc).
It’s the only way that, as adults, children will be able to make educated decisions about it.
Otherwise, you run the risk of alienating your kids completely if they do decide to rebel against their upbringing. My parents are highly conservative creationists and I have a fantastic relationship with them. And I firmly believe that this is because they support me and my beliefs (even if they don’t agree). The biggest crime is alienation, not teaching children evolution.
As for public schools being terrible, I wholeheartedly agree with all of your indictments. It doesn’t do what it ought, and No Child Left Behind is a sham and a joke.
I would also like to add that social development is one of the key things that students do actually pick up in public schools, and I am concerned that some of my homeschooled friends, while intelligent, insightful, and very dear to me, are oftentimes very socially awkward. I would like to see some research on how homeschooling affects social development.
Eric, the Christian parents I know do expose their children to evolutionary theory. They just don’t call it that. It isn’t like they teach “God dun it and that’s the end of that” like so many stereotypes I’ve read. It isn’t adaptation, natural selection, etc. that they/we take issue with.
Sure, I buy that. And I actually sort of assumed that that was the case.
I am curious to know what they do call it. Evolution by means of natural selection is the predominant scientific theory. In fact, the statistics that you supplied are interesting, they are even more interesting when compared to the statistics for experts in the field of biology where fewer than one percent of relevant scientists gave credence to creationism. Logic dictates that we must defer to an expert in certain fields.
There is strong evidence to support it and while I would never criticize anyone’s child-raising (I don’t have any yet myself, so how would I know?), I am bursting with curiosity about how these theories are taught, along with whether or not they stress the scientific definition of the word “theory.”
I do apologize. I’m getting way off topic. The basic premise of your post has little to do with evolution directly (and I must reiterate, that I do agree with that basic premise) and I hope you don’t think that I’m grinding an axe because I really am curious.
Adaptation, mostly. I haven’t looked at the science textbooks, but I know when I say evolution, I’m usually corrected and told I mean adaptation. Or “little e” evolution. That is popular in some circles. The objection is more to the origins of life question, and I think that is part of why it is so difficult for their to be any meaningful discussion. Say “evolution” and the science you are talking about doesn’t come to mind, just the life arising from nonlife in the beginnings of time.
I can’t say how other people teach anything. I can say my children know more about Darwin than most kids their age and not in a “what a horrible man” kind of way. I personally believe that isolating a child from theories and opinions, especially those they are almost guaranteed to eventually confront, makes it difficult for them to really defend their beliefs or to discuss these issues intelligently.