patel travels: Parent's Guide to Homeschooling ? The Only ...

If you?re considering homeschooling your child at home, you?re making the right decision.. Parents have expressed their dissatisfaction with the government-run schools for years, but they often have no idea why they are so bad. The fact is; public schools are exactly the way they are intended to be? poor. ?No Child Left Behind? is nothing more than a clever marketing slogan intended to sell us on more federal control over education under the pretense that all children will be better educated. Does anyone really believe that because the federal government is asserting more influence over the educational system that our children will learn more than before from this broken system? The truth is that MOST children are left far behind, and it?s deliberate. Why? Because the goal is to offer only an eighth grade level of schooling to all, no matter how old the children get. They have no intention of actually raising educational standards, so they lower them in order to make failing students look like they?re succeeding.

Dumbing down is not a joke, it?s the national policy. The government is not concerned with providing the kind of education that most parents want for their children. While parents want their kids to be independent, problem-solving individuals, ?the government wants children to become compliant human resources to be used by government and industry for their own purposes.? according to Charlotte Iserbyt?s book: ?The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America?. The Feds want uniformity ? a workforce and a military ? not an educated citizenry. When the schools say they are ?successful,? it means they are turning out conditioned, obedient, group thinkers.

Let me make it abundantly clear that I do not believe that our teachers and educators or complicit with this agenda of mediocrity and conditioning. ?Many teachers are very passionate and care deeply about the education of our youth (and get paid far too little for what they do). Unfortunately, neither they nor the public at large have much control over the situation. While there are ?local? school boards and administrators, they only decide the trivial details of their local schools. The major planning (curricula, rules, etc.) is designed and directed by the state education departments, which in turn are directed by Washington. Meanwhile, work rules that govern teachers are written by their unions with virtually no negotiating by local residents. Thus, the public schools are uniform, and mediocre everywhere?yes, even in ?good? districts. Yet despite all the dissatisfaction with our country?s educational system, there?s still a pervading opinion that people who want to educate their kids at home are kooks, who are doing their children a grave disservice by not allowing the government to indoctrinate and institutionalize them!

?I?ve noticed a facinating phenomenon in my thiry years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelvant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don?t really teach anyting except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the instituion overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the instituion is psychopathic ? it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.?

? John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education

One of the biggest criticisms of home schooling has been the concern that children educated at home will grow up lacking social skills. I think the real concern for the government is that they will lack socialist ideologies. Children who receive home schooling tend to be confident, creative, and independent. Therefore, not so easily stuffed into a mold of conformity and blind compliance. Another misconception is that the home school environment shelters children in an insular existence, and deprives them of any ?real world? experience. I?ve actually heard teachers say, ?Schools prepare children for the real world.? Nothing could be further from the truth! Our government schools function more like prisons, in that they are intentionally separated from the real world. In public schools, children don?t even have civil rights!

There is very little similarity between school and reality. Students are taught the ?facts? that the government wants them to know, and the ideals that they want them to believe. Its rules don?t exist in the real world, and its deceptive and stressful culture must be unlearned after leaving school. Even most of what has been learned there needs to be forgotten in order to function in the real world.

Public schools claim to offer ?education.? but what they are supposed to offer is schooling ? the basic academic skills. With those skills, we can get our ?education? for ourselves, mostly from learning things that interest us ? Or as Isaac Asimov ? one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century famously said: ??Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.?

Even fewer kids today ever get any real schooling because the public system has become more preoccupied with teaching ?political correctness? coddling self-esteem issues and pushing government propaganda than teaching the basic, fundamental skills. And what little actually is ?taught?, students are forced to ?learn? through rote memorization, because the information they are forced to assimilate is devoid of any kind of real-world context. As a result, the schools make learning a negative experience and a bad memory. And that?s exactly what many kids take with them through life ? the hatred of learning.

Each year in school only prepares students for the next school year, not for real life. If the government wanted the schools to be better, they would be. But since the system claims to be excellent, it?s clear that the government wants its schools to be exactly the way they are ? mediocre and worse.

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