From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: Homeschooling
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 05:34:23 GMT

                                   Thursday, the 31st of December, 1992

Steve Pope writes:
   There is a LOT of waste in public schools, and that
   is at the heart of the problem.

   What I claim is that the *prevalent* fantasy -- about
   "liberals with social agendas" being the ones at fault --
   is blinding the public to the actual nature of the
   waste of resources, thus preventing solutions from occurring.

Since I have just indicated my wife's and my intention to
homeschool our own children, let me respond to this, Steve,
lest you were misunderstanding my position.

(In the first place, I cringe at the usage ``liberals with
social agendas'', since I consider myself liberal and yet opposed
to social engineering wherever I see it. But, that's terminology,
and I think I understood what you mean.

I *do* think social agendists are at the root of the problem,
but I think this far from the kind of conspiracy theory you
seem to be asserting is the prevalent fantasy. (I might
agree with you that in the conspiracy-theory form it is a common
enough right-wing belief, and that in this form it is a fantasy.)
In any event, *I* certainly do not believe that teachers are
all in league plotting carefully the overthrow of the republic.
Nor do I believe that all the public-education campaigns (safe sex,
harassment, drugs, drinking and driving, the environment, whatever
have you) take up that much of the schoolday. What I do believe
rather is that it is a commonly held belief that these manipulation
campaigns, like Coca-Cola advertising campaigns, *work*. Since I don't
believe that they *really* do work, or rather, since I do not believe if
citizens were educated to a responsible democratic citizenship
they *could* work, I regard the pernicious thing that's being
taught is not so much ``the agenda'' as reinforcement for the
widely held societal faith in the ad man. It is this faith
(in the environmental determinism of human behaviour) that I think
schools of sociology, psychology, social work, and education
propagate (and it's not so much a dark design, it just makes
them feel like they're doing something real, something scientific).
Anyway, I think this faith is very widely held, is preached in the
public schools, and is almost the antithesis of responsible democratic
citizenship.

Note that I said that I don't really believe the ad campaigns
take up that much time. But I do believe that if *professional
educators and parents* would drop all the sociological and
psychological baggage that goes into ``teaching teachers how to teach''
and concentrate instead on *what* is being taught, insist that kids
learn it and believe that kids can---I mean calculus, mechanics and e&m,
two years each of chemistry and biology, world and American history,
great books (world and American surveys), 12 years of Spanish, 6
of another language like French, German, Latin, or Japanese, for
*every* American schoolchild by the end of high school---, I think 
things would be a whole lot better. But, since no one's making me
education tsar (I shuddered to hear that Donna Shalala's been
appointed to the cabinet), I'll stick to my own kids for now.

                      Mike Morris
              (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)