From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Homeschooling
Date: 2 Jan 93 05:00:06 GMT
Organization: University of Waterloo


                                 Friday, the 1st of January, 1993

Steve Pope writes:
  Mike, am I to take it then that the inclusion of education
  on safe sex, the environment, and drinking/driving is
  one reason you pulled your kids out of public schools?

Sorry, I didn't mean to give quite this impression. In the
first place, my children are Alexander, who is 3, and Helen,
who is 10 months old. So I am not yet homeschooling, except
in the unextraordinary sense that any parent of preschoolers
already does homeschool. But my wife and I certainly desire
to homeschool and are determined to do it.

(I will say---and say it sideglancingly to John McCarthy---that
Martha is much more bitter about the public schools than I am,
and consequently much more adamant about homeschooling. I acknowledge
that I had some excellent teachers, and I feel like
in some ways the schooling I had prepared me for anything---that is,
I always knew that I could use it to become a doctor, a lawyer,
or... a theoretical physicist if I wanted to. In other words,
I do think it offered me a good career prep. What I don't think it
did is begin me in a liberal education in any classical sense of
the term. Maybe a lifetime commitment to learning---what I think 
true education is---, is only something one can discover for one's
self, but I wonder about this. My schooling prepared me for work,
but I don't think it required enough of me. It taught me I could ace
things with but a mediocre effort. In some sense, it didn't really
prepare me for Jefferson or Marx or the Sistine ceiling or whatever.
Not for responsible democratic citizenship.)

In any event, Steve, there is a sense---but only a sense---
that the existence of public education programs like these
in the schools reinforces my desire to homeschool my own.

  You may regard these topics as "manipulation", but you're
  probably in the minority on that, and it would 
  be my belief that in most jurisdictions they would be 
  required as part of a homeschooling approach.

Well, I may be very ignorant of what the requirements are. That
is, maybe they have been changing fast (since the last that I have
read on it), but I thought there was only one state
in which homeschooling wasn't possible (Wyoming?), and that in
some you had to register as a school, though this was easy to do, but
that in most the requirements were very lax indeed. In
Wisconsin, where we are likely to be at least for awhile, I gather
you have to keep attendance. But it's only something like two hours
a day. The point is that that is usually all it takes (of any formal
instruction), and that homeschooled children (by all counts
I've run into) end up ahead of other children who go to public schools,
so there's precisely no one quick to go regulating tough hurdles
for homeschoolers.

A book I might add to John Scott's list of John Holt's books is
_Homeschooling for Excellence_ by David and Micki Colfax. They
were frustrated academics (i.e. like me) who took to goat-farming
in California. Their approach to education was very hands off (I'm
probably a little too anal---too much into making lists :-) not to
plan out curricula, but I understand I'll have to back off from
trying to be too rigid, too). I think one of the four sons
(two or three of these were adopted, by the way) didn't learn
to read until he was 9, but they say what got him reading was
finding some Indian arrowheads, and this became so much of an interest
that he was reading graduate anthropology texts within a year.
Anyway, by the time they wrote their book, the first three sons
had all been accepted into Harvard.

  As for "harassment", I'm unfamiliar with this topic being
  injected into the public schools.  

I included it only because just a couple of weeks ago, I
found myself at the dentist's office on an emergency (the rest
of a tooth they had done root canal on had come loose) when we
were trying to get out of town, and I found myself...without a book.
Usually I bring one, and usually I just about open it and I get called
in and I don't get to read. Anyway, this time (it figures) they kept
me waiting for about an hour after they said they wanted me. Well,
I fidgeted for a while, and played with the Rubik's Cube, but then
I (gasp) broke down and picked up the Newsweek. I remember reading
the column by George Will (about 80% of the time Will irks me) that
I quite agreed with. He was decrying the fact that a 7-year-old
girl was suing the Board of Education of ________ (someone
else who's more in touch please insert facts) for ``sexual harassment''.
Apparently this is because the school was failing to keep boys
from teasing her. I remember rolling my eyes (in my best
Claytonesque manner) and thinking that this has got to be the final
straw. Anyway, it convinced me that ``sexual harassment'' laws have got
to go. Then I read on and read that apparently this school board
had implemented a Sexual Harassment Awareness Curriculum or somesuch,
and I thought to myself ``Serves them right''. Then I wondered if the
parents of the 7-year-old weren't civil libertarians who were suing
exactly in order to serve them right. I know I would. Anyway, it was
my memory of the only George Will column I've read in the past
3 years that prompted my allusion.

  I'm happy to see your emphasis on calculus and physical 
  sciences, but it would seem to me environmental science
  is just as important for a well-rounded education.  Consider
  holding your nose and teaching your kids a little about
  the environment.

You know, my wanting to respond to this paragraph prompted this 
whole reply. I just puzzled and puzzled and decided I didn't
know what ``the environment'' was. Or what teaching about it
would entail. I mean, we're learning about dinosaurs already,
and both kids get dragged along on our birding. Xan's really
good at spotting cardinals and chickadees and bluejays. Physics
and chemistry'll be in there. I'm looking forward to studying rocks
and biology and the weather and astronomy and math and computers with
them. But, ``the environment'', what does that mean?

My basic problem is that my usual associations with
the word are with fluffy-headed schemes where it is asserted
a panel of experts could determine ``the hidden costs'' of
everything and could tax us all appropriately. Or with assertions
(cf. the Kirkpatrick Sale book I just talked about with my
reading list) that Western culture is rotten to the core and
we all need to start living like the Indians lived. As I've
said, I'm a theoretical physicist, but I'll be damned if I
can figure out how scared we all oughtta be about the ozone.
What does studying about ``the environment'' really mean?

                 Mike Morris
         (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)