Kudo's to Homeschooling

From World Net Daily

Study: Homeschoolers score 37 points higher
Costs also average $500, compared to $10,000 at public school

This does not surprise me one teeny tiny bit. My husband teaches guitar, banjo, and mandolin to mostly adult students, but he still gets his fair share of young people. When comparing the home schooled kids to the public school kids he teaches, the differences are remarkable.

In almost all (there are exceptions) instances, the home schooled kids are better educated, better students, and much better at their interpersonal skills. They are able to carry on an intelligent conversation with an adult, probably due to the fact they are not glued to a cell phone texting someone.

A link from this article led me to:

The Myth of Teacher Qualifications
by Chris Klicka
Senior Counsel for Home School Legal Defense Association
(pdf - but a very well behaved pdf!)

I taught 4th grade for several years at a private boys academy, where teacher certification was not a requirement. Almost none of the teachers were certified, including myself.

By the end of the school year, the boys in my classroom were able to diagram sentences at the level of a 6th grader (do they even teach sentence diagramming in public schools anymore??), were able to give answers on written tests in essay form, read at the level of an 8th grader (I had to search the book storage room for readers that were compatible with their skills), and had mastered pure phonics. They had beautiful cursive penmanship, and fully half of them were altar servers in the traditional form of the Mass, necessitating the memorization of complicated Latin prayers.

Every Friday afternoon, the last period of the day was devoted to classroom cleaning involving washing the desks, vacuuming the room, washing the black board, and cleaning and organizing their desks. I have long wondered why public school kids are not required to keep their own classrooms neat and clean.

They brought their lunches, and different boys were appointed to lunch room clean up on a rotating schedule. They washed the table and swept the floor. They didn't have much to do because the teachers made sure their classes cleaned up after themselves.

Lunch time was a time to sit and converse with our students and gently teach manners. Just so you don't think we were some sort of adult ogres, we were still treated to orange peel smiles or Cheetos "fangs" and found them quite amusing.

At our local Catholic school, where they do a fairly decent job, the kids are served a complete hot meal and trash the lunch room, necessitating an adult to clean up after them. Even with parent volunteers, the cost of staff to run the kitchen plus cleaning up the lunch room, adds considerably to the tuition and reinforces the modern concept that the world revolves around "the children."

Our local public high school has acres of rolling grass that requires lots of water spewed out of automatic sprinklers and a complete staff of grounds people to cut and fertilize. Does all that grass make the kids any smarter? They have a state of the art gym, wrestling room, and weight room, but the majority of the kids are what could only be called functionally illiterate - incapable of even writing a complete sentence.

Are these kids stupid? Of course not. I'm sure they can tell you how to properly apply a condom or save a tree. They are just trapped in an educational system that has evolved into some sort of glorified babysitting service/country club tended to by unionized teachers who are "certified."

Our government-run schools have become nothing more than places to indoctrinate children with the Socialistic attitudes the Left are so fond of. Anyone who can possibly keep their kids at home really should consider doing so. The parents who homeschool should be rewarded with vouchers or a tax break, not punished and demonized.