Schooling: Un, Home, and Otherwise
I am a complete sucker for Wife Swap. ABC are geniuses with their new schedule of starting one show immediately after the previous show ends, because every week, even though I don't intend to, I end up watching Wife Swap after Alias.
After last week, with evil conservative "Christian" Texan Kris who made the nice lesbians cry, the two families looked like they were full of decent people.
Then I watched the show for fifteen minutes and realized I was wrong. Andre, the dad of the family who lives on a bus, is insane. And a dick. (The folks over on the boards at TWoP are accusing him of much worse.)
His wife is a big dishrag who apparently lets him make all the decisions -- like homeschooling their two preteen daughters while driving around on a bus, despite the fact that the girls were really happy when the swapped mom brought them back to a house in their hometown and put them in real school.
Despite the fact that I am now very opposed to homeschooling, back in sixth grade I remember begging my mom to homeschool me. I hated my middle school and most of the people in my class. I was miserable and I wasn't learning anything except memorizing the prepositions in alphabetical order. Liz can testify that our middle school SUCKED (though her sixth grade class had better people in it than mine).
Of course, my mom did not agree to homeschool me. Although I wish she had found me a scholarship to attend Chilton -- I mean, Andover, since that's a little closer and also not fake. I was not particularly happy socially in middle school, not in small part due to the fact that I was constitutionally unable to do worse in school no matter how much I got ragged on for it. (The teachers who thought they were encouraging kids to do well by posting top scores on the wall did not help. At all.)
I certainly didn't learn that much in middle school, other than algebra. But I learned plenty DURING middle school. Looking back, I think that even a poor school system (though in my case, it was just the one middle school, not the whole school system, that sucked) is not an argument for homeschooling. I was still doing tons of reading and taking piano lessons and whatnot on my own. I was learning. I certainly wasn't behind when I got to high school.
That's what I don't get about homeschooling. Ignoring the whole "the world will corrupt my child" religious homeschoolers, why don't people just supplement what their kids are learning in school? If anything, the social development stuff is a worthwhile reason for going to school. I learned to deal with a lot of bullshit in middle school and after that, high school seemed great. (Liz and I have discussed how all the school-is-hell crap that gets pinned on high school on TV really seems to apply more to our middle school experience.)
Not sure what the point of this rant was, except that the guy on Wife Swap totally sucked. And the unschooling movement is even more dumb-er. I mean, I read Foucault. I know that the education system inculcates us as productive little brainwashed members of society. But generally, it's helpful to have a college degree to get any sort of living-wage job these days, and while obviously homeschooled kids can get into college, I'm going to guess unschooling doesn't result in anything resembling a transcript.
After last week, with evil conservative "Christian" Texan Kris who made the nice lesbians cry, the two families looked like they were full of decent people.
Then I watched the show for fifteen minutes and realized I was wrong. Andre, the dad of the family who lives on a bus, is insane. And a dick. (The folks over on the boards at TWoP are accusing him of much worse.)
His wife is a big dishrag who apparently lets him make all the decisions -- like homeschooling their two preteen daughters while driving around on a bus, despite the fact that the girls were really happy when the swapped mom brought them back to a house in their hometown and put them in real school.
Despite the fact that I am now very opposed to homeschooling, back in sixth grade I remember begging my mom to homeschool me. I hated my middle school and most of the people in my class. I was miserable and I wasn't learning anything except memorizing the prepositions in alphabetical order. Liz can testify that our middle school SUCKED (though her sixth grade class had better people in it than mine).
Of course, my mom did not agree to homeschool me. Although I wish she had found me a scholarship to attend Chilton -- I mean, Andover, since that's a little closer and also not fake. I was not particularly happy socially in middle school, not in small part due to the fact that I was constitutionally unable to do worse in school no matter how much I got ragged on for it. (The teachers who thought they were encouraging kids to do well by posting top scores on the wall did not help. At all.)
I certainly didn't learn that much in middle school, other than algebra. But I learned plenty DURING middle school. Looking back, I think that even a poor school system (though in my case, it was just the one middle school, not the whole school system, that sucked) is not an argument for homeschooling. I was still doing tons of reading and taking piano lessons and whatnot on my own. I was learning. I certainly wasn't behind when I got to high school.
That's what I don't get about homeschooling. Ignoring the whole "the world will corrupt my child" religious homeschoolers, why don't people just supplement what their kids are learning in school? If anything, the social development stuff is a worthwhile reason for going to school. I learned to deal with a lot of bullshit in middle school and after that, high school seemed great. (Liz and I have discussed how all the school-is-hell crap that gets pinned on high school on TV really seems to apply more to our middle school experience.)
Not sure what the point of this rant was, except that the guy on Wife Swap totally sucked. And the unschooling movement is even more dumb-er. I mean, I read Foucault. I know that the education system inculcates us as productive little brainwashed members of society. But generally, it's helpful to have a college degree to get any sort of living-wage job these days, and while obviously homeschooled kids can get into college, I'm going to guess unschooling doesn't result in anything resembling a transcript.