Should Progressives Homeschool Their Kids?
A great new video from Declaration Entertainment on the Obama administration’s sabotage of American schools:
Meanwhile at Slate yesterday, the anarchist and statist wings of the progressive movement disagree over homeschooling. Dana Goldstein argues the latter point of view, urging her peers to flood the public school system with their children:
Despite our conflicting perspectives, I agree with Taylor that school ought to be more engaging, more intellectually challenging, and less obsessed with testing. But government is the only institution with the power and scale to intervene in the massive undertaking of better educating American children, 90 percent of whom currently attend public schools. (And it’s worth remembering that schools provide not just education, but basic child care while parents are at work.) Lefty homeschoolers might be preaching sound social values to their children, but they aren’t practicing them. If progressives want to improve schools, we shouldn’t empty them out. We ought to flood them with our kids, and then debate vociferously what they ought to be doing.
In other words: progressive parents should be more concerned with creating a strong public school system than making sure their own children get the best education possible.
What a revealing word choice here too. “We ought to flood them…”
I imagine most of my friends and colleagues who homeschool their kids think of floods more as a destructive force we need to work hard to survive:
“In other words: progressive parents should be more concerned with creating a strong public school system than making sure their own children get the best education possible.”
Duh? Most “progressives” I know tend to hold their own beliefs above everything. Well, that and they tend to be affluent enough to actually pull their kids out later and use private schools or at least private tutors.
In other words, take the schools completely over and remake them into their own image. Have they not done that enough already? Apparently not.
Progressives have not sabotaged public schools, they have transformed them into precisely what they desire them to be. They are now mostly taxpayer funded ideological indoctrination centers vested with authoritarian control. Public schools and universities no longer teach students how to think, they teach them what to think.
Think about how much power public school teachers and administrators have over students and their parents. The public schools now have total control over how children express themselves, how they dress, and even what they eat. Public schools do not tolerate any dissent from liberal dogma. Our country’s foundation of inalienable civil rights no longer exists for parents and students in most public school systems.
All progressive families who homeschool their children should “flood” the schools with their children? What, both of them?
I’m reminded of Utah Phillips joke a a Unitarian charity drive “Send a poor Unitarian child to camp if you can find one!”
As Radar said “incoming!”
Flood away! Talk about your empty threats…”progressives” don’t have children, and half of those that do have will die of measles/mumps caused by their parent’s ignorant opposition to vaccinations…in 20 years conservative voters will outnumber the offspring of liberals 10 to 1…
Yeah, but they’ll still be forced to go to schools where they teach biology, geology and chemistry as though these aren’t massive hoaxes by scientists, so it’s not all great news.
SERENITY NOW !!!
Um, tortillapete, plenty of folks object to vaccines on religious grounds as well as individual right grounds. Ignorant is hardly a word to use for people who refuse government sponsored and enforced chemical programs. I view thoughtless compliance to government mandates as ignorant. Interesting post. I’ve always struggled with the notions of progressives apparent love of individual expression with their goals of “fairness”.
And in my neck of the woods, there are numerous cases of whooping cough–yes, whooping cough. Let’s hear it for no herd immunity! Woo hoo!
If you do not have or cannot afford a parochial school alternative and your public schools are not performing (so you do not feel comfortable about sending your kids there), heck yeah you should home school.
Progs worry that if the kids are homeschooled they won’t get enough variety of liberal indoctrination.