Top Ten Reasons Why PS is Better than HS

Why Public Schooling Is Better Than Homeschooling:

10. Most parents were educated in the underfunded public school system, and so are not smart enough to homeschool their own children.

9. Children who receive one-on-one homeschooling will learn more than others, giving them an unfair advantage in the marketplace. This is undemocratic.

8. How can children learn to defend themselves unless they have to fight off bullies on a daily basis?

7. Ridicule from other children is important to the socialization process.

6. Children in public schools can get more practice 'Just Saying No' to drugs, cigarettes and alcohol.

5. Fluorescent lighting may have significant health benefits.

4. Publicly asking permission to go to the bathroom teaches young people their place in society.

3. The fashion industry depends upon the peer pressure that only public schools can generate.

2. Public schools foster cultural literacy, passing on important traditions like the singing of 'Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg...'

1. Homeschooled children may not learn important office career skills, like how to sit still for six hours straight.

 

I can understand where this is coming from, but talk about a culture shock when homeschooled kids move out to college.

 

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Why Schools Don’t Educate
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by John Taylor Gatto
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I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I've known over the years who've struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word "education" should mean. A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.

We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom. The world's narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn't buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse - and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan fifty per cent of all new marriages last less than five years. So something is wrong for sure.

Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic - it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880's when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator Ted Kennedy's office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98% and after it the figure never again reached above 91% where it stands in 1990. I hope that interests you

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"Top 10 Reasons"...That was hilarious & made my day! Thanks =) I'm a homeschooling-borderline-unschooling mother. (its a balance thing) As for the culture shock, I've seen it happen to people who were in public school too. And have known other homeschoolers who have excelled in college. It depends on the person really.

 

I thought this was another thread that would risk making me angry, but that's brilliant - thank you!

 

You're welcome!

 

..

 

How completely sad, and how completely true.

Everything important that I learned in my life, all those important skills that are getting me jobs, making me friends, and getting me places in this world, out of them all, not a single one of them did I learn in school. Not one. Everything I learned in school went out of my head as soon as I was finally released from my perpetual prison with a diploma in hand. A diploma for what? To atest to the fact that I learned just how to entertain myself in my head for 12 years? To atest to the fact that I was kept from going forward in areas where I was excelling purely because my excellence might upset the other children? or maybe because a poor child shouldn't be that intelligent. Who knows...

All I know is that we do have a problem in our school systems. We do have problems in our societal systems. And from the mindset of our society, those problems will never be solved. Not for everyone.

How depressing.

 

That was hilarious ...

 

Very interesting article Squawkers. It is so depressing.

Amen to the culture shock from public school to college.
In college they treat you like a sane intelligent human being who wants to learn. You get respect.
Oh but the biggest kicker is needing true independant thought and to question things. I still have trouble with that, though am obviously capable of it. Just that years of being told 'sit down, shut up, these are the right answers' kind of dulls that part of your brain.

Nah still not sold on putting my future children through public school.

 

(quote)

8. How can children learn to defend themselves unless they have to fight off bullies on a daily basis?

7. Ridicule from other children is important to the socialization process.

6. Children in public schools can get more practice 'Just Saying No' to drugs, cigarettes and alcohol.
(end quote)

I agree with these ones... Surely there's some truth in them? If you're never exposed to the real world, it doesn't mean you'll never see it - just that when you do, you're not prepared for it. I've got nothing against home-schooling, but it needs to teach the kid important stuff about society, not just numbers and words.

 

I agree on that aspect, we all need street smarts to survive. There are many ways to learn that however. Yes, public schools are ONE way out of many, but not my personal preference. As long as the parent is open w/ their child/children & not TOO over protectant ALL the time...in other words, raise your kids so that you can TRUST them to take care of themselves in scenarios where street smarts are needed. That is one of the main goals I have for my daughter. Mutual respect & trust. She has no problems with the oh-so talked about "socialization skills". My stance is, to each their own. I respect other people's choices to send their kids to public schools, I don't try to convince them to homeschool...but it seems often that homeschoolers are VERY criticized by everyone else. I've had my share of criticism from MANY people, but I take it w/ a grain of salt because I know I've done my homework, I know what i'm doing =) Many people are under the impression that homeschoolers are too stupid to teach their kids in the first place. (A good point made in the top 10 reasons) Maybe they feel guilty for their own choices for all I know or maybe they just can't tolerate difference of opinion. I can't speak for other homeschoolers, but I personally did over a year of research before deciding that I was going to homeschool my daughter...and realized that we had been technically unschooling since she was a baby. I read somewhere that "Every good parent homeschools their children." Some do it fulltime, other part time, helping their kids w/ their homework from public school. So technically, I was homeschooled a great deal because my mother was ALWAYS there to help me with my homework no matter what hour of the night, she stayed by my side. And that is why I feel I did alright in public school & that I would have excelled even more had I been fully homeschooled.

I'm done now sorry for the long rant!

<3

-iSiS

 

Sure, it's possible - as long as you let your kid out to socialize with other kids every day, he'll aquire those social skills. But I'm sure a lot of home-schooled kids are taught at home precisely because their parents *don't* want them hanging out with the other kids... Which is disturbing.

 

ahaha, I haven't asked that since 3rd grade, then I got sick of it and just walked out when I need to piss... I don't care much for authority, that's also the reason that no matter who the teacher is and how old, I've never called them mr. or mrs. lala... Always just the name

 

The original article was cute. But squawkers, Nothing personal at all (Ya know I love you) but this

Is simply NOT true. Japan and Korea have MUCH higher teen suicide rates than the USA. (I will get the stats for this.)

From what I can find (Jeez, the net is loaded with a lotta crap posing as real info) Canada, Finland, New Zeland and Japan have the highest teen suicide rates in the world. The USA doesn't even come close.

Just wanted to set the record straight.

 

DisInfo haha. Still, to each their own. I almost caved & sent my daughter to public school this year...(in the middle of re-locating to another side of town) but by the time I considered it the only school with room in the area we will be living soon is one of the worst schools in our city. (Academically & otherwise) I tried getting my daughter into 2 really good schools in the same area but they were already over their maximum of students. Because I didn't feel right sending her to public school in the first place, expecially to a bad one. Needless to say I am actually happy right now. I over stressed about having time in my schedule to do everything that needs to be done. So now, I still get to teach my daughter, go to school and she'll have more kids (her age) to play with on a daily basis where we'll be living.

In defense of both. Every Home schooler and Public schooler is different depending on what teaching method works best for them. If kids are raised with love, mutual respect & common sense, I trust they will grow to be caring, responsible, intelligent, well-rounded individuals regardless if they are home schooled, public or private schooled, etc.

 

Is this a joke or is this serious? I honestly can't tell, because to me, it looks like a bunch of BS. (no offense)

 

It's a joke....and yes, it's all a bunch of BS!!!!

 

Heheheh, I liked that RainbowSquidney, pretty good!

 

Just an observation: isn't it interesting how suicide rates are the highest in the most developed, most "civilized" countries, and not the impoverished areas like subsaharan africa or parts of asia or latin america?