That sophomoric post at Teacher, Revised got a lot of attention over the weekend. I will admit that the title, “The case against homeschooling”, caught my attention and the post “#5ed” me a bit too. The attempt to bring the discussion to an adult level is welcome.
I don’t have much patience for that kind of a discussion. And I fear that most of our readers (excepting the thousands of homeschoolers who visited our site this weekend), tuned out about as quickly as I did.
Obviously, tone was an issue for me, on both sides of the argument. But mostly it was the lack of complexity. There are wonderful things about homeschooling. And there are some not so wonderful things. It can be done really well, and it can be done not so well. The same goes for public schooling.
But as I think this through, there is something more significant than “a public school teacher who knows very little about homeschooling” admitting it. If we are going to set up our newsreader to pick up on ‘homeschooling’ tags then we should know anyone can tag anything ‘homeschooling’. And while I am it, I will note again that the USAToday piece read like it was primarily written so it could get swept into the current MSM obsession with ‘white men’ and ‘racism’. That is, it is was constructed for search engines and newsreaders.
Tags: case against homeschooling, homeschooling, public school, USAToday
I think a sea-change in the political atmosphere in this country has given many people carte blanche to rail against homeschoolers with all the ignorance and prejudice they can muster, and the immediacy of blogging gives them a platform like none that has come before. I think what we’re seeing is just all the disgruntled-with-homeschooling teachers’ coffee break conversations brought to life…