Imagine a conversation between a couple of moms at a park on
a pleasant afternoon, while the kids play. This is a slightly different time
and place than our current nation. Mom 1 is about to call the kids to head home
for dinner; it’s time to start the cooking process if they’re going to have
dinner on the table when Dad gets home. Mom 2 is surprised.
Mom 2: You cook for your own family? Really? I could never do
that.
Mom 1: Yeah, I always have, and the kids are growing just
fine.
Mom 2: I’d be afraid I’d do something wrong. I mean, what if
I made my kids fat? How would I ever forgive myself?
Mom 1: Well, I mostly make just enough. And it’s not junk
food. And we don’t have sweet snacks and desserts all the time, just as an
occasional treat.
Mom 2: Yeah, I could never say no if my Emma whined and
wanted more.
Mom 1: It takes being the grown up, I guess.
Mom 2: I’m just glad I don’t have to do that. I mean, it’s
enough that I have to get them dressed and out the door in the morning. I’m so
glad the school feeds them breakfast and lunch. And now that they send dinner
home too—what a lifesaver! I’m just so glad the government cares enough about
our children to make sure they get fed.
Mom 1: I figure I can do that. And I’m the one who knows what
my kids will eat.
Mom 2: But, seriously, do you know what they should eat? Do you have a degree in
nutrition? Are you certified?
Mom 1: No, I just use common sense and make things mostly
from scratch. It’s not rocket science.
Mom 2: But all those studies—you should get them to eat more broccoli,
or less, or use soy or don’t use soy. Is peanut butter really too dangerous? I
mean, I’d never feed them something if I didn’t already know they didn’t have
an allergy.
Mom 1: Usually you don’t find out they have an allergy if
they haven’t eaten it at least once.
Mom 2: Well, still, I’m sure the government data puts the
odds in our favor.
Mom 1: One of my kids does have food allergies, to dairy. So
I just adjust what I’m cooking for him. You can’t even get one of the school
meals without milk, can you?
Mom 2: Well, no, but you can just throw out what they don’t
eat.
Mom 1: Yeah. I don’t do that. Like, if I know a kid’s never
going to eat peas, I can make sure he gets some food he will eat that provides the same nutrition. I’m the one closest to
the situation, so I can easily adjust.
Mom 2: Maybe so, but it’s so much easier to just let the
government food specialists make those decisions. Plus, it’s no cost to me. Not
only do I have time free that I don’t have to cook, we don’t have to spend that
huge chunk of our budget just to feed out kids. I mean, it’s free! What could
be better than free?
Mom 1: I guess we just value personal choice, personal
responsibility, being able to adjust to our child’s personal needs without
having to go through a government bureaucracy that doesn’t care about our child’s
individual needs; we like time talking together while we eat, learning together
about foods, how to cook, how to make things taste better, getting variety when
we want it…
Mom 2: Yeah, strange. Whatever. Hey, gotta get going… (runs off, sits down on another bench by
someone less crazy).
 |
| daughter Social Sphere dissecting a squid during a group science day in 2009 |
This conversation is eerily similar to conversations I’ve
actually had about our choice to homeschool. Up until a century plus a couple
of decades ago, most parents saw to the education of their own children.
Sometimes the mom and dad did lessons at home, taught reading and basic math,
and gave assigned readings. Sometimes they joined together with some other
families to hire a teacher or two in a neighborhood school. Sometimes—especially
for kids who showed promise as they got older—they got to learn more as
apprentices or in higher education. What we see taught in college now was frequently
taught in secondary schools (calculus was aimed at 8th grade), and
undergraduate universities taught the specialized knowledge now reserved for
graduate programs.
I grew up thinking public schools were the norm, and we sent
our kids to them. Early on we got lucky.Our very smart kids (never sent to
preschools) got funneled into a gifted program that was quite good, despite the
bus ride across town. Then we moved, and spent two years coming to realize our
needs could not be met in the local schools. Private schools, which we couldn’t
afford for three kids anyway, were not going to solve our issues, because we
needed some individual attention. So we dove into homeschooling and never
looked back.
It was a difficult decision, and kind of scary. But it
turned out that it wasn’t so very different from cooking every day for your own
kids. You look at what they need; you know enough to either provide the
instruction or figure out where to get what they need. So you facilitate their
learning one way or another—just like you did when they were learning how to
sit up, how to walk, how to talk, how to brush their own teeth. Those are
things you have down yourself pretty well, so you just show the way.
There’s really not much necessary learning from elementary
school that a functional adult doesn’t have a good grasp of. When things get
tougher, at the high school level, finding specialized help, the way people do
for music lessons, is easy enough. And getting easier with so many online
resources.
And you learn as you go. Just as I’m a much better cook now
than I was years ago. And I make it better tasting under more limited
conditions (food allergies) than I ever used to know how to do. But it isn’t
rocket science. And when they get to the level of rocket science (we actually
studied some of that), you can get help, which we did.
Were there holes and gaps in our children’s educations?
Undoubtedly. But I guarantee there were not as many holes in things important
to me as the public schools would have caused. Anything they may have missed is
easily compensated for with a book or an online search. Because they know how
to learn on their own now.
I’m often in awe of how well all of my children do that as
young adults. What a delight it is to talk over with them what they’ve recently
discovered!
There’s more to say about education, but I want to end with
a point and a quote. You, as a parent, have the right and responsibility to
bring up your children as you see fit. Among parents earnestly striving to care
for their children, any interference with that process is wrong. Outcomes for
the children will be worse under government control. And our lives and freedoms
will be threatened by the government control, no matter how convincing the
authorities are about their good intentions.
Here’s the quote for the day, from Ezra Taft Benson, former
US Secretary of Agriculture, and author of The Proper Role of Government (as
well as former President and Prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints 1985-1994):
The best way to prevent a political faction or any small
group of people from capturing control of the nation's educational system is to
keep it decentralized into small local
units, each with its own board of education and superintendent. This may
not be as efficient as one giant super educational system (although bigness is
not necessarily efficient, either) but it is far more safe. There are other factors, too, in favor of local and
independent school systems. First, they are more responsive to the needs and wishes of the parents and the community.
The door to the school superintendent's office is usually open to any parent
who wishes to make his views known. But the average citizen would be hard
pressed to obtain more than a form letter reply from the national Commissioner
of Education in Washington, D.C.
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