US vs. THEM

Home schooling has become increasingly popular in today’s culture. It is estimated that 1.2 to 1.7 million children in grades K-2 are being home schooled. This is a huge amount of students, therefore it is easy to see that home schooling is established as a significant and legitimate force in the American educational system. Once thought of as an abnormal way to educate your kids is now fast growing and for many reasons. Some parents think the public school systems are too liberal or conservative. Some parents are motivated for religious reasons. Whatever the reasoning it is very important to have a mutual understanding and a positive view between public schools and home schooling parents. Most of the tension between the two sides is the lack of understanding by public school teachers as to why parents choose to home school their children. This creates an “us verses them” mentality. In reality the school teachers and the home teachers need to come to an agreement and partnership to benefit the children no matter where they are taught. I found two new terms regarding home schooling. They both relate to the type of parent and the reason why they want to keep their kids at home to educate them. The first term is IDEOLOGUES. They have specific beliefs, values, and skills they want their children to learn and embrace. They also feel that these things are not being adequately taught in public schools so the opt to keep their children at home. The ideologues reasoning is usually religious based. They believe that the public schools do not have strong Christian values. This is correct because now a days majority no longer rules. We have become a county trying to please everyone. If we offend one single person and they speak out our country and government changes the rules around one person instead of the majority of the people in the US. Anyway, these ideologues are looking out for their children’s moral, ethical and spiritual development and don’t think that the public schools take religion seriously.

The second class of parent is PEDAGOGUES. These parents also feel that schools are unwilling or unable to serve their children and give them a proper education. Some of the parents have seen their own children or others suffer emotionally or academically in public schools. Since they don’t think the schools teach well, they want to keep their children at home as well. They don’t think it is fair for the public schools to sort, label and select their children based on a limited measure of their ability. Namely the state standardized testing. In Florida we have the FCAT, this test is given to children in grades 3-8. It puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the students to perform for this one test. It also alters the curriculum because the teachers have a certain amount of “testing” information they need to get out to their students and because of this other areas like the arts, social studies, science get left out. The children are being taught only the information on the test and not becoming well-rounded in all subjects.