Homeschooling or Homefooling Q3: Involved Parent v. Objective Teacher April 12, 2008

(Editor’s note: This is one of a series of questions about homeschooling that will all be posted with answers. Eventually.) 

Question 3. Separating the roles of Parent/Teacher. To me, my parents are my parents, not my educators. Although they have taught me many valuable life lessons, they have allowed me to be an independent thinker, learning from various individuals. I have learned something different from all my teachers, and I’m grateful for that. This is like the last point about the Christian world view; home schooling parents shouldn’t impose only their point of views on their children. In addition, home schooling diminishes the professional roles of teachers. Teachers are professionals like doctors and lawyers. Doctors don’t normally operate on close relatives, and lawyers don’t normally represent close relatives in trials. That’s because there should be a standard of objectivity, and I don’t see how parents can be objective when teaching their own children. Parents are going to be more likely to give their children more leeway than professionals. When John and Jane get jobs, unless it’s in the family business, bosses are not going to be mommy or daddy. They’re going to be objective professionals.

Your parents are not your educators? Who taught you to talk and communicate, to walk, to dress yourself, to behave in social situations? “Eighty-five percent of a person’s intellect, personality and social skills are developed by age five,” according to Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources Jane Woods. More learning takes place in the first five years than in happens for the rest of one’s entire life; so why are parents suddenly disqualified as their own child’s teachers, after having taught him in five short years eighty-five percent of everything he will ever need to know in his entire life, simply because the child is six years old, only one day older than yesterday?

Parenting is education. The Latin root of the word educate is educare, meaning “to rear, educate,” according to my Webster’s. The idea that homeschool parents mew their children up in their homes, never letting them interact with people outside the home … can we just drop that tired old idea? It never was true, and it isn’t going to become true. People homeschool because they want to open up the world to their children, in a way that classrooms cannot. How is doing a worksheet on worldviews better than meeting the old Chinese man who runs a stand at the open air market, and hearing his stories about his childhood in his homeland? I don’t really have to answer that question, do I?

Parents are not educators? I beg to differ. A list of the successfully home educated reads like a who’s who honor roll of American and world history as well as modern newsmakers.

>>In addition, home schooling diminishes the professional roles of teachers.

Not to be too free market here, but if “professional” teachers are not getting the job done to the satisfaction of the consumer (parent and child), then they had just better be prepared to lose the customer’s business.

It is long past time to dispel the myth of the teacher as the sole holder and dispenser of knowledge, and the myth of education as children sitting in neat rows having knowledge poured into their waiting minds. Remember the old adage about leading horses to water? Well, a teacher can stand in front of a classroom all day and teach and teach and teach, but if the child is not stimulated to learn, he won’t become educated. True education is stimulating the child’s interest in the subject and facilitating a deepening desire to know more. The best teachers know this and try to do it - often not as well as they would like, because it is nearly impossible to do it for twenty-four students at once. Some superlative teachers do sometimes manage to overcome some of the obstacles institutionalized school puts in the way of their teaching, as did John Taylor Gatto, three times elected New York State’s Teacher of the Year … oh, wait; he quit teaching because, he said, he was “no longer willing to hurt children.”

You did catch that, didn’t you? A man publicly recognized three times as one of the best teachers in the United States quit his profession because he believes it damages children.

>> Doctors don’t normally operate on close relatives, and lawyers don’t normally represent close relatives in trials. That’s because there should be a standard of objectivity, and I don’t see how parents can be objective when teaching their own children.

What on earth does objectivity have to do with education? Where are the studies showing that “there should be a standard of objectivity”? I’ll tell you where they are: they don’t exist. Sure, a doctor might excuse herself from cutting her child’s abdomen open, because emotion and anxiety would cloud life-and-death decision-making ability. But education has relatively few life-and-death moments; and unlike surgery, attachment enhances education. All good teachers seek parental involvement because they know that is the best predictor of the child’s academic success.

Look back at the time when your parents were your teachers. Your parents helped you learn to walk by holding your hands, encouraging you, walking with you, and setting your feet on top of theirs to help you take giant steps you couldn’t take on your own. They weren’t objective, they were involved. Would your learning to walk have been enhanced by someone “objective” standing there with a checklist and a red pen, peering at you over a clipboard as you struggled to stand and cruise along the couch and let go and take that first step? Or “objectively” making you meet arbitrary “walking education” standards: “Left foot first! Young man, I’m going to have to mark you down if you insist on starting with your right foot! And don’t tippytoe!” Of course not. It is precisely their loving, encouraging involvement that fueled your desire to be like mom and dad, to keep getting up and trying when it seemed impossible. Someone objectively saying, “Well, this is the eighth time he has fallen in six minutes. Most other children have mastered this skill by now!” as she placed a large X beside your name - would that attitude have helped or hindered your learning to walk?

Guess what? The way we learn does not change suddenly because we hit a certain age. Knowing the child’s interests and learning style can only enhance the child’s learning experience. Being involved and truly caring about the child as a person produces more educational results than standing back with a timer and a red pen, looking for objective errors to compare to the rest of the class. Teachers have students for six hours, five days a week, less than nine months a year. Hardly enough time to develop an intimate understanding of an individual child when there are twenty others clamoring for attention; besides the fact that statistics show that each child receives about one or two minutes of one-to-one adult attention in the classroom every day. How is any teacher, no matter how dedicated and skillful, going to address the individual needs of each child in the classroom, much less meet each one emotionally with the involvement that enhances learning so well, and which comes like breathing to any loving parent?