NEA Hates Homeschooling

I wonder how they like Unschooling! I was alerted to this excerpt from a recent convention.

The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs
based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive
education experience.

When home schooling occurs, students enrolled must meet all state
curricular requirements, including the taking and passing of assessments to
ensure adequate academic progress.

Home schooling should be limited to the children of the immediate
family, with all expenses being borne by the parents/guardians.

Instruction should be by persons who are licensed by the appropriate
state education licensure agency, and a curriculum approved by the state
department of education should be used.

The Association also believes that home-schooled students should not
participate in any extracurricular activities in the public schools.

The Association further believes that local public school systems
should have the authority to determine grade placement and/or credits earned
toward graduation for students entering or re-entering the public school setting
from a home school setting.

Wow. Quite a statement. Or a set of statements. I’ll sort of move line by line through the words they use.

1. Isn’t one of the signs of a “good school” one where the student-teacher ratio is low? Well for us, our ratio is 2:1 right now, soon to be 3:1, but not likely to reach 20:1. I may not have the child psychology background a general teacher gets, but I do have a college degree and I know how to guide my children so that they can learn for themselves.
2. Taking tests is fundamentally against our purpose as unschooling homeschoolers. Tests don’t prove anything except a person knows how to take a test. I got great grades in school, and don’t remember anything I haven’t used.
3. So we must bear all expenses of homeschooling, even though half our local taxes go to schools, which we don’t even use. Great.
4. Again, the licensing and curriculum are totally irrelevant. We are teaching our children how to learn, not teaching them specific information. This is clearly the union trying to maintain control over their domain.
5. Now why should the teachers care if homeschool kids participate in public school activities? Do they prohibit private school kids from participating? And even with our kids young ages, it seems that school makes kids mean, and I don’t necessarily want my kids participating in those events. However, should they choose to be involved, they should be allowed to do so. We pay our taxes like anyone else, yet do not use the majority of the school services. We should at least be allowed to do drama club or sports or whatever other activities they’re talking about if we want.
6. Hey, I found a point I agree with. Sure, if we were to send our children back to school for some reason, it is reasonable to allow them to run their diagnoses and put our children in whatever grade they feel is best. We’d be handing back responsibility for the majority of raising our children back to them.

Just the whole premise of this statement from the NEA is kind of silly. I guess it is what we should expect. It’s not like they’d say “yeah, keep your kids home, we don’t want ‘em here anyway!” But they could have just said nothing. I’ve probably written this here before, and I’ll say it again. If you want your children to grow up to work for a good company, send them to school. If you want them to create a good company, homeschool them. School creates worker bees. Homeschool, and in particular unschool fosters an enduring love of learning.