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.

My Daughter is a Math Wizard

So my daughter just turned four two weeks ago. We let her choose her own learning. When she wants to learn about letters, we encourage her and let her go as far as she wants that day. When she wants to learn about numbers, same thing. Same thing for every "subject".

She is really into letters, writing and reading individual letters frequently. That's cool. She gets excited about it, and watches shows like "SuperWhy" and is really into it (even though my wife and I hate that show, since the characters have absolutely no facial expressions, especially the fairy princess character).

The funny thing is that she is somehow secretly into numbers. A few weeks ago, she suddenly asked us "two and two is four, right?", "three and three is six, right?", all the way up to like "nine and nine is what?". We never told her that, never even really taught her there was such a thing as addition as far as I can remember. But when she asked us that first 2+2=4, we were like "uh, yeah, you're right!" And we answered her questions about the higher numbers, and didn't push her to be like "and 20 + 20 is 40". We let it go as far as she wanted to take it, which was still a few sums beyond numbers she really understands.

Then today, she was making muffins with my wife, and suddenly asked my wife "what's three fours?". Our muffin pan, like most, holds twelve muffins, in three rows of four (or vice versa if you like). She was doing multiplication! My wife called me while I was working to tell me about it, and it is quite remarkable. I was on accelerated math in elementary school, number one or two in the class, going to the next grade up for math class, and I remember doing multiplication in like third or fourth grade. Or was that fractions? But anyway, definitely not in kindergarten, which would be one grade level up for her right now. In kindergarten, I remember things like Mr. M Munchy Mouth - the letter people. She would be totally bored with that after like ten seconds right now in her life.

I think this is a perfect example of how schools work. They have to teach to the lowest common denominator (not to overdo the math thing), or at least to the median (OK I will stop I promise) level of the class. In some cases, even working at a grade ahead, this is way too slow. This to me supports our decision to let our children learn what they want when they want when it comes to traditional school subjects.

On a side note, our almost-two-year-old son is really into counting and letters thanks to our older daughter's interest in it. He shouts letters at SuperWhy and "writes letters" - albeit far less accurately or proficiently than the older one. Even if he thinks every number is "one" or every letter is "eight", he really gets a kick out of it. After all, that's what it's all about - getting a kick out of life, at every age.