harry potter and homeschool

This year, I panicked and considered sending my daughter to public school.

My block has 45 children on it, six of whom are her age. I was worried that she, being so social, so desperately interested in being part of a group, would suffer from not doing what all the other kids are doing. I mean, after school, they’ll get off the bus and run out to play and talk about the things that happened at school, and she won’t have established those friendships or have the same context for them.

Well, yeah, that’ll probably happen. She may be awkward and an outsider with this group and may or may not assimilate to them. But you know, I was awkward and an outsider, but I attended public school.

Tell Me, Why Do You Send Your Kids to School?

There’s some tough decisions when homeschooling, but they don’t seem nearly so tough as those that would send her to public school. That’s the switch I’ve made, realizing I need to come up with reasons why I should send my kids to public school rather than reasons to homeschool. Most moms have it backwards. I’m always asked by other moms why I homeschool and they don’t have an answer for me when I ask why they send their kids to public school.

But it seems to me that homeschool would be the default, if not for a society so dependent

• on two-worker households and parents satisfied that three hours a night with their children is enough family time
• on a sprawling beast of an education system that devours the nations’ taxes with little accountability for its programs and success
• on the largest labor union in the country (the NEA) that puts the union’s and teachers’ interests ahead of students by lobbying against accountability laws, failing to stop teacher misconduct, maintaining a tax-exempt status for a 300-million dollar budget even though some funds are used for political contributions, and claiming political impartiality when in fact it votes 90% of the time for liberal policies
• on taxpayers who believe it when the lobbyists say we just need more money to make the kids safe and provide the right programs, though most funnels through layers and layers of administration

In other words, I would need a really good reason why I would give up my child for 8 hours a day so that she can spend most of that time in the care of strangers, while she

• waits in lines
• sits at a desk
• is taught at the rate of the slowest or most disruptive child in class
• risks bullies and perverts 
• is exposed to parasites and illness
• and requires a lie from me to get her out of class if I want to take her to see a play or spend the day at a park

Alternate Teacher Preparation Program

Let me tell you about a job I once had. I worked in a program that trained teachers for public schools in Florida. We focused on people seeking second careers – people retiring or separating from the military who wanted to give back to society and thought teaching was the best way to do that.

If they had a college degree, all they needed was one year worth of “professional courses”. In other words, they had to spend a year learning how to manage kids, not learning any content like history, math, english, etc. Their degree didn’t matter so much. I mean, education degrees don’t include much content, either, and these second-career teachers actually had MORE content education by virtue of having a degree in an area that was not education.

This is why you should never worry about whether you can teach your kids. If you can read, you can teach. You may even know more than local teachers, except, perhaps, how to manage and motivate a group of thirty variously-skilled and energetic kids. Yes, I would need lots of training for that.

What is Public Education Teaching, Anyway?

Not having dealt with the school system for some years, I looked into what public schools are like now. I’ve discovered that kids are in school for more hours than I was, but they get physical education and art classes just once a week and don’t have recess. I was in half-day kindergarten and even got a nap. I had two recesses and a 20 minute lunch, not to mention art/music and physical education every day through sixth grade. What the hell are kids doing with all that time? I mean, they’re not learning more than I did.

One thing they’re not doing is reading; at least, they’re not reading significant literature. That’s the real issue for me. I was reminded how literature is so necessary by an article about Harry Potter And the Attack of the Critics by Martin Cothran .

I’m not going to tell you the Potter books are great literature, and neither is Cothran. The point is:

To a child who is not well-read, Harry Potter is dangerous—and so is any other book he or she may read. But the best defense against one idea is not fewer ideas, but more of them; and the best defense against one book is a whole host of them. Being widely read, in other words, is the best inoculation against the dangers of literature. Being widely read enables a person to not only see an idea, but, as Chesterton put it, to see through it.

Cothran made me laugh when he explained that not only is good literature necessary but also great literature and this is why:

Many parents of my generation will remember the fellow students they ran into in college during the 1970s and 80s who were hijacked by the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. These were people who left home and came to college where they encountered Rand’s novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and were captivated by Rand’s egoistic ideology. Why were they so swept away? For one reason: they hadn’t read anything else. By and large, these were people who were not well-read in the first place. They were ignorant of the great books, and so, in encountering Rand, they mistakenly concluded that they had come in contact with great thinking. They were not used to ideas, and so, to use G. K. Chesterton’s words, Rand’s one idea went to their heads like “one glass of wine to a starving man.”

I remember those kids! That impulse reverberates today in college kids looking for some high-fallootin’ theory to argue with their peers who think, for example, that Senator Obama’s message of a new politics is too left-leaning, altruistic, or just plain silly. (I do think the message is silly, but not because I’m a Rand-styled objectivist.)

So, my thought for today is that kids need to read great literature so they understand the Big Ideas and aren’t hoodwinked when some clever writer comes up with a “new” theory unknown to everyone but people who actually read.

Sure, my kids will read good books, like Harry Potter, but they’ll also read the great ones, like the Greek philosophers and tragedians, the rationalists, the Romantics, the existentialists, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, and — my favorite — the French feminists. 

Of course, most of those are a few years down the road. My homeschooled nephews are already reading Young Reader versions of Dickens, but my kids are still at Dick and Jane. I wonder how Dick and Jane would read as written by, say, Kierkegaard…