Recently in Education Category

A reader writes to say that his five year old came home from public school kindergarten with a flyer alerting parents that the kids are about to have a whole week of "Just Say No to Drugs" education. It shocked him that kids as young as this are being subjected to this sort of thing, and made the reader and his wife consider whether they would be better off getting their kids out of the public school environment, and homeschooling them.

He wrote me asking for homeschooling advice. I told him a couple of things from our experience. First, be realistic. Homeschooling is not for everybody, and it's no panacea. You have to have a certain amount of idealism to get through the tough parts, but understand that there probably will be tough parts. Not everybody is ideally suited to be a teacher, nor are all kids suited to home learning. If you can go into it without illusions, you'll do better.

Second, I said, by far the greater burden of homeschooling will fall on your wife, if you're like most families. As a husband, that means you have to play a crucial support role. If your wife is busy homeschooling, she's not going to be able to cook and clean like she otherwise would. You can step in there by doing this work yourself, hiring a housekeeper to come in once or twice a week, and so forth. Also, you can pick up some of the homeschooling tasks if you can. Furthermore, you'll need to be there to support your wife emotionally when she has a bad day with the kids (and she will). If you think of homeschooling as something your wife does with the kids, it won't succeed.

Those were two things off the top of my head. For you who are now homeschooling, or who once homeschooled but no longer do, what would you advise this reader? Don't chastise or be argumentative here; I mean for this to be a helpful post to him and to all readers who are considering homeschooling, or who might be struggling with it and need some tips.

Did you realize that in the last generation, there has been a startling drop-off -- a near-collapse, actually -- in the number of college humanities majors? Prof. William Chace, writing in The American Scholar, takes on the problem from the English Department:

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

Chace tells a long, fascinating and depressing story of how broader social and economic changes have marginalized the humanities in colleges. But he focuses his frustration on how English departments have done so much harm to themselves, by turning the study of the beauty and the wisdom of literature and language into a bloodless, clinical dissection of this or that Theory. Chace, who is a veteran professor of literature, says there is no center or coherence to teaching English literature nowadays, and therefore a dissipated sense that its study is important. The withering and decay of the profession can no longer be hidden, he writes:

Meanwhile, undergraduates have become aware of this turmoil surrounding them in classrooms, hallways, and coffee lounges. They see what is happening to students only a few years older than themselves--the graduate students they encounter as teaching assistants, freshman instructors, or "acting assistant professors." These older students reveal to them a desolate scene of high career hopes soon withered, much study, little money, and heavy indebtedness. In English, the average number of years spent earning a doctoral degree is almost 11. After passing that milestone, only half of new Ph.D.'s find teaching jobs, the number of new positions having declined over the last year by more than 20 percent; many of those jobs are part-time or come with no possibility of tenure. News like that, moving through student networks, can be matched against, at least until recently, the reputed earning power of recent graduates of business schools, law schools, and medical schools. The comparison is akin to what young people growing up in Rust Belt cities are forced to see: the work isn't here anymore; our technology is obsolete.

Discuss.

By the way, I'm hearing that schools of journalism are thriving these days. I cannot figure out why. The job market is terrible, and is not going to get any better in the foreseeable future. Veterans are trying to leave before they're driven out by circumstances. Far more than what's happened to English departments, I think, this is an externally driven matter for journalists (though we are aware that we have made mistakes that hurt ourselves too). It is often pointed out to us journalists that the public is consuming more journalism than ever before. The problem is not a lack of interest in what we do; there is far, far more interest in that than in what English professors do. No, the problem is that because of the Internet, there is no longer a way to pay for what we do, and no longer a way to compel people who consume our products to pay us for what we do. I bring this up here not to start another discussion about the decline of journalism -- really, I'd rather hear from English students and professors, and also teachers and students in the humanities about their situations. I only bring it up to say that I would actively discourage any college student from majoring in journalism, unless he or she couldn't imagine doing anything else, and had a clear idea of how hard their professional lives were going to be for an indefinite period. If I had college-age children, unless they were on scholarship and were intensely passionate about journalism, I would throw myself in front of them to keep them out of journalism school. It's not that I don't love journalism; it's not that at all. It's what I do, it's all I've done, and it's what I love more than almost anything. Rather, my fear is that my child would rack up indebtedness and waste his college years studying something that he won't be able to support himself doing.

Anyway, the decline of English and the humanities in university. Discuss.

Bill O'Reilly did a segment last night (embedded below the jump) about a short film supposedly being shown in some California schools. It's a cartoon about a cross-dressing boy who has fun wearing his mom's bikini, part of a package of gay-friendly films being sent out to California schools that request them. Youth in Motion, the San Francisco gay activist group distributing the films, claims that over 250 schools have requested their materials; here's the map showing the schools; without naming the schools, there's no way to verify this.

Here, from the group's own website, is its description of the "Bikini" film featured on O'Reilly (you can see part of the film if you go below the jump and watch the segment):

Bikini Lasse Persson 2005 7 min. Sweden

An animated musical, Bikini stars a young boy, dolled up in his mother's yellow swimsuit, who is afraid to come out of the locker room. With the encouragement of a pair of happy twins he emerges, but their lady friend would rather receive all the attention herself.

Set to the classic 1960 song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," this short offers an entertaining take on finding the courage and acceptance to express one's gender with honesty and style.

That's one of several short films included in this unit sent to schools. You're also encouraged to download the "curriculum guide," which includes passages like this:

Gender Expression

Watch: Screen the short films eddie and Tomboy and pose the accompanying discussion questions (see page 12).

Discuss: Revisit the gender chart you created earlier. Do you need to revise the placement of certain terms or images? Is the class still able to define a "real man" and a "real woman?" Is there a growing gray area between these two genders?

Engage: Ask students to create a circle map or draw a picture of a perfectly gendered person--the ideal man or the ideal woman. Next, ask them to create a circle map or draw a picture of themselves (or use magazine images again to create a collage for each).

Ask students to consider the different ways they express their gender: In what ways do they conform to societal expectations for their gender? In what ways do they deviate from these norms? How does this challenge or change their definitions of male and
female, man and woman?

The curriculum guide that accompanies this stuff makes it clear that under California law, not only does a school not have to inform parents if it intends to show this material to schoolchildren, but parents are not allowed to remove their children from the classroom. Why? Because this is not intended as sex education (which does retain an opt-out provision), but "anti-bias training."

So: your California middle-schooler is shown the cute Swedish cartoon about a cross-dressing boy, and is asked in his classroom to consider ways he expresses his gender, and you, Mom and Dad, have no say in it. That's the law.

Where are we going with this? Why are we doing this? I agree with Bill O'Reilly, who said he wishes no transgender person any harm, and anyone who tries to harrass a transgender person should be strongly dealt with. But come on! You can teach basic respect and civility without getting into all of this advocacy. This is about imposing a radical cultural agenda on captive schoolchildren, and disempowering parents who might object. It is a hostile act toward traditional religious people and social conservatives, and ought to be seen as such -- just as a public school curriculum teaching gay kids that something is wrong with them should be out of bounds. Why do we have to bring the culture wars into public schools like this? No wonder people homeschool, or want out of public schools. Or want to leave California.

I love this essay by Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, who, along with his wife Leslie is homeschooling in Brooklyn. Excerpt:

At the risk of gross generalization, there's a hierarchy of responses when you drop the home-school bomb in conversation. Childless men don't much care; the question is too remote from their consciousness. Childless women are often curious and even intrigued; the question is hypothetical but possesses a certain allure as a thought experiment. As for men with children, they may or may not be sympathetic, but they don't experience the subject as a personal affront. Let's be honest: It's almost always mothers who react defensively when the subject comes up, as if our personal decision not to send our kids to public school contained an implicit judgment of whatever different choices they may have made.

As I say, I understand this a little bit better than I did at first. For one thing, I'm not sure any man can really grasp the competing and largely incompatible demands faced these days by American women, who are expected to be providers, power brokers, nurturers and sex symbols, either all at the same time or in rapid succession. Whether they're working-class or middle-class, most working mothers feel fundamentally torn between home and the workplace. They get shunted into mommy-track careers if they seem insufficiently devoted to their corporate overlords while getting grief from mothers-in-law for not spending enough time with the kids. They're doing the best they can and it's not that much fun, and the last thing they want to hear is somebody telling them, in effect, that they must have missed the latest memo on hip 21st-century motherhood: You're supposed to quit your job and spend your days reading your kids "Oliver Twist"! Home schooling is the new black!

Other stuff is involved as well. Some people seem genuinely disturbed by our decision, on philosophical or political grounds, as if by keeping a couple of 5-year-olds out of kindergarten we have violated the social contract. Specifically, we have rejected the mainstream consensus that since education is a good thing, more of it -- more formal, more "academic," reaching ever deeper into early childhood and filling up more of the day and more of the year -- is better for society and better for all children. This is almost an article of faith in contemporary America, but it's also one that's debatable at best and remains largely unsupported by research data.

In a related vein, some people suspect we have a hidden ideological or religious agenda we're not telling them about. We may look like your standard-issue Brooklyn creative-class family -- two 40-something parents, two kids, two pet rabbits and a battered Chrysler minivan -- but who are we really? Home schooling has become a lot more mainstream and diverse in recent years, but familiar stereotypes endure. As Alicia Bayer, a Minnesota home-schooler and blogger who's one of Leslie's online mentors, puts it, "People think we're all conservative Christians who hate the government and wear denim jumpers."

It's also a myth that conservatives are all supportive of homeschooling. We homeschool our oldest, and though homeschooling is much more mainstream here in Texas than in most places, we've had to take some surprising scorn from conservatives, almost always based on the idea that our son is going to be a freak who has no social skills.

More:

This struck a chord with Leslie in several different ways. She's a hardcore nonconformist -- yeah, she's a lifelong lefty, but one closer to anarchism than socialism -- and home schooling dovetailed perfectly with a bunch of other DIY interests she's developed in recent years. She tends a large vegetable and flower garden every summer at a family house in central New York state, where Desmond and Nini help her grow peas, beans, lettuce, carrots, pumpkins and enormous sunflowers. In the basement she has a workshop where she makes furniture out of recycled wood and fallen branches, and she hoards piles of sewing projects for the cold winter months. Her interest in unconventional education goes back to her beloved grandmother, a renegade schoolteacher in an Indiana small town who gave her a copy of A.S. Neill's legendary "Summerhill School" more than 30 years ago. Compared with all that, public school never had much chance.

You go, girl! Crunchy cons got your back. And on the socialization question:

Now, I suspect that response fails to capture the full extent of faith-driven home schooling, but it does suggest that the phenomenon is more complicated than many people suppose. A rough but reasonable guess might be that one-quarter to one-third of home-schoolers -- say, 450,000 school-age kids -- come from more or less secular backgrounds, and that proportion is probably growing. Just as important, not every home-schooler who happens to be religious is home schooling solely or primarily for religious reasons. There's a vibrant African-American home schooling scene, for instance, and while a lot of the folks involved are Christians, many say their top concern is the destructive culture they see in public school.

Our support network in New York is diverse in many ways, but it definitely lacks the extraordinary racial, ethnic, religious and economic heterogeneity you find in the city's public schools. Our home-school cadre mostly consists of creative professionals with flexible work lives -- writers, actors, artists, musicians, academics -- both because those are people who can conceivably accommodate home schooling in their lives and because those are people who share a nonconformist attitude toward work, authority and institutions. Do we regret not exposing our kids to the intense cultural melting pot of New York's school system? Sometimes, sure. But we're also not exposing them to bullying, arbitrary systems of order and discipline, age-inappropriate standards of behavior, and the hegemony of corporatized kid culture. Desmond and Nini have never heard of "Transformers," and we're OK with that.

I urge you to read the entire O'Hehir essay. It's fantastic, and I bet many of you will be able to relate. Also, don't miss The Bitter Homeschoolers' Wish List. I want to shout this one to the rafters:

10. We didn't go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.

John Carney thinks the president owed those students yesterday some hard truth-telling. What should he have told them? Excerpt:

There's a serious danger that the college education bubble may burst. As more and more people get college degrees, which inevitably have to become easier to get in order to increase the amount of graduates beyond its realistic levels, the market will eventually figure out that the degree doesn't mean what it used to. It will become less useful as a heuristic for intelligence and achievement. And college graduates will find themselves with an asset--a degree--whose value is dropping while their debt remains high.

It's all a little reminiscent of the housing bubble. Cheap loans, rising home price, the idea of the homeownership society, and mounting debt. Except this time it is cheap loans, rising tuitions, the idea of an educated society and mounting debt.

Those of you who aren't tempermentally or intellectually suited to college should not despair. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.

Here's how you can benefit from the coming bursting of the bubble of college education. Avoid taking on too much debt. Attend a trade school, a vocational school. We have created a dearth of craftsmen in America--we need more skilled carpenters, painters, electricians, plumbers, glaziers, masons and auto-mechanics. These will be highly in demand.