Matt Walsh:
Here’s the email I received last week. I was saving it for today, as I’ll be speaking at ahomeschool conference tomorrow:
*The subject line of this email was: “Not all public school teachers are the devil.”*
Hi Matt,
I’ve been a pretty decent fan of some of your writings, and while I don’t always agree I find that you sometimes have an entertaining way of presenting your opinion. Anyway, all due respect, I find myself having a hard time continuing to follow you now that I’ve gone back and read through your views on education.
It doesn’t so much bother me that you seem to be PROUD of your lack of a college education. You seem to be of the lucky few smart enough to get away with having no real education to speak of (congratulations). What I can’t reconcile myself with is your vitriol and hatred for public education and your insistence on peddling “homeschooling” like it’s somehow the answers to all of our problems.
I worked in public education for many years so it’s hard for me to stomach your ignorance. However I’ve enjoyed many of your posts so I don’t want to give up on you just yet. Hopefully you’ll consider this email and consider retracting many of your statements about public school. Public school might not be perfect (we can’t all be perfect like you, Matt) but it’s certainly far superior to “homeschool”. Any number of studies prove this. Studies aside, I’d like to see your response to these two point:
1. The flaws in our public school system have to do with PARENTS. Parents send their kids to school and think their job is done, instead of being involved in their child’s education. How can the system ever improve if the involved parents pull out and do their own thing? We have a responsibility not just to our own family but to our community. Homeschool parents hurt their communities when they isolate themselves and remove their children from our academic institutions. If we don’t help the system, the system will not work.
2. You mock the idea of socialization, but the fact is that kids need to learn how to socialize. That skill is not ingrained in them. How can they learn proper social skills if they aren’t around other children? You might as well try to teach your kid how to swim without ever putting him in a pool. It’s most important for kids to learn the academic fundamentals, but learning proper socialization is very important as well. Public school gives young people the chance to become well adjusted adults.
I look forward to your responses to these two points, and to your admission that “homeschool” does far more harm than good to our society. I don’t think I can read your site again until that has happened.
In Christ,
Dan
Hi Dan,
Thanks for reading.
I actually went back to check, and I can’t find the post where I refer to all public school teachers as ‘the devil.’ Now, I can tell you that I had a music teacher in elementary school who once ‘disciplined’ a kid by having him sit in front of the class while she went around the room and asked all of his classmates to insult him. True story. I’m not saying she was ‘the devil,’ but if the devil ever DID teach an elementary school music class, I’m sure he’d do something similar. Let’s just settle on calling her behavior ‘devilish,’ and leave it at that.
But, no, I don’t think all public school teachers are that bad. Some of them are, but not all, and probably not most. In my own experience, I’d say 10 to 15 percent of my public school instructors were so obnoxiously terrible at their jobs that I often wondered if their classes were elaborate practical jokes, or maybe some kind of strange performance art stunt. On the other side, a good 10 to 15 percent were wonderful, dedicated, tuned-in, engaged, and brilliant. The rest fell somewhere in between the two extremes, as is often the case in any profession. The only difference here is that, in most other (non union) occupations, the obnoxiously terrible ones can and will be fired.
I notice that you have no problem laying the blame on parents (or PARENTS, as you call them), but, apparently, leveling even the slightest criticism at the sainted teachers is akin to accusing them of Satan worship. This strikes me as an awfully unbalanced way of approaching the issue.
Also, I’m anxious to read any number of those any number of studies you mentioned. I’m not sure what subject you taught in public school, but I’m positive you’d have given your students a failing grade if their Works Cited page simply said: “-Any number of studies.”
That’s the thing about claiming to have read “studies” that validate your argument about public education being superior to home education — you really have to offer, like, maybe ONE example.
I’m not sure which studies you’ve researched, but I guess it isn’t the one confirming that homeschoolers outperform public schooled kids on standardized tests, or the one showing that homeschooled kids are more prepared for college, or the one showing homeschoolers achieving a higher 4th year GPA.
Really, though, we could go back and forth with studies all day (well, I could — still waiting to see you produce one on your end). What’s the point? This is part of the reason many people are thoroughly disgusted with the way we treat education in our country. We don’t need to be studying our kids like lab rats, running academic experiments on them, and then comparing and contrasting their performance with the other kids across town, and the kids across the world, and the kangaroos in the zoo. Education is not a competitive sport. I’m a little tired of this “quick — learn more stuff faster!” attitude. Education is a much deeper pursuit. It can’t always be quantified and qualified and whateverified. You can’t necessarily measure a person’s knowledge, anymore than you can measure their artistic talent or their sense of humor.
Maybe we should stop turning our kids into charts and bar graphs, and instead work on connecting with them as human beings.
Furthermore, if we treat education like a race (“Race to the Top!”), we only reinforce the notion that the whole endeavor is just a game to see who can absorb the most information, and carry it all across the finish line without having a nervous breakdown.
There is no finish line. Education is a lifelong journey, despite the fact that nowadays we tend to say: “Hey, you graduated college! You’re done! Now go watch Netflix until your eyes bleed!”
So let’s forget the studies and move to your two points:
When was the last time you heard of a new program that a school system started that began with ONE teacher with an idea, who tried it in their class, and management liked it, and they passed it on up to higher officials, and then the idea was used by ALL the schools in that state? I used to hear of teaching programs that started that way.
@Smorgasbord:
Because the same ideologues pushing “Top-Down” government are also trying to institute “Top-Down” indoctrination, I mean education.
Socialization
Here we get back to the indoctrination. The children must become socialized through a socialist leaning education for socialism to take hold. While the teacher may not have purposely intended to present that definition, her letter in it’s intercity has a decidedly “collective” slant. Therefore the other definitions of socialization are valid.
While it was refreshing to read that particular school teacher’s letter, not all public school teachers are able to string together even two such well-written sentences.
And, if this particular teacher is unaware of that fact, she needs to widen her circle of public school teaching associates.
I used to tutor school children in reading, writing and spelling at the 5th through 8th grade levels in LB, where they went to public schools.
Their teachers were a big part of the problem.
They were used to not being graded on spelling or grammar.
It was as if black English was going to one day become an accepted official language in the US.
These youths were anxious to learn proper English.
But, had their parents allowed only public school teachers to have at them, it never would have happened.
This teacher’s hasty generalization is also a straw man: all public school teachers are the devil.
Two fallacies in one!
@Ditto: #2
Since the Bundy ranch incident, a lot of people are starting to SOCIALIZE with their local militia. I can SOCIALIZE with groups like that.
@Nanny G: #3
How many colleges and universities have remedial reading classes for incoming students because they can’t read at college entrance level? Over the years, I have heard many stories like this. I have also heard of high school graduates applying for a job, and can’t fill out the application because they don’t understand the questions.
@Smorgasbord:
Ah, but those groups don’t want to turn you into a loyal SOCIALIST in order to SOCIALIZE with them.
I devoutly hope that I offend elementary public school teachers with this post. For many years I worked in a Junior High School in Washington, DC. Our math department set out to consolidate information from the elementary schools from which our students came. There was no standard curriculum! We attempted to get a consensus about addition and multiplication, fractions, decimals, percents, using measuring instruments, and so on, to no avail. The lower level teachers had taken few math classes (elem ed is mostly theory) and many of them had no notion (for instance) of what motivated the addition of fractions with differing denominators. And they were profoundly unconvinced about the need for physical representations of numbers. As a result when it came time to teach Pre-Algebra, we spent our days laying the basis of computation (percents, decimals, and ratios are equivalent) and application (one sees these equivalences every day).
It was so bad that some of our feeder schools had to have specialists come in once or twice a week to teach math!
I am not a reading or writing teacher, but my sense is that the same basic deficiencies prevail in these disciplines as well. I speak here of parts of speech, various sentence forms, agreement of subject and verb, the difference between phrases and clauses, (so to speak) the bricks and mortar of language.
The members of our math department came away with the sense that elementary school teachers regarded their positions as jobs, in which one showed up, did one’s class, and went home. There was no sense of obligation or calling to truly master the various subjects or grow in mastery of the discipline of teaching.
I know this is a harsh judgment, but it was based on our experience with both the teachers and their students.
@mathman2: #7
As I have mentioned before, try to imagine that others are trying to infiltrate our country to turn it into a non-free country, just like we are doing to other countries to try to turn them into a free type of county. Compare what is going on in our schools with what went on before a country became a dictatorship or a socialist country. The same things are happening in the USA, and most people are not seeing it. Anybody who has studied history can see the many steps that were taken to overthrow a country are happening RIGHT NOW in the USA. Brainwashing our kids in the schools, and graduating them with a low level education so that they will be dependent of the government is one of the steps.