Home Education Seen As Timely Solution to Failing Public Schools
“Christian faith home schooling is America has come of age,” Moore says, “and it’s time now to get on offense and become more outreach- and evangelistic-oriented in our presentations.” He believes faith-based home schooling is an increasingly attractive option, especially since growing homosexual influence in public schools and the schools’ anti-parent policies regarding sex education and abortion are raising the anxiety level of many parents today.
Also, the home education advocate notes, failing standards of education, social engineering in the classroom, and drugs and violence on school campuses have led to a surge in home schooling in recent years. Meanwhile, he points out, home schooling has experienced tremendous changes, growing from its early days of being viewed with suspicion and skepticism by government and education officials to now offering large state conventions and curriculum fairs and even exerting influence with state legislatures around the nation.
Home schoolers were once outcasts, Moore asserts, “but the tide has turned, and now Christians who are public schooling their children are on defense.”
I wouldn’t say I feel defensive about our choice to let our kids attend a charter public school.
Last night my oldest daughter and I went on a date for her birthday and I told her about the recent decisions which make public schooling more suspect. I also told her that many people are choosing to home school. This is a child who was home schooled for kindergarten and first grade, and then all of middle school. We had to force her to attend high school. She did not want to go.
I asked her if she felt she was being better prepared for college at the charter or if she would do just as well at home. She said that she felt she was working much harder in all of her classes than she ever did in home school, and that being in a classroom motivated her to try to get top grades and classroom competition really helped her want to achieve.
I was glad to get this firsthand feedback, because it is challenging for parents to know what is best for each child. At one point I believed that my children would never attend public school, and Dr. Moores books had a large impact on that decision. But as time has gone by, and we had our home school experimenting, I believe the children are doing much better at a quality charter school than they ever did at home with me.
For example. I purchased an expensive Spanish Curriculum and was all set to teach the kids how to speak Spanish, which I do not speak. I planned that each wednesday we would have an hour of spanish instruction using the CD’s and the books that I had bought. The children were bored, I had no idea how best to teach them, and we floundered for a few weeks and just sort of gave up.
At the charter within the first week of spanish instruction all four of my kids were speaking, writing, and conversing better than after weeks of “spanish instruction” taught by Mom. I’m not trained in the language, I don’t speak it, and I had no idea how best to motivate the kids to want to learn it. But learning a language is required at the charter, and teachers who have had years of training are prepared and ready to teach my kids DAILY, something that I had not clue about how to teach.
I’m not dissing home school with this anecdote. I’m just trying to make the case that in some instances, and in some areas, trained teachers do a much better job of educating than busy moms who have no expertise in a certain area. Language instruction is one of the main reasons I feel good about our decision to send our kids to public school.
Jenny Hatch