[...] my travels around the blogosphere this morning, I ran into a comment by “bob” about objective thinking. He states that “it is absolutely imperative that today’s children be exposed to as many [...]

[...] Our School Decision, and How We Got There – homeschool. I left you hanging with a little teaser on Monday, when I told you about the school budget cuts and my concerns about the upcoming school year. I told you I was trying to decide between staying at public school, … [...]

I really like what Seth Godin writes about schools these days just being production lines producing homogenized workers for factories rather than remarkable individuals. Best of luck!

I was an early admissions student at our state university, but it was based much more on what I learned outside the classroom (e.g. sitting on the floor between the stacks at my “High” School library and downtown public library) than in the government school classrooms… which BTW were orders of magnitude better when I grew up (in the 1940s and 50s) than anything I’ve been able to see today.

Homeschooling is the hope of our future if we are to progress scientifically, academically and politically to restore our American Republic to its former innovative entrepreneurial and sociological greatness.

Instill a love for learning about things will do more to make them truly good scientists than any amount of propaganda from the classroom. Start taking junior college classes in high school if an “academic” version really is necessary for the direction they want to go.

Instill a healthy questioning attitude, even of the scientific elite and your child will be much better prepared to filter through the tripe we get in the name of science today.

Brad

These posts are about homeschooling and you don’t even capitalize your sentences – did you attend public school?

I totally disagree with your comment about dealing with real world pressures. If anything, I would think homeschooling would give a parent the opportunity to open up their child’s world to the “real world” so much more than having them attend public school for nearly a third of their day.

I am a public school graduate. I went on to earn two bachelors (architecture and civil engineering) and a masters (civil engineering) from two “big ten” schools. I believe a love of learning instilled by my parents helped me to succeed in both school and life after. That said, I stopped by the junior high school I attended to pick up my niece one day about 8 years ago. I walked down the hallway to hear students using foul language (f-this, f-you, etc.) and not one teacher anywhere in sight. When I attended that same school – 18 years earlier – teachers left their classrooms between classes to monitor behavior. If we’d so much as yelled something across the hall – foul or otherwise – we’d have been warned to behave. I would much rather homeschool my children and be able to teach them appropriate behavior then have them exposed to what other people may feed is “real world”. It IS NOT appropriate to behave as those children were in the “real world”. If they yell an obscenity across the hall at a co-worker someday, they will be fired. If they bully or harass co-workers someday, they will be fired. Children can be shown “real world” experiences without being subjected to the sub-par public schools as they exist today.

My nephew, now 16 and a junior at the high school I attended, told his mother one morning “just don’t look anyone in the eye and they’ll leave you alone”, meaning the other students. My nephew is nearly 6 feet tall and is an athletic kid – and yet he worries about attending this school with other kids known to carry weapons, beat up other students, etc. I DO NOT want that for my kids someday. I don’t want “real world” for them to include a knifing by another student who barely speaks English.