Hello LBO-Talk!
All three of my kids did home school for at least the first couple of years, long enough to get them past learning reading, writing and arithmetic. (They are seventeen, twelve, and seven years old.) We did this mainly because, as I remember all too well from my own childhood, school is painfully boring, especially for a kid at the first-grade age. Also, Florida's schools are notoriously crummy; in national comparisons, only Miserisippi and Lousyiana have worse schools than Florida's. When I moved to Florida from Cleveland, Ohio, I was in the last part of the third grade. The classes in Florida caught up with Cleveland's mid-third-grade material about in the middle of the seventh grade!
My family didn't get any subsidy at all for home-schooling. No, that's not quite right. We got access to the discarded textbooks at the school repository. When, for example, Addison-Wesley released the third edition of "Introduction to Algebra," the local schools dumped all their hundreds of copies of the second edition, and you can get all those old books for free. Whenever we'd go to the repository, we could find perfectly untouched, brand-new copies of school books - if we wanted to, we could fill up a U-Haul truck with books like that. The justification was that it would be too difficult for a teacher to assign homework if half the students had the second edition and half the third edition. That's nonsense, since you could ship all the second editions to this school or that, and then everyone in that school would have the same edition. There's a lot of money to be made selling new school textbooks, I guess.
Doing home-schooling, my kids did as much studying in two hours at home as they would have done in seven hours in a public school. It's just not natural for a six year old kid to sit still in a classroom for seven hours a day, and it's cruel to make him do so. Since they weren't bored silly, my kids didn't learn to associate reading, arithmetic, and education in general with boredom. The biggest down-side to home schooling is that the kids don't get to meet so many other kids as public school students do, so they have fewer friends to play with. (That's where a co-op like Max was talking about would have been cool.) Now my three kids are all in public schools, and they are doing very well there - a lot better than I did, that's for sure. All in all, I believe that it was way better for them that they learned the basics at home.
My oldest daughter Selah, who first attended public schools in the eighth grade, just got in the National Honor Society and she is an A student in one of Tampa's "magnet school" programs, the "health professionals" track. Her homework there is amazingly difficult, not just in the science courses which make up the core of the "health professionals" program but also in subjects like history and English! For one example, in her tenth-grade history class they made her read the entirety of William Leuchtenburg's "Perils of Prosperity" and "FDR and the New Deal." When I was in high school, no one ever assigned any books at all (beside the one textbook) for history classes. She sometimes asks me for help with some of her assignments, and when I see some of the stuff they're trying to teach her, my mouth just hangs open in astonishment to see it in a Florida public school. I'll bet that her public "magnet school" classes are academically in the same rank as any private high school. There's just no way, with high-school preparation like that, that she won't be a success when she goes off to college.
What I wouldn't have done to attend a school where you actually get to learn something when I was a kid! I can only remember two classes in my entire public school career where anybody actually taught me anything - everything else I learned back then (academic stuff, I mean) I taught myself in the library. Hell, when I was going to Florida public schools, they'd punish you if you asked questions too far ahead of the class. So I am delighted with the quality of her classes. As an additional advantage for my family (which I'll admit is totally unfair) if one of your kids gets into a "magnet school" in Hillsborough County, all your other kids get in automatically, without having to take a competitive exam like all the other kids do.
I don't know the figures for Hillsborough County, but I read an article about the "magnet schools" in Pinellas County right across the bay, and right now there are 10,000 applicants for only 3,000 openings in Pinellas. The obvious solution is to open more "magnet schools," or to turn some of the regular public schools into "magnet schools" where they have that high-quality rigorous curriculum. But for typical hick-state political reasons, I doubt that will happen.
Naturally, whenever anything good comes along, there's going to be a snake slithering around to ruin it all. If there are no snakes around, then there's got to be a God damned Republican instead. Our new Republican governor, Exclamation-Point-Boy (Jeb! Bush, that phony) is going to deliberately fuck up all the public schools as fast as he and those fundi morons in the Florida legislature possibly can. The Florida legislature is already working on a voucher plan so taxpayers can subsidize the abominable private schools run by those fundamentalist idiots, and to Hell with the First Amendment anyway.
That's good news for the fundis who not only get a subsidy but also they get to shield their kids from learning sinful subjects such as history and, as they spell it in their imbecilic pamphlets, "evilution." It's also good news for the wealthy - if they can really stick it to the public schools where the working-class kids go, then their own private-schooled offspring will have so much less competition when it comes time for them to apply to college. So there is a pretty good chance that my two younger kids won't get that good "magnet school" education after all.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net
** "The pictures which my little boy Felix paints are often better ** ** than mine..." Paul Klee **