How the Failure of Public Schools Led to Homeschooling

Why in the world would someone homeschool their children? Why would someone who has access to public school, for which they pay exorbitant taxes and to which most of their friends' children attend, stay home with their children and attempt to educate them themselves? The modern homeschooling movement is tied in with the failure of the public schools.

"The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders," says John Taylor Gatto, NY city and State Teacher of the Year (n.d.). The National Education Association has an annual budget of $300 million a year plus, claims Ralph de Toledano in his provocative Insight on the News article entitled "NEA Hastens Death of American Education" (2003, Jan. 21-Feb.3, 56). Its membership is approximately 2.2 million, and its political action committees invested around $250 million into Democratic campaigns.(Toledano, 2001, Jan. 21-Feb. 3, 56).

Yet the failure stories of the public schools continue to pile up. The children can't read, can't write, don't know history, science, math. They do drugs and even have sex on campus, and if they aren't making love, they are often making war on each other. Originally the schools were strongly based on Christian values, as constitutional lawyer John Whitehead points out:

In looking at the historical record, one sees that religion was integrated into the public school curriculum. Textbooks referred to God without embarrassment, and public schools considered one of their major tasks to be the development of character through the teaching of religion. For example, the New England Primer opened with certain religious admonitions followed by the Lord's Prayer, the Apostle's Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the names of the books of the Bible. (Harris, 1988, 31).

But now, due to an imaginary wall of separation between church and state, that flies in the face of the Constitution's promise of freedom for religion from government, the Christian children are losing their Constitutional rights of free speech and freedom of religion. The NEA, with a radical, extremist philosophy of education based on the Frankfurt School's Marxist ideas, is using its considerable clout to try to force control of education away from the harder to control states to Washington, rather than trying to educate children. (Toledano, 2003).

So parents have removed their children from the public schools, thereby effectively being taxed without representation while saving the schools money at the same time, and they are, for a median amount of $450.00 per year per child, (U.S. Department of Education Statistics, 2001) doing remarkable things in academics. Due to the failure of the public schools parents would rather homeschool their own children.

References

de Toledano, R. (2003, Jan. 21-Feb. 3). NEA hastens death of American education. Insight on the News. Retrieved February 9, 2003, from Proquest, Lirn database.

Harris, G. (1988). The christian home school. Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt.

Home school soup. (n.d.). National Home Education Network. Retrieved February 9, 2003 from http://nhen.org/media/default.asp?id=353

U.S. Department of Education. (2001). Home school statistics. Retrieved February 12, 2003, from http://www.uhea.org/stats.html