Public School Textbooks and the Homeschooler

A recent development prompted me to research the smartest countries in the world based on education. What I found was information from 2004. The information is recent enough. These statistics are based on 250,000 students from 41 countries that took the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). This tested the students in math, reading comprehension, science and problem solving. The top four countries are:

Finland
South Korea
Hong Kong
Japan

I could not find where the United States ranked in this study, but I did find something stating that based on overall population that the US ranked number 49. That means that citizens of 48 countries are smarter than the citizens of the United States on a grand scale. I wonder why this is. Actually, I know why this is. When was the last time a parent looked at their children's textbooks?

As a homeschooler I take free textbooks when I can get them. Even if we don't formally use them, they can still be used as reference material. I was looking over the more recent free textbooks that have come my way to figure out what, if anything, I was going to have my children work from this year. While looking over the second grade social studies books I came across two things in the first several pages that made me close the book and decide that it wasn't worth the paper it was written on.

Passage one: Every child is a special person. They are all part of the same group. A group is made up of people who work, play or live together.

Passage two: Things can be alike and different. Things that are alike are the same in some way. Things that are different are not the same.

I checked the publisher to make sure it wasn't the Children's Television Network. You know, the people who put out Sesame Street. The book was put out by Macmillian/McGraw-Hill. I am disappointed. I expect so much more from a second grade textbook than the lessons of the week from Big Bird and Elmo. Kids aren't stupid, why are they being treated like they are?

Maybe it's because of No Child Left Behind. No child will be left behind if the entire curriculum is dumbed down. There is no way a second grader is going fail if their curriculum contains what they learned on Sesame Street and Barney when they were three.

I read the entire content of these two pages to my first grader and my second grader. My second grader asked me if the people who wrote the book were idiots. I asked my first grader what he thought of the book. His reply was "It scared away my intelligence." I guess that says it all really.

With text books like that is it any wonder that homeschoolers are consistently scoring higher on the SAT with an average verbal score of 568 and a math score of 532 compared to public school scores of 505 and 514 respectively. (1) Homeschoolers are also winning geography contests and spelling bees. Last year it was announced that local homeschoolers would no longer be able allowed to participate in local spelling bees. The county created a loophole that would prevent homeschoolers from participating in any county run event. Could it be because homeschool students are making public school students look bad?

Most teachers that I have come across take offense to homeschooling. They probably feel that homeschool parents don't think that he or she can do her job. They probably see it as an insult, that in some ones eyes they are not good enough to educate children. Not only that, every time a school teacher reads about a homeschool student winning a spelling bee or geography bee, it has to add insult to injury.

Thinking back to my public education, I don't recall being taught that Woodrow Wilson, George Washington or Abe Lincoln were homeschooled. We were taught that Albert Einstein flunked out of school but went on to greatness. There was no mention of his homeschool education. We were never taught this piece of information about C.S. Lewis, Hans Christian Anderson or Leo Tolstoy. Today do children learn this fact about Sally Ride?

I don't blame the teachers. I blame the administrations. I blame the government. I blame bureaucratic red tape. I blame No Child Left Behind, education reform and accountability. I blame text book publishers. The average American History text has 46 errors. How can children learn anything when the odds are against them? That is the beauty of homeschooling. I get to teach and my children get to learn. We don't have to worry about learning to color inside the lines with a number two yellow pencil in order to pass a test designed to see if teachers are teaching.

(1) SAT scores from the year 2000.