Thursday, January 15, 2009

Homeschooling Is On The Rise

More and more parents prefer to take control over their children's education, rather than trusting them to a public school system.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--A new report by the U.S. Department of Education finds that the number of homeschooled children in America has risen steadily over the past five years and stood at about 1.5 million in 2007.

Homeschooling experts, though, place the number closer to 2 million and say the discrepancy can be attributed to homeschooling parents being less inclined to respond to government surveys.

The report from the National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the federal government's education department, said in December the number of homeschooled children was up 74 percent from 1999 to 2007 and 36 percent since 2003.
Too bad, there are no numbers for Canada, but the trend is the same. There are more than enough Canadian parents out there that are concerned with the kind of values the kids are being taught at public schools. And there are even more that are concerned with the quality of education, which is going down continuously. Homeschooling is a great option for those who don't trust the public system, but can't afford public schools:
When a family homeschools, this reciprocal relationship is magnified. Homeschooling participants are affected by more than just the person who sit at the homeschool table. All generations create and reinforce the bond between family members. Home schooling families spend their time laughing, learning, playing and living with each other 24/7.

You can choose the best curriculum
to promote an intrinsic love of lifelong learning. The homeschool curriculum is flexible. The parameters are determined by the best teachers available, the parents, who know and love their children.

Learning never stops in the homeschool environment. The parents are not just lecturers or observers. They are active participants who expand, explain and encourage their children to be inquisitive and explore the specific areas that interest them without the constraints of arbitrary rules set up by an outside source.

Another benefit to homeschooling is that the parents model and reinforce valuable behavior and deemphasize undesirable behavior in a natural manner.
Sounds much better than a system which has become more about indoctrination (or at the very least - about merely keeping the kids busy from 9 to 3) than about education, doesn't it? Back in 1999, the CBC aired a short report on homeschooling in the National. I don't recall the exact number they mentioned, but there were between 20,000 and 25,000 homeschooled children in Canada back then. Since then we had the courts ruling that excluding books about homosexual cohabition from elementary school libraries is "discriminatory"; that a perverse graduate should be allowed to bring his partner in perversity to the high-school prom - even if it's a Catholic school.

Since then we had the BC government allowing militant homosexuals to monitor all the school curriculum to ensure it's "gay friendly". We had Quebec government introducing a mandatory "Chinese buffet" course in "world religions" which is nothing but a virtual indoctrination into social and moral relativism. How many parents have since resorted to homeschooling as the only way to save the children from becoming guinea-pigs in lefty's social experiments? I dare to assume it's in the 6 digits now.

4 comments:

Devin Maxwell said...

I wouldn't have posted that comment either...

Leonard said...

If you're referring to any of the old comments - those were lost when I resubmitted the post with the corrected title and removed the duplicate.

If you want to comment - you're free to do so, as long as it's about the article itself, not about the spelling mistake in the title.

Devin Maxwell said...

Leonard:

Do you homeschool your children?

Leonard said...

When the time comes - I will. It's not like I have much of a choice here. Unless there are enough homeschooling families willing to work together - then we could establish a volunteer-run, non-profit school of our own.