Lift Up Your Hearts!

I do feel sorry for Lake Brantley High School's band. When our kids played in it, many of the members secretly (or not so secretly) wanted the football team to lose so they wouldn't extend the marching season by making the playoffs. (An understandable side effect of the unreasonable rule requiring students to play in the marching band if they wanted to be part of the concert band.)

Still, even the hardest-hearted (that would have been me, had I known) must have felt a thrill when Brantley became the first Seminole County football team to play in a State Championship game, which was held at Miami's Dolphin Stadium last night.

They lost the game to the powerhouse Miami Northwestern team. But they won more than they lost, according to Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Bianchi. Some excerpts from today's column:

Lake Brantley High didn't win the Class 6A state championship Saturday night, but it accomplished something even more admirable. None of the Patriots' players was arrested or paid off this past week.

Miami Northwestern's star running back was arrested last week on a felony charge of lewd and lascivious battery.... Any questions about whether [he] would be allowed to play against Lake Brantley on Saturday night were quickly answered when he was introduced before the game and received an ovation 10 times louder than any other player on the team.

If you wonder where college and professional athletes get their sense of privilege and pretension, look no further than the state's powerhouse high-school football programs. [Miami Northwestern isn't the only Florida high school football team with documented ethics violations.] Brantley's coaches and administrators obviously didn't get the memo: If you want to win the state championship, leave your conscience at home.

Get this: Lake Brantley actually has something called a "citizenship policy" that precludes athletes from participating in games not only for breaking major rules but for simple conduct violations. There have been instances when Patriots athletes have missed games for unexcused tardiness. "If one of our kids had been arrested, he wouldn't be playing in the state championship game," Lake Brantley Coach George Clayton said.

Lake Brantley may not have won the state championship Saturday night, but it did something even better in my book. The Patriots put the class back in Class 6A.

In the past few decades, the number of college-bound students has skyrocketed, and so has the number of world-class schools. The demand for an excellent education has created an ever-expanding supply of big and small campuses that provide great academics and first-rate faculties.

So says Newsweek, which procedes to list 25 top schools it calls the "New Ivies," rivaling the traditional powerhouse schools in excellence. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you might find your alma mater on that list, which includes Carnegie Mellon, Colby, Kenyon, Vanderbilt, Davidson, RPI, and my own University of Rochester.

That's good news, right? Certainly. But I'm struggling with how to reconcile this with what I hear from friends who are university professors and others recently associated with the college scene, and what I know from my own experience with American education: that the overall quality of students emerging from American high schools has plummeted. Granted, most of my professor friends are not teaching at the top-level schools, but they have contacts throughout academia, and even at the University of Rochester a professor told me that in his view the student body has only recently come back up to the quality it was in the 1970's.

My own observation is that it is harder to get a good pre-college education in America today. I'd venture to say that my father's very ordinary public school education in the 30's left him both more knowledgeable and better prepared to continue learning than today's average high school graduate. But for those who can take advantage of it, whether through private schools, home education, special public school programs, or extraordinary effort, it is possible to acquire an excellent education. Our local public school offers far more than my prestigious, Main Line Philadelphia high school did 40 years ago, though few are the ones who profit as much as they could from it.

So—whence the flood of excellent students fueling the boom in top-notch colleges? Despite the extraordinary pre-college educations achieved by some, I don't believe there are sufficient numbers of superior American students to explain the phenomenon. Take a look around the campuses of our great schools, and I think the answer stands out: foreign students. No matter how much we bemoan the state of higher education today, America's top schools are recognized as superior by many foreign countries, who send us their best and brightest students, far more so than in the past. If this competition makes it more difficult for an American student to get into Harvard, it has several salutary effects, one of which is the elevation of formerly second-tier schools.

Another benefit, and one which is probably even more important, is the greater intermingling of cultures, and the bringing together of students half a world apart, that they may get to know one another as people, as fellow-students, as us rather than an anonymous, faceless them.

At our children's elementary school, the administration made it clear that parents were not particularly welcome to visit their children’s classrooms, although occasional visits would be possible if special arrangements were made several days in advance.

Not long afterward, the school sent home a pamphlet about choosing daycare, in which it was stated that under no circumstances should children be in a daycare situation in which parents could not drop in at any time, without warning. If such visits were not allowed, the pamphlet warned, parents should suspect that the daycare provider had something to hide.

As far as I know, no one in the school’s administration appreciated the irony.

Even young children can benefit from music lessons. I knew that, but it's nice to read about this McMaster University study of twelve four- to six-year-old children, half of whom took Suzuki violin lessons. The tiny violinists performed better on both a general memory test and on a measurement related to attention and sound discrimination.

Twelve students is a small sample, so I'll add one more. When I administered early kindergarten "readiness" tests for our local elementary school, the one little boy I knew was a Suzuki violin student showed a marked superiority on the tests of listening skills and auditory processing.

Back in 1990, just before we took the plunge into homeschooling, I sat down one day and typed out every reason that came to mind for our decision. My purpose was not to make a reasoned argument for homeschooling, but to have something written down to which we could refer when the going got rough, to remind ourselves why we had made that choice.

At the time, I posted the list on the good ol' GEnie Education Round Table, my online support group. Now that I have my own blog, I thought it would be fun to publish it again. The list is specific to our particular school situation in places, and somewhat dated, but most of the reasons would still be valid were we beginning our homeschooling journey today.

At the time of writing, we had one child going into sixth grade and another going into third, both at our local public school. The elder had completed kindergarten and first grade in a private, Montessori school.

Fifty Reasons for Homeschooling

1. We have long known that we would have to supplement our children's educations, whether they were in public or private schools. For a while we were content with this, but the increasing homework load, plus all those hours spent in school, has made this impractical if not impossible.


2. More time could be gained by dropping extracurricular activities, such as music lessons, choir, and the Indian Princess program, but we consider these to be essential elements of education.


3. In middle school the time load will become even worse. Not only is there more homework, but the schedule is such that students do not arrive home until after 4:00, severely limiting after-school activities and interfering with a reasonable bedtime.


4. Eighth grade is even worse, as eighth graders with any academic ambitions at all attend their first period class at the high school, for which they must catch a 7:00 bus.


5. Even this long schedule allows only seven class periods per day; sixth and seventh grades have only six. There are no classes that meet less than five times per week, so this leaves open only two class periods beyond the core of math, science, social studies, and English. One of the two may be band or chorus (she'd have to choose between them); the other is required to be 2/3 PE and 1/3 gifted resource class. She would have no opportunity for art, home ec, shop, foreign language, etc. This is simply too restrictive a curriculum. I could cry when I remember all the different classes I was able to take in junior high school.


6. While most middle school girls are probably delighted to have only twelve weeks of PE per year—I wouldn't have minded that myself—it's not enough physical activity for a child who no longer has recess and whose schedule does not permit any other outdoor activities on school days.


7. The situation does not improve in high school, either academically or physically. Only one year of PE is required, and most kids take it in summer school, because summer school is virtually required and PE is easier to compress than algebra. Summer school is necessary for anyone with academic ambitions because there are only six periods in a high school day. That is because these periods are sixty minutes long, longer even than our college classes! After a long fight, the school board finally relented and will be offering a seventh period—after the normal school day ends, thus forcing students to choose between the extra class and any after school activities.


8. I have observed top level sixth grade math classes this year, and am not at all happy with the pace of learning. I realize that math requires a good deal of repetition before it becomes second nature, but the students are entitled to enough new material to keep them from giving up on math as altogether too boring for words.


9. Speaking of math, our youngest has now spent two and a half years in school and knows only a small fraction more math than she knew before she entered kindergarten. I don't know how our country expects to turn out mathematicians if its schools allow them to vegetate for so long in the subject.


10. Both children are suffering the consequences of low expectations. They are working hard, in and out of school, but the work is not the mental stimulation it should be. Any threats to their grades are not academic but organizational: forgotten homework, poor time-management, bad study habits, etc. Granted, organizational skills are very important, but children deserve an academic challenge as well. Our primary concern is in the area of reading; our oldest has never been given any reading assignment in school in which the vocabulary, content, or style placed any demands on her reading ability. It is tempting to be happy that school is easy for her, until you realize that she is missing out on the most important aspect of education: learning how to learn. The lazy mental habits acquired through unchallenged schooling can be disastrous later in life.


11. One-day-per-week "gifted" classes are no substitute for solid academic training. They do provide opportunity for interaction with children of similar abilities, and for more interesting activities than regular classroom work, but in reality the most that is accomplished is the establishment of "one day each week when I'm not bored." Depending on the teacher, far too much time may also be spent on affective activities. The middle school offers some gifted academic classes that would be useful if they were not offered in a six-period day context.


12. The schools' social expectations are low, too. The teachers expect the children to be TV-saturated and rock-music oriented. Although some effort is being made to change it, the Friday afternoon "reward" for a week's good behavior is still most often a movie. I would not mind "educational" movies so much (although I still think recess would be a better reward), but most of them are entertainment-oriented. Some teachers can't seem to imagine children being entertained by something educational. And maybe they're right. Our youngest came home upset one day because they had been watching a movie about animals which she had been enjoying very much. Due to the misbehavior of some of the students, however, that movie was stopped in the middle and a more "entertaining" one substituted.


13. The lower grades are not so much of a problem, but rock music blares out of the fifth grade during party times. Some buses play rock music as they make their rounds. I realize that many students love rock music, and if that is their musical taste, I have no right to deny them, on their own time. But as we keep trying to explain to deaf school system ears, there is a big difference between what is allowed in terms of books, music, and movies, and what is school-sanctioned. Are we alone in thinking that the schools should set higher standards than the general community?


14. If the academic atmosphere is too slow, the social atmosphere of middle school is too advanced—if that is the word for it. Having worked in the school for a year, I have observed a steamy atmosphere of pre-teen dances, sexual innuendo, steady dating, foul language, and social ambition. The clothes you wear are very important, and even the teachers have been known to speak disparagingly of "the kind of girl who would buy clothes at K-Mart." It is bad enough that so many of her peers have their standards determined by Hollywood; more disturbing is that the schools go along with it.


15. The atmosphere is not only steamy, it is also cruel. From my own observations, and the experiences of friends with children in middle school, I can see that the "normal" adolescent tendency to cruelty toward other kids is given almost free rein. I don't know if the teachers are afraid of the students, or think this is an important stage of development, or are just unable to keep them civil, but it's a jungle in there.


16. We hear a lot of talk about the need to prepare the students for the "real world." This is true, but the schools' idea of the real world and ours are vastly different. I see the world as a place where you can enjoy and must get along with many different kinds of people, but where there are choices: if it's too hard to get along with your boss, or your neighbor, you can get a new job, or move. Also, in the real world there are laws against assault, slander, and child abuse. (I guess it's not called child abuse if it's done by another child.)


17. We have tried to work within the system, serving on and working with the school advisory committees, PTA, advocacy groups, and the school volunteer program, attending school board meetings, helping with parties, going on field trips, keeping close track of what goes on at school, in general knowing and being known. All these have helped, have been very important. And we have a good school, with a sympathetic administration and wonderful teachers. Indeed, when I look at all the available teachers, I believe that each year our kids were assigned to the best possible ones. But we've also become aware of a few key problems. One, all that involvement helps, but it doesn't help enough. Two, we've seen changes made, changes for the better, and should be able to rejoice. But for the most part, the changes are too little or too late to help our kids. True, there is value in changing the system for the benefit of those to come, but how much family time can you sacrifice for the solving of other people's problems? Which also brings us to: Three, we've discovered that there are a lot of people out there who don't think much of the changes we'd like to make. What good does it do to give up our time to make changes for other people's kids, only to have them turn around and change things back, sacrificing their time to "fix" the system for subsequent students whose parents will probably try to change it back again!?


18. I love teaching our kids, and we work well together. I am not a good teacher, as such, and I take my hat off (or I would if I wore one) to anyone who can work with a classroom of thirty children. But I am a good tutor, and enjoy working with one or two kids at a time.


19. There are three reasons that I volunteer at our schools. One is simply community service, helping where help is needed. Relative to many districts in the country, our school taxes are low; service in the schools is a kind of voluntary tax of my time. The second motive, which in reality is the primary one, is that by helping others I can indirectly help our own children. Because I help run the Math Superstars program for the third grade, others are freed to do the same for the second and fifth grades. Moreover, involvement in the school shows our children that we are interested in their educations, and has vastly improved our relationship with school personnel. The third reason is simply that I enjoy the work. The first motive would be valid no matter where our children went to school, and I would hope that not only I but also the kids will be able to continue to offer some service in this way. The others, though, are somewhat specious. Having the good will of the school is helpful, and I wouldn't want to be without it, but there are too many problems that all the good will in the world won't fix. Above all, what kind of sense does it make to spend my time tutoring someone else's children so that that person can work with ours? It is like fixing dinner for a neighbor while she makes our meal: interesting on occasion, but pretty silly otherwise, since we each know our own family's needs best.


20. Homeschooling is not an option for most people. For those whose needs include day care, for those who don't like to teach or who don't feel competent to do so, for those who think the benefits of their school outweigh the problems, for those who have little interest in education, schools are a blessing. But I am home, I love to teach and am confident in my ability to help our children learn until they are experienced enough to take over the process themselves, I'm convinced that the disadvantages of school now outnumber the advantages, and I have lived and breathed education for the last seven years.


21. Their dad is a good teacher also, and strong in my areas of weakness. While of necessity most of the teaching responsibility will fall on my shoulders, he has a lot to contribute in the evenings and on weekends, and in terms of ideas, wisdom, and direction.


22. Homeschooling will allow our children to learn at their own paces, permitting them to advance in their areas of strength and take more time in areas of weakness.


23. A homeschool curriculum can be tailored to fit each child's individual needs and interests.


24. In the one-to-one, tutoring relationship, misunderstandings can be detected early, and mistakes corrected while they are still fresh.


25. Homeschooling should save a lot of time. Not the parents' time, of course. But tutoring is a much more efficient use of a student's time. Witness a friend's daughter, who was as an eighth grader confined at home by illness for three months. She had no difficulty staying caught up with her classmates on two hours of work a week—and she was in advanced classes! Not that we expect to spend only two hours per week on school work. The homeschoolers we know spend anywhere from two to six hours per day "in school." But we expect to do a lot more than just "stay caught up" with the public schools.


26. Time is a major issue. The enormous amount of time swallowed up by school (and, I'll admit, extra-curricular activities) is depriving our children socially, physically, and emotionally. Socially, they have little time to play with their friends. Traditional ways of coping with this might be: Letting them stay up later to do homework, so they could play in the afternoons (unacceptable; they need the sleep). Cutting down on their TV time (impossible; you can't watch less than nothing). Teaching them to work more efficiently (a good one; we're working on it). Restricting extra-curricular activities (forget it). Encouraging them to take the route many of their friends have, of not worrying so much about doing a good job (forget this one, too). Or reducing the number of chores they are expected to do at home (they'd like this one, but we wouldn't). One of our homeschooling goals is to work the kids hard during the day, but to arrange it so that they will be finished when their friends return from school.


27. We have seen our oldest daughter's physical fitness level drop each year, as she spends more time with the books and less outdoors. With homeschool, not only would there be more "after school" time, but we could incorporate recess and daily fitness activities into the curriculum.


28. One of our biggest time concerns is that our children do not have enough time to be kids. They need time to play, time to explore, time to call their own, even time to be bored, if that were possible. Homeschooling will give them time to be children while avoiding the middle school atmosphere that forces children to grow up before they are ready.


29. Homeschooling should also reduce the unnecessary stress put on adolescents these days. Every school official we have heard from admits that middle school is too stressful; it is even noticeable in elementary school.


30. In homeschool, we can teach practical home economics. (And not "Orientation to Home Economics Occupations," which is what is offered in our middle school!) Cooking, sewing, housekeeping, etc. can be taught in a much more logical manner where the benefits are immediately obvious.


31. Other "practical arts" courses would have similar at-home benefits. Yardwork, car maintenance, the use of basic tools, and the like could be taught in a much more natural way.


32. We can provide a better, more practical, and more comprehensive computer education program than the schools do.


33. Homeschooling will enable our oldest to continue in church choir. Because of the middle school schedule, which would get her home after choir was more than half finished, she would otherwise have to drop out.


34. This way we can be more flexible about scheduling music lessons, not being restricted to normal after school hours.


35. Homeschooling removes us from the uncertainties of the public school situation. Rapid growth is threatening us with cutbacks in services, rezoning, double sessions, and/or year-round schools.


36. As long as we put in the required number of days, and cover the material, we are free to be as flexible as we like in our schedule. This means we can have classes in the summer and take our vacation in the winter, if that is what we'd like. We can take off the same days that our county does, for more interaction with neighborhood friends, or work on some of those days and take off days that correspond with vacations of friends in other counties, or with the arrival of relatives, or whatever.


37. The girls need more religious instruction than they get at church. As noted before, time for supplemental teaching is scarce, and they certainly won't get it in school.


38. Frankly, despite our love for our school, I'm tired of "winter holidays," "spring break," and the unnatural removal of all references to religious activity in life as it is presented in public schools. I realize schools must be very careful not to give offense, but I find the resulting blandness pretty offensive myself. Once when I observed a second grade class, the teacher gave the following lesson in her reading group: "Who made the mountains? Did men make the mountains? No, Nature made the mountains." And this year, at a "holiday party," the teacher (a Christian herself but limited by school policy) sang a dozen carols with the class, not one of which made any reference to Christmas at all! I hate to start any sentence with "In my day . . ." because it makes me feel old, but in my day people at least realized that Christmas is a national holiday and therefore didn't choke on the name. Songs were not excluded from our repertoire just because they mentioned God; the musical and historical value of Christmas carols, Negro spirituals, and the like were recognized. (I wonder what Negro spirituals are called these days; maybe they're just not sung at all any more.) In addition to excluding traditional religion (meaning Judaism and Christianity, mostly) from the classroom, the schools seem to have invented one of their own, a combination of pop psychology and materialism that comes across as flat and boring. There's a limit to how much of this kind of stuff I can stomach.


39. Homeschooling seems to be the only way out of our reading dilemma. There are so many books that we feel are important for the kids to read; books that we read as children, but also many that we didn't read but wish we had. (The expectations placed on us in school were not always the best, either.) Our children are quite willing to follow our suggestions in reading, but time again is our enemy. We're more inclined to encourage them to play outside in their free time, because they spend so much time at bookwork as it is. The schools are not helpful at all in this, even at the middle school level; they seem to have quite a different set of books that they think are important. Reading will be a big part of our homeschooling curriculum, and we get to choose the books.


40. We believe that one of the primary forces that drives a family apart during the adolescent and teen years is the excessive peer dependency fostered by the school environment. Homeschooling will provide a proper balance of peer and family activities.


41. A chief goal of our homeschool will be to teach the girls how to learn: how to dig into a subject and work at it until it is understood, how to find out information on their own without having to be spoon-fed. Too many bright children graduate from high school without ever learning anything of the sort.


42. Field trips would be less crowded and hectic, with more opportunities for discussion, and more direct application to what is being studied.


43. Once you begin to think in terms of homeschool, all of life becomes educational. We have always been education-oriented, but now find ourselves even more so. Once we made the decision to homeschool, we began integrating learning into everything we do. This not only increases our knowledge, but enriches our relationships as well.


44. Homeschooling is legal in Florida, with modest restrictions.


45. While homeschooling is not commonplace, we are hardly pioneers. There are many resources available to us: other homeschooling families (we know several), books, curriculum publishers, support groups, and magazines.


46. Homeschooling will allow us to begin foreign language instruction before eighth grade. (You can begin in eighth grade if you are willing to attend first period at the high school.)


47. We are tired of fighting a school system with values so markedly different from ours. Why spend so much energy trying unsuccessfully to convince them to teach what we think they should, and not to teach the things we think they should leave alone? Surely that energy is better and more effectively spent working directly with our own kids.


48. We also have trouble with the schools' approach to discipline. The philosophy, even in middle school, is a kind of mushy behavior modification approach that is teaching the kids to expect a reward every time they do something right. There is also altogether too much group discipline, where everyone is punished for the misbehavior of a few. And the kids who are real troublemakers rarely get any punishment worse than a severe "talking to." I know that the schools are very leery of corporal punishment, but why they don't use their power of suspension more often is beyond me.


49. In short, we believe homeschooling to be the alternative that best meets our children's academic, mental, emotional, social, physical, and spiritual needs.


50. Besides, we expect to have a lot of fun!

I'm cleaning out old computer files, and came upon this article by Paula Rothermal of the University of Durham. Unfortunately, I no longer have any idea where I acquired this comparison of home- and school-educated children in the UK.

For reasons of copyright, the above link goes only to an abstract of the paper, but I'm posting a few interesting quotes that I believe fall into the "fair use" category.

School is not compulsory in the United Kingdom, contrary to some official notices....In the UK it is not necessary either to register as a home-educator or to ask anyone’s permission.

Parents of the home-educated children in this age group tended to have planned for home-education from birth, or at least from very early on; thus the parents had generally given more attention to their children’s early learning than they might perhaps have done had they known that the children would soon be starting school. The parents were thus not awaiting the ‘big day’ when school began and responsibility for their children’s education would be delegated to an external institution. Unlike the situation for schoolchildren, for the home-educated cohort, there was no right or wrong time to learn and it may well be that the most efficient way in which to gain skills and knowledge for life, would be to permit children to acquire information at their own pace.

As the children commonly spent their time with either one parent or the other, parental influence appears to have been an important contributing factor in the children’s exceptionally high…scores. In the same way that [other studies] found that the effect on children of a good teacher was enduring, so the home-educated children’s continued high scores may have been the result of the strong bond with their parents. Just as…teachers responded better to children whose company they most enjoyed, it would seem that the parents were those who had the most invested in their children’s development; this pattern created the cycle of positive attribution.

All the children scored good marks, whatever their background and family structure…. [T]he home educated children from the lower socio-economic groups scored significantly higher than those with professional parents. The most obvious reason for their doing well, and one that is supported by evidence from other sources, is that home-educated children are, at least amongst their own ranks, free from the stigma of being poor, simply because they are not learning in an environment where affluence and labelling are an issue.

[S]tarting school at a later age may well have no detrimental effect upon learning skills. The results from the present study suggested that a delayed school start date may have very positive effects.

 

The findings lent support to the idea that parental input was not just a useful support tool, but that indeed, it could substitute for professional assistance.

 

The findings in the present research, underpinned as they are by previous research, provide support for the value of informal settings in children’s education and inherently questions the ‘accepted’ wisdom that children need school to learn.

[I]nterviews with home-educating families show that while for many home educators, raising a family on the equivalent of one income is a burden, the families valued the freedom to live according to their own ideals and relished the flexibility to, ‘do what we want, when we want.’ It seems that happiness, a feature of home-education…may well extend to raising the children’s levels of learning.

Research focusing on older home-educated children suggests that the findings reported here of high attainment continue through Key Stages 1 and 2 [UK educational terms, roughly ages 5-7 and 7-11]. However, in view of the overall indication that home-educated children are learning on an entirely different trajectory from schoolchildren it is perhaps unhelpful to think of these children in terms of Key Stages. Expectations and outcomes for these children may have little in common with those anticipated from schoolchildren. Indeed, while the phrase ‘home-education’ suggests an education taking place in the home as opposed to the school, this is incorrect. Home-education is best described as an individually tailored education (ITE) whereby the children work from a home base but often spend a large amount of their time away from the home itself, instead attending group get-togethers and activities, visiting parks, museums, friends’ houses, libraries and ‘after school’ groups. In general this is an education gained through ‘living and doing.’

And the conclusion:

 

Insofar as the PIPS Reception data was concerned, the home-educated four and five-year-olds demonstrated high levels of ability and good social skills. The children appeared to benefit from an education that was flexible and tailored to their individual needs and interests. Another important factor was the attention given to them by their families. In particular, parental input and interest was high. Learning appeared to be on a gentle incline from birth, a process that appears to have suited the children very well.

Let me make clear up front that I'm glad our grandchildren are on schedule for most of the currently-recommended childhood vaccinations. I can be pleased with that because their parents have taken the time to research the issues, and decide which vaccines they think are worth the risk, and which are not, and are willing to pay the extra costs—in money and time—to spread the vaccinations out rather than subject their children to the assault on the immune system caused by receiving many vaccines on the same day. Moreover, the children are breastfed, which helps their immune systems deal with the vaccines.

Vaccines have prevented much suffering and death, and they do work; witness the frightening polio outbreaks in Africa when immunication efforts were hindered by Muslim clerics skeptical of both the vaccines and the good will of the vaccinators. But they are far from risk-free, and the government and the medical community are doing parents a disservice by pushing vaccinations as if they were entirely safe and absolutely essential for their children's health.

"Informed consent" does not mean handing your patient a long form, full of legal and medical terms, to sign on the day of vaccination, along with another sheet describing possible side effects. It means addressing the issue far in advance, with both pros and cons, admitting controversy and uncertainty, and pointing the parents to sources of further information.

Parents, too, have the responsibility of seeking out information on their own, to be better prepared to discuss the issue with their physicians. My doctor may have forgotten more about medicine than I'll ever know, but no doctor knows everything, and the best ones are always open to new information, carefully and respectfully presented.

Above all, avoid jumping on bandwagons. Don't vaccinate just because your doctor expects you to, and don't avoid vaccination just because that's what your friends are doing. Just as there are risks to vaccinating, and actions we can take to mitigate those risks, there are also risks to not vaccinating, and precautions that can help protect the unvaccinated child. One helpful, and reasonably balanced, resource is Aviva Jill Romm's Vaccinations: A Thoughtful Parent's Guide: How to Make Safe, Sensible Decisions about the Risks, Benefits, and Alternatives.

One of the hazards of being unvaccinated is catching a "childhood disease" later in life, when the body is often less able to handle it. One example made the news today, in this WebMD report on an outbreak of measles in 2005, the largest in the United States in a decade. A 17-year-old girl caught the disease in Romania and passed it to members of her church when she returned. Thirty-two of the 34 who caught the disease had never been vaccinated.

The story fails its readers by not reporting how the measles sufferers fared. Do the parents regret their decision not to vaccinate? I had measles as a child, and it was a relatively minor affair, easier for me than chicken pox, which itched like crazy. There can be serious complications, however; were there any in this epidemic, or was it relatively mild? That's important information.

Because 20 of the cases were homeschooled children, Amy Parker of the Centers for Disease Control stresses the importance of promoting immunization among homeschoolers. If she means educating people about the risks and benefits of vaccination, I'm all for it. But buried in the article is this chilling statement:

Proof of measles vaccination is required for children entering school, but West Virginia is the only state in the U.S. with a similar requirement for homeschooled kids.

This should frighten every homeschooler in the country. Requiring immunizations for admission to public schools is understandable, as long as certain exemptions are allowed, because of problems inherent in the confining of large populations to small spaces for long periods of time. But what is the concern that causes the West Virginia government to want to impose immunization on homeschoolers as well? If it's the fear that a homeschooler taking a public school class might pass a disease on to fellow students, how can that occur if the rest of the students have been vaccinated?

It appears the source is actually worse than that, and should frighten everyone, not just homeschoolers. There are those in the West Virginia government (and elsewhere!) who believe the primary responsibilities and rights when it comes to raising children belong not to the parents, but to the state. If the state decides universal vaccination is desirable, parents should have no choice but to go along.

The Internet is a wonderful tool for finding information; it is less useful when it comes to updates to that information. In 2004 the West Virginia legislature attempted to pass a bill expanding the immuization requirements and exacting severe penalties for noncompliance. Whether the bill succeeded or not I was unable to determine. If it did, it was apparently weakened, because the requriements I found through the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources mandate fewer vaccines and impose smaller penalties. Nonetheless, it's chilling enough. State Code 16-3-4 deals with "compulsory immunization of school children" but apparently they mean all children of "school age," not just children in the public schools.

Any parent or guardian who refuses to permit his or her child to be immunized against diphtheria, polio, rubeola, rubella, tetanus and whooping cough, who cannot give satisfactory proof that the child or person has been immunized against diphtheria, polio, rubeola, rubella, tetanus and whooping cough previously, or a certificate from a reputable physician showing that immunization for any or all is impossible or improper, or sufficient reason why any or all immunizations should not be done, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and except as herein otherwise provided, shall, upon conviction, be punished by a fine of not less than ten nor more than fifty dollars for each offense.

Unlike every other state except Mississippi, West Virginia makes no provision for religious or philosophical exemptions to its immunization laws.

UPDATE:  Please see the first comment, below.

When Larry Summers, then President of Harvard, dared suggest that genetic differences between men and women might, in general, predispose them to greater abilities in different fields, I had no problem with that. When he was pilloried and forced to resign, I was appalled (though not surprised) at the continuing evidence that liberals aren't necessarily liberal, those who call loudest for tolerance aren't tolerant, and "academic freedom" is an oxymoron. If the presence of a Y chromosome instead of an X can make differences that are visible and obvious, to insist that it can't possibly make more subtle differences, and to forbid inquiry into the matter, is as bad as the Catholic Church in Medieval times. Worse, because I don't think the Church ever claimed to be open-minded.

Yet as fast as Harvard tried to distance itself from Summers' heresy, there are more serious worms in its own apple.

Ben Barres is an M.D./Ph.D. professor of neurobiology at Stanford University. What makes his comments on sexual discrimination in science and academia especially insightful is that until 10 years ago, he was Barbara Barres. As a man, he suddenly found himself receiving much more respect than he had as a woman, at least among people who don't know his history. Even in such a hotbed of liberalism as Cambridge, Massachusetts, both MIT and Harvard failed the test. When Barbara was the only person in a class full of men to solve a difficult math problem, her professor suggested that her boyfriend had solved it for her. At Harvard the situation was even more interesting, because Barbara became Ben in the middle of her/his graduate studies. One faculty member (who apparently knew neither Barbara nor Ben very well) remarked, "Ben Barres gave such a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister's.

It matters not a bit to me if there are differences between groups of people considered en masse, because everyone deserves to be treated as an individual. Insurance companies have some justification for considering a person in terms of his inclusion in broad classes (male, Asian, non-smoker, overweight, etc.) because that is what makes insurance work. The rest of us have no excuse, and the educational system especially; from preschool to Harvard, should be looking at individuals, not stereotypes.

It's been a while since I've posted a Frazz comic here (I always worry about the line between fair use and copyright violation), but it's one of the best comic strips ever, and deserves all the publicity it can get. Though set in a public school, it often captures what homeschooing is all about, and today's strip made me shout in acclamation:

During my lifetime I've watched the Deaf community teach the world to see them as people, rather than as people who can't hear. This was brought home most forcefully to me in the story of the two young children, one deaf and one hearing, who met one day, and each went home to report the other's disability. The hearing child explained to his mother that his new friend could not understand him when he spoke, while the deaf child expressed to his own mother his amazement that his playmate could not understand him when he signed.

Today's Orlando Sentinel showed me that blind people are beginning to accomplish the same feat. An article on teaching very young blind children to use a cane describes an encouraging departure from the conventional model of mobility for the vision impaired. In the old, vision-centered model, young children are taught to depend on those who can see to lead them around, and only later learn to use a cane. This trains blind children in habits of dependency at a stage in life which for most children is the golden age of mobility. The new method introduces the child to using a cane at an early age, even as young as when he first learns to walk. In this way the skills needed for independence come naturally and thoroughly. According to advocate Joe Cutter, retired from the New Jersey Commission for the Blind, "What matters isn't the vision you have. What matters is the skill you have. You have to observe your own movement, do it solo, to get those skills."

Thomas Edison said that genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, would agree. His studies of what makes someone really good at something are discussed in the May 7, 2006 New York Times column, A Star Is Made, by Freakonomics authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt. (The New York Times requires registration before you can read their content, but it's free and worth the effort.)

What Ericcsson concludes is that talent is overrated; what really makes the difference for success—in any field, from art to sport, from finances to computer programming—is hard work and deliberate practice. Here are some quotes to whet your appetite (and maybe make it worth your while to go to the effort of getting to the article):

Here is more information on the subject from the Freakonomics website.

Two recent articles on homeschooling were brought to my attention; specifically, they are about unschooling, that branch of the homeschooling movement that seeks to liberate students from the oppressive assumptions and restrictions of schooling as much as from schools themselves. Each article was reasonably positive, yet was too short to be of much use, and included a few blood pressure-raising statements.

From the Orlando Sentinel (originally the Chicago Tribune):

A significant part of the growth in home-schooling has been among Christian conservatives who shunned public and private schools for reasons that included curriculum, school violence and social trends. These parents often seek highly structured curricula suited to their conservative beliefs.

But those who practice unschooling tend to do so because they think the school system does not allow children to learn to their full potential.

This ranks right up in fatuousness with such statements as "blacks do better at athletics, and Asians do better at academics." As a Christian conservative who chose to homeschool because the school system does not allow children to learn to their full potential, and whose educational philosophy leans much more toward unschooling than not, I find the characterization insulting.

And from CNN:

"There is nothing like the texture of kids having contact with each other, making friends and relating to different adults in a school setting," said David Tokofsky, a longtime educator and member of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education.

He may be right; there is nothing like it. Making friends and relating to people of all ages outside of a school setting is so far superior to what goes by that name in school that I'm surprised he dared mention the subject.

The Giver, by Lois Lowry (Dell Laurel-Leaf, New York, 1993)

I doubt I would have found The Giver had it not been required reading for two of my nephews. One read it as a class assignment in seventh grade; for the other it was read aloud in fifth grade. Intrigued, I borrowed the book from our library.

The Giver makes me wish I belonged to a literary discussion group. Without a doubt there is plenty here to discuss, and I can see why teachers might be eager to share this Newbery Award winner with their classes. I would love to talk about it in a group, to toss about various interpretations and implications. And yet, despite the "young adult" designation, despite the fact that the main character has not yet reached his teens, I question the value of such a book in the elementary or middle school curriculum.

My friends and family know all too well how strongly I believe children are much more capable than we give them credit for, and are all too familiar with my rants about how society—especially school—holds them back, does not respect them, and deprives them of important opportunities for growth and learning. Certainly a 10-year-old could contribute intelligently to a discussion of The Giver, if he had the background and experience. However, modern American education—which definition I extend backwards at least as far as my own experience—will rarely if ever allow such a child to develop. To speak intelligently on the serious issues that emerge from this book requires more knowledge of history, philosophy, religion, literature, and ethics than many adults possess. Without such a background, how can a discussion rise above the level of the readers' feelings?

I'm reminded of the first Gulf War, during which our local elementary schools made a point of engaging their students in discussions about the war, querying them on such issues as why we were fighting and whether or not the war was justified. What, other than confusion and a false sense of self-importance, can come from asking such questions of people who know nothing of history, let alone economics, politics, and religion?

Before we ask our children to wrestle with life's difficulties, ambiguities, and moral dilemmas, let them have a strong course of history and logic, at least. To do otherwise is to send them unarmed into mortal combat.

The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home, by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 2004)

I heard so many homeschoolers raving about The Well-Trained Mind that I had to read it for myself. Then the question became not why so many people love it, but why do I? One reviewer called this approach “ultra school-at-home”—which should have been enough to send me fleeing as from a thousand devils.

If I didn't loathe labels that place homeschoolers into boxes, the one I would be most likely to accept concerning our homeschooling philosophy would be "unschooling." So why would I enthusiastically recommend this book, in which the only reference to unschooling is negative and largely inaccurate? Why would I even read a homeschooling book that opens with the stated belief that homeschooling is second best to an ideal school system, and includes the line, "I set up the desks and the American flag and started to teach my children at home"?

Let me begin with my sympathetic feelings for the White Queen in Alice, who could believe “as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Just as I find no inherent contradiction between Attachment Parenting and my belief that babies need to spend a lot of time prone on the floor, so I see no reason why someone who passionately believes an unspoiled child hungers and thirsts for knowledge should not find much of benefit in the Classical Education model. One of the secrets to success with unschooling is knowing how to discover, discern, and extract from many sources that which is good.

What is commonly called the Classical approach has fascinated and appealed to me ever since I read Dorothy Sayers’ The Lost Tools of Learning. Despite the best (unintentional) efforts of one of the most popular present-day advocates of this approach, and of a private school of my acquaintance that attempts to follow it, to make this form of education appear repulsive, if I were homeschooling now I would find a way to synthesize these ideas, to offer my children the benefits of both unschooling and the Trivium. Impossible? Go ask Alice.¹

Two aspects of The Well-Trained Mind make it particularly valuable:

• The authors have compiled an absolutely fabulous collection of ideas, recommendations, and resources. The reading lists alone are probably worth the price of the book.


• The book articulates one of the foundation stones of my unschooling educational philosophy: Children can achieve far, far more than is commonly expected of them, if they are given the opportunity and the encouragement our educational system commonly denies them.

I do want to point out an area in which I find The Well-Trained Mind to be deficient: mathematics. We used the Saxon math books from Math 54 to Advanced Mathematics (neither the earlier books nor calculus was available back then), and our experience was quite different from what the authors describe.

They state that parents need to teach the mathematical concepts in the Saxon books, that it is not a self-teaching program. We found that to be dramatically untrue. I can't speak for anything before Math 54, but beginning with that book the Saxon texts contain everything needed. Our children simply sat down with the books, read the material, worked the problems, and went on. This was a delightful contrast to other math texts that had left us bewildered because they assumed a teacher had already explained the concepts.

A grievous omission from The Well-Trained Mind's carefully laid out mathematics curriculum is any recognition that some students will be able to cover the material more quickly, although they do provide a revised sequence for students who might need to take a slower approach. Our children would have hated these math books if we had followed the official Saxon plan, which requires students to work every single problem. This would have bored them so seriously they probably would have developed an aversion to math, instead of the love they now have. We found that doing one third to one half of the available problems (carefully chosen to avoid missing concepts) was the right pace, and they flew through the books with joy. Saxon proponents who fail to acknowledge such an option do a disservice to both the publisher and the students.

Children who follow the path described in The Well-Trained Mind will receive a liberal arts education exceeding that of most college graduates, yet their mathematical knowledge will be little better than that of a typical college-bound high school senior. Not only is mathematics critical to many fields, but the mental skills developed in more advanced (post-calculus) courses should be an important part of the rhetoric stage.

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¹ For those who are too young or too old to have experienced Jefferson Airplane, this is not a reference to my mother-in-law.

I once read that a child should learn "at the rate determined by her own happy hunger." (I believe the quotation is from John Ciardi, but I haven’t been able to confirm that.) It is delightful to observe Jonathan’s voracious appetite.

He loves books, and rhapsodizes, "Library! Lots of books!" He asks frequently to be read to, usually specifying the book he wants. This week his first choice is usually, “Hop on Pop, Cat!” (The Cat in the Hat, don’t ask me how it picked up the “Hop on Pop” part) and sometimes “Wocket Pocket” (There’s a Wocket in My Pocket). Elephant’s Birthday (new from Great-Grandma Landeen) and A Fly Went By are other favorites.

He is equally enthusiastic about his “bits.” (See this post and others from Daley Ponderings.) Basically, they are large, discrete, unambiguous pictures of almost anything under the sun, from flowers to art works to mathematical quantities. He has a large collection of physical bits (on 11x11 or 8.5x11 card stock, laminated), and we had some new ones for him to see on this visit. We also have a large number on computer CD’s (“Picture Dictionaries” in which the pictures are shown along with the names of the objects, in English or any of four other languages.

At home, when and how Jonathan sees his bits is somewhat more disciplined, though he still has a lot of freedom to express and indulge his happy hunger. But at Grandma and Dad-o’s house (with Mommy’s permission), just as in the pool, we let Jonathan “drive” with the bits. We show him the cards as often as he wants, several times in a row if he asks. And with the Picture Dictionaries he is allowed to choose the subject (there’s a menu of 15 on each disk) and see whatever he wants, as many times as he wants. He even navigates the mouse (with a fair amount of help) and does the clicking.

He has definite preferences for subject matter, and one of his favorites is Dots (number quantities) in Japanese! He is not (yet) interested in any other language besides English and Japanese, but asks repeatedly for the Japanese Dots. Last night he asked for other subjects in Japanese, which he had resisted the day before. Although he has seen the Sports Equipment only a few times in English, and Vehicles not much more often, he vocalized “baseball bat” and “road roller” in English after seeing them in Japanese. I don’t know what that means; I just thought it was interesting. He asks for some subjects by category (“Dots”) and others by the name of one element of the category (“crab-it” for Sea Creatures, “double bass” for one set of Musical Instruments, “trumpet” for another).