When I saw this at Heart, Mind & Strength I thought surely this was a joke. But it is Comonweal.
Two very bright and very balanced graduate students at my university (one a former columnist for “Commonweal”) have told me that they are home-schooling their children, which leads me to wonder what information is available about this phenomenon, which, I think, is now some twenty or thirty years old–who are choosing to home-school? why they choose to do it? what have been the results? the effects? what state-regulations govern it, if any? Etc., etc.
Has “Commonweal” published anything on it?
(emphasis added)
18 comments
It amazes me that there are people that clueless about home-schooling.
All one has to do is search for “King and King” or “Gay Fairy Tale” along with “John Edwards” and that’s all you need to know
Fr. Komonchak’s one of the good guys over there. Yes, that’s a dismaying slip, but he’s all right. By posting, it shows that at the very least he’s open to the phenomenon and wants to know more.
Wow. The Commonweal folks really do live in their own little hothouse, don’t they?
Anyone looking for the reasons why someone would homeschool is welcome to visit my blog. I’ve written a bit about it there.
But I am not surprised that there are people who are clueless about it. Some people just take public education for granted, and seem to believe that there’s some magic that requires a Master’s degree involved in teaching a child to read or do math.
It’s not such a big deal as all that.
Sorry, that link should this instead.
To be fair, a lot of people don’t run into homeschoolers much in real life. If you’re not in the right circles of bloggers or otherwise in the right place at the right time, you might not know much about it at all.
-Fr. Komonchak’s one of the good guys over there.-
Hmmmm. I have very serious doubts about Komonchak’s orthodoxy.
Fr. Komonchak is one of the good guys.
I can’t decide if Kathleen Kaveny is asking questions because she really doesn’t know the answers, or because she THINKS she knows the answers.
I own a Catholic bookstore and have several home schooling families and I assure you they get as good or better science education than they would at the public school (you can buy dissection kits, microscopes, and chemistry sets), and many of them start college at age 16 rather than 17 or 18. What’s more, they are generally so much more inquisitive than public school educated students. I think the biggest barrier to home schooling is cash. It costs a lot to buy really good materials and equipment. However, if you have a big family you can spread that expense out over time.
Actually, my wife and I get the science/advanced mathematics questions a lot ourselves, as both of us are liberal arts types. It was certainly a question I had.
Another answer, if there’s one in your area, is a local community college. Our friends have enrolled their son for at one for math, physics and chemistry.
Frankly, the Commonweal thread has been much better than I thought would be. I haven’t cringed yet, which is a bit unusual for a dotComm thread of any reasonable length.
To be fair, if you’ve run into only a few homeschoolers, you may have a skewed view of homeschooling in general. In my hometown, many families homeschooled children. Some of their parents did it for idealogical reasons (e.g. the Amish and Jehovah’s Witnesses) and some for practical reasons (e.g. their young children spent 2 hours each schoolday riding with a busful of undisciplined and foul-mouthed teens).
But honestly, there ARE homeschooling families who pull their kids out of public school but don’t follow through on teaching them. I had a classmate whose parents pulled him and his sister out of school at age 11 and then “homeschooled” them by making them do farmwork and hiring them out to the neighbours. My friend Kelly’s father didn’t think women should learn science or math, so she and her sisters didn’t learn very much until later in life.
They were in the minority of homeschoolers in my area. However, I took a college class with a smart young woman in a college class who told me that the Catholic Church had existed for only 220 years, but that the Papists had faked the historical record before that. For many of our classmates, that was their first brush with someone who’d been homeschooled, and I had to explain that homeschooling is NOT the same thing as brainwashing.
That’s a new one for me – the standard view seems to be that the Church dates back to Constantine.
I think you caught the tone of the initial post pretty well. That blog opens a window to the very parochial atmosphere in which Catholic liberals exist. You might also notice Margaret Steinfels’ response to the post; she seems unable to imagine liberals who would homeschool for any reason except as an expression of solidarity with striking public school teachers.
Still, there is a good side to this. Catholics who won’t believe anything the pope says are more receptive to what Commonweal contributors have to offer, and most of the responses on the blog have been very positive about homeschooling.
A lot of folks know homeschoolers and don’t know it.
I think I know one of the students Fr. Komonchak is talking about. And if I’m right, then one of the children concerned is my goddaughter.
Just thought you’d all faint to know that.
“Has ‘Commonweal’ published anything on it?”
I assumed the blog contributors were subscribers and had access to its archives.
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