Sam Sorbo at Big Government makes the case for how public schools exasperate trouble with parent-child relationships in a humorous way:
Parents wonder where their relationship with their teen went wrong. Answer: Their influence was all but eclipsed the moment the child crossed the school threshold. It’s that simple.
Each day a young child goes to school, he learns (way too early,) that his parents don’t know everything. School reinforces this point by teaching the little ones to instruct their parents. “Tell Mommy not to pack plastic sandwich bags in your lunch – that kills the dolphins!” Mommy kills dolphins!
He makes friends with other kids whose parents also slaughter innocent animals. He joins his peers, learns to challenge authority, then comes home and asserts himself. The parent thinks, “Well, that’s probably a good thing, because he is learning to be self-confident and capable.”
That trend continues into adolescence when children become surly teenagers surrounded by other surly teenagers in an environment that rarely respects a parent’s authority. To top it off, Sorbo adds, the education received is subpar, then she asks an excellent question. One that all parents should consider.
“Is a mediocre education worth risking the parent-child relationship?”
She goes on to say:
Not when home-schooled children typically out-perform their public school counterparts by 30-37 percentile points across the board. Socializing all day (for that is truly what school has become,) is apparently not the most sensible way to nurture or instruct a child.
With so little to recommend a public education, the decision to send a child to school must be a product of societal conditioning. Responsible parents owe it to themselves and their families to investigate home schooling options.
While I wouldn’t recommend home education for all families (we homeschool our three kids), there are some families who haven’t considered it who really should. Not that our kids don’t have behavior issues, but my wife and I have noticed a major difference in the way our kids behave and interact with adults compared to some of their public school friends. While that is anecdotal, I know we aren’t alone in our experience.
Perhaps it comes back to the socialization question. When we were considering homeschooling and then we we started homeschooling I was asked “what about socialization?” I still get asked that from time to time. My kids are socialized – the primary difference is that my kids receive intergenerational socialization. Because honestly when you stick a bunch of 8th graders into a room together what do they really learn to become?
