… so why pay the state to propagandize your kids for an additional seven hours a day?
Author and educator David V. Stewart lodges this objection–among many others–to our schools’ pointless habit of assigning children homework.
I think that the benefits to homework are pretty much nil, and it’s nothing but negative consequences. But it is a thing which has been so heavily ingrained into the American academic experience, people can’t think of not having homework. Parents can’t think of their kids not having homework. If their kids don’t have homework, then maybe the teacher’s not doing enough. Teachers can’t think of notgiving kids homework because, “What if somebody judges me negatively for not giving homework?” And of course students don’t want homework, but I don’t need to say any more about them.
Well, I think homework is something that is for the birds. I don’t think that teachers should give it, and let me give you a couple of reasons why.
So first of all, built into every homework assignment is the claim that the school day is not long enough. There’s been some some legislation introduced recently, in couple states I think, to lengthen the school day to like eight or ten hours. And people find this abhorrent. They’re like, “No, you can’t make kids go to school for ten hours!”
We already make them go to school for ten hours. They just go to school with the teacher for like seven and a half hours and then with their parents for two hours. So yes, parents of public school kids, you are still engaging in homeschooling because you have to teach them how to do their homework when they come home.
Meanwhile, homeschooling parents finish their kids’ entire school day in the time it takes parents of public and private school kids to help them with their homework. Yet homeschooled students have long outperformed their Prussian model counterparts.
David’s highly insightful video is well worth watching, especially for any parent who still has kids in the public school system.
The real reason that social engineers and their willing tools like Kamala Harris want to lengthen the school day to ten hours has nothing to do with academics. They want even more unfettered access to your children so that intellectually and spiritually, they may become their children.
That's exactly what it is: the theft of your children, for the purpose of perverting them into their children. Those children then grow up believing the Enemy's narrative, so they embrace the Enemy's culture, and thus enact the Enemy's politics.
Prussian model schools and all of higher ed are Death Cult seminaries.
I've heard it put this way: A normal person secures their legacy by having children. A leftist secures their legacy by stealing other people's children.
An apt observation!
The Leftist's story is that of the Dark Elf. The Death Cultists work to steal children's souls and leave empty husks behind for the parents.
Warnings found in fairy tales are true!
Shocka!
Which is why the Left–especially Leftist academics–hate fairy stories.
New label for Public Schools:
Changeling Factories
My wife and I have agreed that our children will not go to public school. Not only because of the ideological problems, but because it is a profound waste of time for even moderately bright children.
Public schools are a warehouse. The product is children. The teachers are technicians, the managers are principals, and the executives are the administration.
The children are carefully managed to draw out the need for funding and further administration jobs while teachers attempt to manage 27 children with no aides. Learning occurs in spite of rigid pursuit of metrics, not because of it.
I could go on. The public school system is a crime in progress.
Good for you and your wife! Great metaphor.
Unfortunately I don't have this option. The state is particularly obnoxious as well as an authoritarian one.
Not only is their homework but kids are sent to tutorial classes. It's a 1 billion$ industry.
My own son has been subjected to this nonsense.
I'm a teacher and I never assign homework. I want kids to be kids after school.
xavier
People (intentionally?) forget about those Prussian roots of the modern school system. The point of the system, then and now, was to provide the state with "properly" educated cogs for the governmental machine. The state needed literate cannon fodder to feed into the imperial meat grinder. These days the meat grinder is a socialist one, but the principle is the same.
This is why rank and file conservatives need to get past the "Socialism is bound to fail because it doesn't work!' coping mechanism.
Our rulers' definition of what works vastly differs from ours. Not only don't they care if the US turns into Venezuela or Sweden, they're actively pushing for it. The schools are their main attack vector in this regard.
From its inception, the goal of state-controlled compulsory age-graded schooling – the Prussian model favored by our betters and used here for the last century and a half – has been to replace the parents with the state, a fact clearly and repeatedly stated by its proponents.
A couple pertinent quotations:
Leland Stanford told his wife at the founding of Stanford U: “the children of California shall be our children.”
Ellwood P. Cubberley, dean of the Stanford School of Education, said in 1898: "Our schools are in a sense factories, in which the raw materials – children – are to be shaped and fashioned into products"
Fichte, explaining how the state needs to overcome parents' objections to total state control of education down to totally removing kids from the home for their entire childhood: "Of course, it is not to be expected that all parents will be willing to be separated from their children, and to hand them over to this new education, a notion of which it will be difficult to convey to them. From past experience we must reckon that everyone who still believes he is able to support his children at home will set himself against public education, and especially against a public education that separates so strictly and lasts so long." He is here defining the enemy of his schooling: parents who imagine they can educate their children themselves.
It has proven more practical and just as effective to simply fill every waking hour with school in lieu of physically removing kids from the home. Homework is a key tool: not only does it occupy the students, but turns parents into tools of state control: you're a bad parent if you don't 'help' your kid do his homework, thus wasting both your and your child's time.
Expect federal laws outlawing homeschooling outright to be passed during the next Democrat president's administration.
Hopefully homeschoolers are preparing workarounds.
The history of public school runs like Dr. Seuss from the evil mirror universe: Horace Hatches The Egg.
Homeschooling or cooperatives are the only way to go. Private education and catholic schools are mostly converged. And if you find a non converged classical school, good luck paying for 3+ kids to go through it. We plan to homeschool, and job selection has been based on homeschool laws and Catholic cooperative resources available.
Btw, saw the posts on Twitter. I’d love to hear about the homesteading life from you sometime.
Durandel,
As a teacher in a private school I have concluded similarly. In fact, education needs to be localized right down to the municipal level.
So my hierarchy
family, neighbourhood, municipality. For rural or low population I'd permit regional but no higher
Ministries of education must be abolished.
xavier
First, do a Tin Eye search on those images.
Lol….will do
It's one of my favorite counters when someone tells me how bad homeschooling is. I say, "If homeschooling is so bad, then why to public schools rely on it via homework?" My daughter went to 1/2 year of public school (due to some serious health issues my wife had at the time.) Never once did she come home with homework that she had learned how to do in school…
That's a sound rhetorical comeback. Based on truth!
Brackets marked for excision:
A mule is an animal with long funny ears,
He kicks up at anything he hears.
His back is brawny, and his brain is weak;
He's just plain stupid with a stubborn streak!
And by the way, if you [hate to] go to school,
You may grow up to be a mule.
If any reader is considering homeschooling and lives in Iowa, we actually have very permissive homeschooling laws. This is much to the dismay of several democratic state reps and senators.
For details on Iowa and any other state, HSLDA (Home School Legal Defense Association) keeps very close track of home schooling laws across the nation.
Good to hear. Oddly enough, Illinois has some of the most favorable homeschooling laws in America, though the state legislature is chomping at the bit to change that.
Brian
Just recently
The German or Swiss court of appeals has banned homeschooling.
The justification sounded very historically huffy.
Once again
If public education is so good why is it obligatory? Surely something intrinsically good will attract no?
xavier
There is a counterargument to be made in public versus private television. But that's because TV-watching is a direct rather than a parental decision in the first place. An adult might cheerfully watch whatever firmly non-educational stuff is on The Learning Channel these days, but they'll die before intentionally subjecting their children to popcorn as the program that will form their minds and souls.
Public schools, on the other hand, need lots of popcorn, as a growth-stunting agent, to keep all the tiers of education as fully-staffed and in want of mill levy revenue as can be.
Don't get me wrong, I fully support all homeschooling efforts and plan to homeschool my kids, but the conclusion of the linked study, that the homeschooling system greatly outperforms the public system, seems flawed.
In general only very dedicated, conscientious, and disciplined parents will go through the effort of homeschooling, and what do very dedicated, conscientious, and disciplined people tend to have in common? Being significantly smarter than average, hence having smarter kids than average. The average homeschooler would almost certainly have been a high achiever anyway.
This also explains the narrowing of the black-white academic gap (a long insoluble problem for progressives that strongly resists intervention): only blacks on the extreme right end of the bell curve would ever consider homeschooling. The average black likely isn't even cognizant of the fact that homeschooling is allowed. If there had been a way for adjusting the results for inherent aptitude, then the b-w gap ought to have been more or less unchanged even if the homeschooling performance was superior.
I would say that outperformance is outperformance. While I agree with your points, I'd just point out that plenty of high-average to high-IQ kids get ruined by the school system, and that home-schooling is heavily, heavily favoured by parents of special-needs or high-needs kids. For example, home-schooling is a pretty decent selection criteria to accidentally select autistic kids.
In other words, you could be right, but I have seen other data that confounds at least some of the theory, leading me to favour "the outperform is an outperform unless proven otherwise". In fact, again from only a glance at incomplete data, I think it would be just as reasonable to assert that homeschooling achieves better averages at the opposite end: by far better serving kids who would otherwise be effectively abandoned by the system.
(I'm raising the point for your consideration, as a homeschooler myself of two autistic kids who happen to meet both the high-average to high-IQ criteria AND the "impossible for the system to deal with" criteria. Consider it an anecdote presented for your further thought, not an argument per se.)
Without doing IQ tests, it’s tough to anecdotally tell if homeschool is leading to better performance because of natural IQ, better knowledge acquisition, better materials, better environment, better focus/attention, and/or better habits. The public/private system fails in so many categories that it’s tough to suss out from regular observance.
I will point out that a public school education, by its own proponents' assumption, does NOT leave you equipped to pass your knowledge on to the next generation.
Homeschool is coming from what vestige of outside and parent-to-child learning has been salvaged from the past seventy or ninety years of such degradation.
That's a non-trivial aspect of Prussian style schooling. It purposefully erodes family relationships and makes the state the sole medium of tradition.