Today's shooting in a one room school house in an Amish community in Pennsylvania really made me think about options to protect children:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,217073,00.html
Question -- how many "school shootings" have readers ever heard of occurring in families where home schooling is practiced? I searched Google several different ways but could not find such a story. There seems to be an overwhelming tendency that school shootings happen in public schools based on my completely unscientific review of news clips but perhaps I can call on my friends in the school reform movement to explore this theory?
A further observation ("generalization" is perhaps a better term) I would offer is that the home schooling community tends to live in "Red State America" -- the conservative portions of the USA if you aren't aware of this term -- and of course Red State America tends to be the most vocal supporters of the "right to keep and bear arms"/Second Amendment. This is an interesting paradox isn't it -- households that most likely own guns and home school their children at the same time yet we don't see reports of these students shooting their classmates or teachers (family members that is).
Decentralize education,
Todd
1 comment:
Actually, your data is out of date. By at least a decade, decade and a half.
I am a homeschooling mom.
I am not a red-stater, I am not a pro-Christian yada-yada-yada.
I will not allow a gun in my house any more than I would allow alcohol (or, if I had my way, chocolate, but that's a food allergy). Swords, yes; bows, arrows, daggers and practice equipment, yes.
But these allow for the personal contact and personal impact I think is necessary should one do violence to another. That is, if defense is ever necessary.
Mainly we own these types of items because of our interest in history, personal discipline, physical arts and sportsmanship.
Also, they need training to use. Yes, so do guns, to use properly. But it is much, much more likely to be able to harm someone with a gun if you have no gun-training whatsoever.
Smaller schools, geared toward core knowledge and topped off with whatever the local community feels their children need on top of that.
Less de-personalization.
Knock "No Child Left Behind" off the books, and thus keep our children from being left behind.
Those are the sorts of things that will change those headlines.
But if we don't make drastic changes to our country right now, the entire group in power will erase our precious oh-so-American Middle-Class into poverty, and all we will have left is private paying schools for the monied and homeschool or nothing for the lower-class, those who are left scrabbling to make enough money to have a roof and food.
Look at the histories of this world: middle-class populations are rare indeed - and it is when a country's population is predominantly middle-class that any "golden" ages have occured.
Decentralizing education is too simplistic, and it doesn't provide a solution for the problem you identified. Solving the real problems at hand just might.
Post a Comment