A big question about public school, or any schooling for that matter, is what should be accomplished?
We tend to know what we want students to learn, how to read and write, how to do math, some science and social studies.
I’m wondering if we know why, and if the “why” changed, would the “what” change also.
Let me see if I can be a little clearer…
We hear over and over again how bad our educational system is. We experience its failures ourselves as students, and we watch our children experience its failures. What are our main criticisms? Children don’t learn the basics is usually what I hear. I would have to add to that school’s (government’s) growing usurpation of the rights of the American family.
What if, however, the main problem with public school lay not with the institution of school itself, but with our own confusion about what we want school to be and provide? Sometimes situations are challenging because we’re not asking the right questions. Change the questions, change the outcome. Let me explain…
I’ve noticed that some of my most popular posts are about education. I’m a public school educator, and I’m not blind to the problems that we have in education. (I am quite willing to do my part to solve those problems, however, even if the system is flawed.) Although I teach math, reading is the other big part of the puzzle. Here’s an article I ran across about how one school system is trying to get kids to read.
I teach high school mathematics. I’ve done so for nearly ten years. I’ve taught everything from algebra to calculus to computer science. In other words I’ve got a lot of experience watching kids struggle with learning mathematics. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are only two reasons why kids don’t do well with math.
In my last post, I talked about how I view homeschooling vs. how educators in general view it. Here’s a great blog carnival on the subject of homeschooling. There, you’ll find a wealth of opinions, ideas, and how-to’s on the subject.
Homeschooling is big and getting bigger as educated Americans wake up to the inherent problems with public, mass schooling. If you have kids or are thinking of having children, this should be an alternative worth considering.
Yesterday when I woke up, I had two posts in mind that I thought were going to be a) hilarious and b) worthy of a Pulitzer 
. I have yet to write either of them. Steve Olson’s recent post threw me completely off track. But that’s good.
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