Public schools are controlled by the government and subject to all ills of government bureaucracy and power. Private and home schools are run, in varying ways, by parents. Private schools are dependent upon the satisfaction of parents in order to remain in business. They do not control the children in their care. Instead, families retain their authority and hire the schools for certain aspects of raising their children.
Basil Venitis favors ending government involvement in education. Any influence by the state over education corrupts its goals, and therefore the ability of its graduates to think and reason. Only a full separation of education and state allows for parents to choose how best to equip their children to function in the world. Anything less is a violation of the parents', and child's, rights.
Homeschool is a legal option in many places, for parents to provide their children with a learning environment as an alternative to school. Parents cite numerous reasons as motivations to homeschool, including better academic test results, poor school environment, improved character development, and objections to what is taught in school.
Venitis points out that half of one's knowledge is outdated within four years! Thinking should be the top priority of education. The proper goal of education is to foster the conceptual development of the child, to instill in him the knowledge and cognitive powers needed for mature life. It involves taking the whole of human knowledge, selecting that which is essential to the child's conceptual development, presenting it in a way that allows the student to clearly grasp both the material itself and its value to his life, and thereby supplying him with both crucial knowledge and the rational thinking skills that will enable him to acquire real knowledge ever after.
Unschool refers to a range of educational practices on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child directed play, game play, household responsibilities, and social interaction, rather than through the confines of a school. Unschool differs from school principally in that standard curricula and of school, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child.
Jennifer Marshall points out these days women get more bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees than men do. And yet many women don't feel up to the task of educating their own children. Never mind that we live in a country where women are brain surgeons, rocket scientists, CEOs and presidential candidates. Schooling is best left to professional educators, moms have been told for decades, so pack the kids onto the school bus and leave the rest to the real experts.
Contrast that with the go-girl themes that have saturated American culture since at least the early 1970s: Set your sights high. Be anything you want to be, even a president or chancellor. And that includes being your child's teacher, educational entrepreneur Leigh Bortins says.
Bortins was one of those girls challenged to be the CEO, not the secretary. As a teenager, Leigh had her eye on the Naval Academy when she learned she needed glasses. At the time, it disqualified her from piloting, and taking the second seat as navigator didn't interest her. Instead, she went on to study aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan.
Bortins married and had four boys. She and her husband, Robert, decided to homeschool their sons. Math and science went fine, but literary classics such as Aristotle and Shakespeare were a little tougher. That's when the Bortinses found out about the classical approach to education, which makes the great works accessible through the learning tools of grammar, logic and rhetoric.
Talk about a breakthrough. The Bortinses discovered that they could participate in the conversations of mankind's greatest thinkers. Their words allowed us to more confidently confront the problems of daily living. When son Robert was in high school, Bortins launched a learning community called Classical Conversations. It included 10 of his peers. This fall, Robert is 26 and Classical Conversations enrolls more than 25,000 students.
Once the dominant model, classical education has been sidelined in favor of a paradigm that's supposed to equip students more effectively for modern economic and social life. The public school system has been built around a factory model: one-size-fits-all mass production. It's the wrong direction, Bortins warns. Renewal, she says, will require shifting from factory techniques back to the ideal that education prepares mankind for freedom.
In her new book, The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education, the North Carolina resident challenges all parents — no matter how their children are educated — to aspire to this ideal. Bortins believes every parent can participate in the restoration of our culture to one that appreciates classical learning, but only if they will believe it about themselves.
The classical standard is high, to be sure. For example, Bortins recommends that by the time students reach high school, they should be able to discuss the award-winning children's literature and articles from newspapers or specialty magazines.
Another core is in the news, though: The Common Core Standards Initiative is the project pushed by the Obama administration to impose national standards on local schools. But this core will empower bureaucrats, not parents. The emphasis is on uniform measurement and comparable data — in other words, tools of efficiency for national policymakers, not tools of learning for parents and children. That kind of standardization perpetuates the factory model, taking us further from the ideals of classical learning.
Conformity to the government's norm tends to limit educational formats to three: public, private and — the model that breaks the mold — homeschooling. Yet countless options and combinations exist for configuring a child's learning. Marshall points out that online learning in particular provides vast possibilities. More and more parents are taking advantage of these options to customize an approach that suits their children's needs and gifts. They're operating as educational managers to make the most of opportunities for their kids to reach their full potential.
Venitis asserts there is no direct relationship between education and schooling. You might be schooled but uneducated, and you might be educated but unschooled. Schools are concentration camps for the drones of society. Unschooling is much better than schooling. Internet is the best source of knowledge and information, replacing schools, libraries, media, parliaments, and postoffice.
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