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October 30, 2010
Christopher Pearson in his Great education available outside the mainstream in The Australian advocates homeschooling. It is part of the broad criticism of public education from the right, which has traditionally demanded vouchers for education in the clash of ideas around education. This clash is between those who believe that public education is not only a fundamental right but a vital public service, akin to the public provision of police, fire protection, parks, and public libraries, and those who believe that the private sector is always superior to the public sector
Pearson says that the thriving home-schooling movement in Australia is:
born of a warranted mistrust of the ideological baggage of the state system and, increasingly, of the Catholic parochial and independent systems. Parents tend to rely on unfashionable textbooks that teach you how to parse a sentence, to construct a paragraph and to mount an argument in 500 words. They do not pander to the fads for dumbed-down literary studies but offer English as we once knew it. Similarly, the maths and science books are usually at least 20 years old and quaintly insistent on the difference between a right answer and a wrong one. Because the parents learned from similar texts, they find them relatively easy to teach from.
From Pearson's description homeschooling is the province of religious fundamentalists and educational traditionalists rather than the hippies of yesterday or those on the left.
The general argument, from what I can gather, is that public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The hope for the future of our society, is escape from public schools, especially to home schooling and charter schools.
The appeal is to a broad apprehension that the nation is falling behind in global competition. If the economy is a shambles, if poverty persists for significant segments of the population, if Australia kids are not as serious about their studies as their peers in other nations, the schools must be to blame. It is not globalization, poverty or equity, our popular culture or predatory financial practices that bear responsibility: it’s the public schools, their teachers, and their unions. Able teachers are all it takes to overcome the disadvantages of poverty, homelessness, joblessness, poor nutrition, absent parents, etc.
My problem with this argument is that though teachers are the most important factor within schools for determining student achievement, this ignores that that nonschool factors, such as poverty and family background, matter even more than teachers.
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"... if they could fire bad teachers".
Presumably the ones who try to teach kids the truth about things.
For god sake,we are back to the nineteen seventies; do all these battles for objectivity have to be fought all over again?