WHY HOMESCHOOLING IS BECOMING HIPSTER
A great
article from Katie Kieffer at Townhall.com
Who knew? My parents are cool. Homeschooling is becoming hipster. Celebrity parents like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie proudly discuss their homeschooling lifestyle. But pioneers like my parents set the trend of educational freedom.
The plan was to send me to public
school. My mother enjoyed her job as an R.N. and was not bored. She was simply
a creative rebel. And my father encouraged her to pioneer — because he believed
in freedom.
My mother is a rebel with her own
style. She once told me: “I never wanted to be like anyone else. I always did
my own thing. But my girlfriends would copy my artwork and my clothes. I would
get a new outfit, and they would go out and buy the same outfit. I was happy
when I could eventually sew my own clothes and they couldn’t copy me. But when
they copied my artwork, it irritated me.” My grandmother told her: “When they
copy you, it is the highest form of flattery.”
My mother designed, sewed, modeled
and won fashion awards for her clothes. Her parents could not afford to buy
drawing paper so she innovatively recycled newspaper to sketch her designs.
As an adult, I think the artist in
my mother motivated her to do something unique with her children’s education —
and, once again, set a trend that her peers would copy. When I was five years
old, homeschooling was not as cool and acceptable as it is today; homeschooling
parents were scrutinized and ridiculed. My mother did not care; she was an
entrepreneur.
My mother’s friends openly doubted
her ability to teach her own children. She proved them wrong; I graduated Summa
Cum Laude from college, my sister is a teacher at a private school and I have a
brother in medical school. Today, many of my friends and cousins are
homeschooled.
More and more American parents are
choosing homeschooling. Here’s why:
1.
Freedom
Homeschooling parents want freedom
— for themselves and their children. They do not want their children’s First
and Fourth Amendment rights to be routinely violated as they are in many public
schools through censorship, unprovoked random drug tests (for athletes) and
unwarranted searches and seizures.
Education, per the Constitution,
should be left up to individuals and states. Americans should have options for
how to educate their children. Thomas Jefferson once said: “It is better to
tolerate the rare instance of parent[s] refusing to let their child be
educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible
transportation and education against [their] will.” Some of the most successful
entrepreneurs (think Steve Jobs) never finished college; there is no perfect
formula for how much formal education someone needs to achieve success.
Children learn in different ways and at different rates — and parents will
always make better educational choices for their children than the state.
However, former presidents like
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson ushered in an unconstitutional era of
compulsory education — directed at the federal level.
Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano
explains in his book, Theodore and Woodrow, that public
schools were started as a way to turn children into obedient little statists —
not to provide equal educational opportunity.
Napolitano writes: “Public schools
were an ideal place to weed out students in order to create an elite class of
people, while relegating the rest to their rightful position in life. Many
ideas advocated by Roosevelt and Wilson were not far off from those of some
European dictators of the time.” Bottom line, compulsory education is an
offense to individual liberty and the Constitution.
2.
Personalized Academics
Academics is a top motivator for
parents, who believe that they can use one-on-one attention to develop their
children’s intellectual gifts and overcome any weaknesses. USA Today reports:
“…home-schoolers, on average, scored 37 percentile points above public school
students on standardized achievement tests.”
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