Uptick in homeschooling

Last updated on: August 24, 2016 at 4:28 pm by Dave Griffey

Uptick in homeschooling 2016-08-24T16:28:10-04:00 Dave Griffey

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Not surprising. Believe it or not, there are still some crazies out there who aren’t sold on the whole post-Christian, secular liberal world view. That view, of course, is the standard against which our educational designs are measured. My wife, a former teacher and then editor in an educational publishing company, has no problem telling stories about the obvious inroads that modern liberalism and secular ideals have made into our educational industries. Hence former educator and former educational publisher.

Funny story. One of the things that pushed my wife over the edge at the publishing company was ‘the list’ of standards that needed to be used to appease modern sensitivities. For instance, there had to be appropriate ratios of names and characters. Anglo names needed to be balanced by Hispanic, black, Asian, and a host of names from around the world. The list my wife worked with included anything in a graph or picture. So if a math problem dealing with money used pictures of money, the presidents on the bills counted as men, American, white, and had to be balanced in other parts of the lesson with other inclusive images. The funniest was the Holidays list. Granted, some of these were optional considerations. But for Halloween, the suggested term was ‘Halloween Lantern’ rather than Jack-O-Lantern. Why? Need you ask? Because Jack is a male name, and could be offensive to some. Really. I didn’t believe her until she showed me. Again, why she is a former educational publishing editor.

Now, after I mention those little anecdotes, our reasons for homeschooling weren’t necessarily because of that. There were four reasons for us in fact, and the usual dumb emanating from modern progressive PC sensitivities didn’t actually rate. Though I can see why some would be bothered by the dumb. That alone was not enough to push us into the world of homeschooling. In short the reasons were: Flagrant indoctrination by threat of retribution, typical government counterproductive red tape, the culture of ‘everyone deserves an A’, and the textbooks that showed we and our values were clearly on the outs with our educational perspectives. Like my snippy second boy once quipped, thank goodness we learned about the Catholic Church, or we’d think America was the most evil thing in history. More on those some day.

But it wasn’t just Common Core, which really came out in the later days of my wife’s publishing career, and so we missed the details. It wasn’t just the LGBT issues. How they were handled maybe, but not the issues themselves. Perhaps the biggest problem was the feeling that our kids’ education was getting short shrifted. They weren’t being educated. Between the three boys, they had one B, and the rest As. And yet they didn’t know basics. They didn’t know basics of American history, geography or government. They didn’t know the basics of our cultural heritage. They knew science and math, but there were many topics within those subjects they didn’t know. I shouldn’t say they didn’t know. They knew. From us. But unless we taught them a host of things we felt crucial for understanding the real world, they weren’t learning it. Not in school. In short, based on what they were coming home with from school, they didn’t seem like A students in the least. Not compared to the A students I remember growing up with who always threw the curves.

So that’s why we did it. I can understand why the approach to LGBT issues, and the few parts of Common Core I’ve seen, could compel some to homeschool. Others probably have other reasons. But nonetheless, it appears to be getting more popular. Heck, some homeschoolers in our area aren’t religious or even conservative. Just looking for a place where education has at least half a chance of occurring.

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