There is a really good debate about homeschooling going on over at Crooked Timber. Chris Bertram wrote:
Children have an interest in growing up with various moral capacities, including the capacity to form, revise, etc their aims in life, a sense of justice, and so on. Schools function not just as purveyors of information about maths, physics and geography but also as social environments in which individuals learn to rub along with others and get exposed to a wider range of social influences than they would at home (or perhaps than their parents judge desirable). That’s a good thing, and is a reason to be opposed to home schooling.BUT. It all depends what the options are. In an ideal system no child would be home schooled, but faced with the prospect of unacceptably poor schools it might well be the right thing for a parent to do. The point about a broad social environment also cuts two ways. Although being exposed to those wider influences and to peer groups is valuable, in reality the peer groups that children have available may be (really and not just in the imagination of paranoid overprotective parents) be dangerous and bad.
Where I am at in Virginia, homeschooling seems popular, but it is not really “home” schooling. It is 20 to 30 parents getting their kids together to educate them. This is not really “home” schooling, this is more like a private school run on the cheap. But it is called home-schooling and the government classifies it as such.
These are parents who can not afford private schools but love the diversity and critical thinking that is fostered at private schools. They want to give their kids something like that.
By the way, despite the religous stereotype, and despite the fact that I’m in Virginia, all the parents I know who home-school are secular and politically liberal-left. Their cultural ancestors are the hippies of the 1960s counter-culture which, lets remember, had an anti-government libertarian streak.
Some of the other, to the point, comment included:
Seems to me that homeschooling also requires a good deal of unpaid labor by women. Not saying there aren’t fathers who homeschool, but the homeschoolers I’ve come across are mothers (most in a two-parent home with a male breadwinner).
and:
Homeschooler does not always equal right wing religious conservative. I’m a liberal and I homeschool. I want my daughter to retain her freedom, her privacy, her creativity and her passions. I don’t want her dumbed down to the lowest common denominator in any classroom setting. I want her to think for herself instead of being indoctrinated by the government thought police that run the public schools. Even if I didn’t care about any of the above, today’s Zero Tolerance policies are more than any sane person could accept and there is no way I’ll sign her up for that kind of potential abuse.
The premise that Bertram opened the discussion with, "in a just society", seems a little utopian, but I haven't read Rawls, so I've no idea how "just society" is being defined here. Perhaps it is not utopian. However, many of my liberal friends take the line "rather than having people drop out of the public schools, why don't we fix the public schools?" and, another popular line is, "there are some very good public schools, and our aim should be to raise all schools to their level."
As I've said before, I believe there are no good public schools, because public schools are not and never can be wholly under the control of the parents who send their kids there. I speak of schools that collect their students from a fixed geographic region, and thus collect students whose interests and talents are unrelated. What's better is to have schools unrelated to geography, so that kids can choose them based on their interests. This could, theoretically, happen with government-run schools, though so far no society has ever done it. I've an easier time believing this can be achieved through school vouchers and private schools.
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