I read with interest an article from The Detroit Free Press a friend emailed me about parents in a rural American town who homeschooled their teenage son Cole.
I understood what proponents preach about homeschooling, but as a onetime educator, I’ve concluded that not everybody can teach. To put education in the hands of the untrained or to those homeschoolers who aren’t willing to learn alongside their child is like having a butcher perform open-heart surgery. Who would do that?
Homeschooling does have a long history in this country and in other parts of the world, but it’s not caught on in the United States because it puts too much of a burden on working parents.
From what I’ve read, a single parent would be hard-pressed to homeschool, which can’t be seen as a part-time job. Homeschooling does allow a child to explore what he likes, but at 6-years-old, the age Cole was when his parents started homeschooling him, a child has no idea what he likes or dislikes.
It’s fine for Cole to have Warren Buffett or Elon Musk as mentors, but how would somebody like him find Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollock? How would he find musicians like, oh, Kingfish? God knows white parents, raising a child on a farm, would probably never put Ralph Ellison or Zora Neale Hurston on their child’s reading list.
Teaching is an art, just as journalism and photography are arts. Those who practice teaching without training will make a mess of it, and in the case of a child, the parent could retard his development.
Cole looked at homeschool like a trade school; it isn’t. Nor should college be looked at as a trade school. Its aim has always been to give a person a liberal education. That’s not a political perspective I’m talking about here when I use “liberal.” The word is meant to suggest that a student ought to graduate with a broad base of knowledge, and he’s supposed to fine-tune that knowledge in grad school.
Instead, the notion of that sort of learning has given way to careers. I want to be an engineer, so why should I have to take World History or Geography? Or I want a career in marketing, so why do I have to take Advanced Mathematics, Music Appreciation, Greek History or Women’s Studies? Can’t I just take business courses?
Yes, you can, but then what you have is a trade school, not a college — a place for serious learning.
Think about this advice I ran across in a Google search: Parents should homeschool only if they do have a love of learning and an ability to patiently explain subjects and find answers. Parents who homeschool should be willing and able to engage in the professional development necessary to become an effective teacher for their child.
How many parents have such patience?
Well, I’m confident when I say the answer is very few, which explains why, despite the stinging criticism some people level at public education, so few of them homeschool their children.
Oh, and in case anybody’s wondering, the percentage of parents who do homeschool looks as if it’s dropping, not growing. I’m basing that on some statistics I ran across after reading about Cole.
In my opinion, teens like him miss more than they gain.
