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Debate: Home Schooling
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[Edit] What are the pros and cons of home schooling? |
[Edit] Background and Context of Debate:Home schooling is legal in most countries but the extent to which it is practised varies. Within Europe, in the Netherlands parents have a duty to send their children to a school, and Germany also forbade home schooling until recent decisions ruled this contrary to human rights legislation. Elsewhere in the EU home schooling is allowed but parents may have to justify their choice (Greece and Italy), register with a local school (Norway and Portugal) or put their child forward for national tests annually (Austria). The extent of regulation varies considerably; Austria has its testing regime and Swedish home-educators can expect two or three inspection visits per year, but elsewhere monitoring may be left to regional authorities with varying results or may not exist at all. There is not much data about the number of home-educated children in western Europe, except for Britain where there are three to four thousand children educated at home, and Germany where there are only 200 or so following the recent change in the law.However, as a political issue home schooling looms largest in the USA, where it is comparatively popular. Home schooling is legal in every state, though the level of difficulty encountered by parents wishing to teach and parents removing their children from the state system varies between states. In Idaho there are no specific teacher requirements, and no testing requirements - ‘no registration, certification, notification, qualification, or testing requirements’, as the state’s Home School Association says. In California, home schooling is often challenged by politicians, and people such as former Superintendent of Public Schools Delaine Eastin even suggest it is illegal; they claim it is not protected by existing private schooling legislation, as its supporters believe.For the purposes of this piece, it seems sensible to adopt a middle ground of home schooling - that it would be regulated under the proposition’s plan, and the opposition do |
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[Edit] [ ![]() Rights: Do parents have the right to home school their children? | |
[Edit] Yes
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[Edit] No
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[Edit] [ ![]() Quality: Do parents provide an enhanced quality of education? | |
[Edit] Yes
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[Edit] No
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[Edit] [ ![]() Bad schools: Do parents have a right to withdraw children from bad schools? | |
[Edit] Yes
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[Edit] No
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[Edit] [ ![]() Argument #5 | |
[Edit] Yes
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[Edit] No
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[Edit] [ ![]() Argument #7 | |
[Edit] YesClassroom education often fails the bright and the slow, by going too slowly for the former and too fast for the latter. Necessarily, a teacher of many has the interests of the group as a whole in mind in pitching a lesson at a particular level. This leaves some unchallenged and others humiliated. Home education avoids the pitfalls of both. This point is especially true with regard to students with special needs; the state either fails to identify such needs and lets the student lose years of education instead spent unproductively, or drops then into the vastly underfunded and stigmatised bins we call ‘special schools.’There is yet another group that is failed - individuals with identifiable problems that damage their capacity to learn in a normal school environment, but are not severe enough to merit a place at a special school - those with mild to medium severity dyslexia and attention-deficiency suffers fall into this category with many others. Home schooling can help such students, often with the help of tutors specially trained for such needs (and sometimes the state helps parents with funding for these tutors, so the burden does not fall solely onto them). Indeed, parents willing to take on the enormous task of educating their child at home, or paying for them to be educated at home, are relieving the state of the burden of doing so in the state system - but continue to pay their taxes to benefit others. |
[Edit] NoThe benefits of education in a wider context more than counterbalance to this objection. Of course, the state doesn’t just leave high achievers and strugglers to rot! Whilst admittedly, attention for individuals in either group isn’t one on one, it’s not awful - and the experience of growing up alongside less and more able students produces individuals with greater understanding of their society. Furthermore, students with special needs are those that most need the state’s enormous resources to focus on their requirements. Once a student has needs of such a magnitude that demands it, they are educated in special schools specifically intended to help them. |
[Edit] [ ![]() Argument #6 | |
[Edit] YesHome schooling doesn’t just offer a better education. Family bonding is a massively important element of a child’s development, one that’s constantly undermined in modern society. Positive parental role models are found less and less frequently. If a parent is judged by a state vetting process to be good enough, isn’t it enormously positive to approve of an environment that cements both a positive role model and family bonding? It is absurd to suggest that children only interact with others at school. The concern regarding ‘getting to know other children’ has been solved in the USA, the nation that home-schools the largest proportion of its population; a network of home-schoolers exist to provide companionship, promoting sports events and social functions through the internet and other methods - it fulfils the role admirably (recent steps include the creation of a home-school honour society). Furthermore, the standard social provisions for children in civil society - scout movements, sports clubs - are open to home schoolers like everyone else. Seen in this light, home schooling is not a removal of a child from society - just from the state’s schools. But such interaction happens outside the classroom, where it belongs, instead of acting as distractions to learning. Within this point, some parents have legitimate concerns about the moral tutelage their children receive in state schools - about the kind of moral message some teachers choose to impart, and the kind of classmates they find themselves alongside. Parents are entitled to judge schools on a moral level, and find them lacking. In so many school districts, the only way to avoid drugs in school is not to go. |
[Edit] NoInteraction with other pupils is a crucial element of a child’s development, and mere social interaction isn’t good enough - team building, working towards goals, being forced to confront problems with and live alongside individuals one might not like, or come from different backgrounds, is clearly done best in a school environment. Being able to integrate depends on exposure to other people - obviously there’s more diversity in a class than in the home! The proposition is right to identify wider needs: education is about more than just academic tutoring - it’s about educating the whole person, and that is best achieved by educating them within a school with their peers, in a microcosm of the society they will soon enter.Indeed, parents and children spending day after day at home are sometimes subject to a phenomenon sociologists call the ‘hothouse’ relationship - the closeness between them becomes exclusive, with reaction to outsiders almost aggressive by instinct. Such a relationship makes it even more difficult for the child to adapt to life in the wider community.Those that seek to cocoon their offspring from the outside world merely delay the time when their children have to deal with it - and strengthen the impact of the shock that will be received upon seeing the element of society they find so unpleasant. Furthermore, what is the guarantee that the moral structure parents might be instilling in their children, year after year, away from any kind of effective monitoring, is beneficial? |
[Edit] [ ![]() Argument #8 | |
[Edit] YesTry as it might, the state constantly fails those with greatest faith needs in its schools. Numerous examples can be found of the state failing to provide for students of ‘minority’ faiths - of ignorant failure to provide for prayer time, the banning or denigrating of religious dress, of unwitting subjection of students to religious festivals that are manifestly unsuitable.The popular home schooling movement in America sprang out of two real and legitimate concerns parents of Christian students had: that their religion was being denigrated in the state curriculum, and the ritual humiliations they were subjected to for their faith. Of course, schools should reform to ensure such behaviour is minimised - but if parents want to avoid such perils altogether, and teach their child within an environment that caters for their religious needs, that is and should be their right.Nowhere is this more true than in discussing the appropriate place of dogma in schools. Many deeply held beliefs - such as creationism - are undermined, directly and indirectly, by state sector educators. The refusal of many schools to alter text books to highlight the fact that evolution is a theory and not proven truth, and the refusal to teach creationism as a possibility alongside it, serves to prove this point. |
[Edit] NoThose that wish their children to be educated in a religious environment have the chance to send them to a religious school, the quality of which can be monitored by the state. However, that ‘exclusivity’ of belief is remarkably unhealthy - we believe that the adherents of all religions shouldn’t shut themselves away, but rather engage in society as a whole, and understand other people’s beliefs and points of view. Meanwhile, it is the duty of the state to teach the thinking of all religions, and the dispassionate conclusions of science. It should indeed be pointed out when theories are theories - but that should never stop schools teaching our best understanding of how we came to be, and how we developed. If that jars with theology, that’s a pity - but it shouldn’t stop teachers teaching. |
[Edit] [ ![]() Argument #9 | |
[Edit] YesThe liberal establishment has education in its grasp in most of the Western nations. In the USA, many who fought against Communism in Vietnam see their beliefs undermined in their children’s classrooms, with Communism held up as a perfect ideal (meanwhile, Stalin’s heinous acts go unmentioned). Many who worked hard all their lives to provide money for their families see capitalism ridiculed at the blackboard. In the UK, a proud history of achievement and creation goes untaught whilst the sins of colonialism and the faults of class structure are drummed into pupils year after year. Sadly, if you want your children to understand the history of their nation, you can’t send them to their nation’s schools anymore. |
[Edit] NoThe argument presented by the proposition is a charter for every extremist and oddball to haul their child out of the state structure and give them years of indoctrination in their own beliefs. State schools teach history and social interaction within a framework agreed upon by a wide variety of bodies within the social spectrum. If a parent’s world view is so far detached from that perspective that he wishes to remove his child from school, it’s a fair bet that the opinions he wants to substitute in place of it are questionable at best.
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[Edit] [ ![]() Pro/con resources | |
[Edit] Yes
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[Edit] NoThis pro/con resources section needs expansion. See how in the Getting started tutorial. |
[Edit] ReferencesThis article is based on a Debatabase entry written by Alex Deane. Because this document can be modified by any registered user of this site, its contents should be cited with care. [Edit] Motions
[Edit] This debate in legislation, policy, and the real worldIn real world decision-making, this issue is far more complex than a simple pro/con debate. Qualities of government, school district, parental teaching abilities, quality control of schools, quality control of home schooling, student learning-preferences are just a few of the many issues that may vary broadly per student. Having experience in higher education as well as specialized rehabilitation foster care, I can comment from direct experience regarding some of the more outstanding examples. I have not been introduced to a milquetoast home schooled student, but many extremes. Well-prepared and conscientious parents can provide an exceptional education, resulting in students that obtain full-ride scholarships to excellent universities, but poorly prepared or neglectful parents can prove disastrous teachers, resulting in students woefully prepared for even the most basic of college remedial coursework, yet this is not the worst case scenario. The public is aware of some of the horrific situations where one or both parents imprisoned their children for the purpose of sexual molestation. I learned from in working in rehabilitation foster care that this sort of situation can also occur in the context of "home schooling." In these situations, sexual predator parents use home schooling as a cover for their abusive activities which, the worst case report included rape not only by a boy's mother and her boyfriend, but also persistent psychological, emotional and physical abuse, such as time-outs locked in a small unlit closet filled with broken glass. Biological, adoptive and foster parents have been involved in abuse cases and government monitoring of home schooling has not always been a guarantee for child safety. I have also witnessed that no socio-economic class nor race or ethnicity is a shelter from these problems, but I am optimistic that cases of abuse are rare rather than rarely detected in the general population. Unfortunately I do not have such positive data regarding home schooling situations due to the limitations of my professional experience and infrequency encountering of home schooled students in higher education. Thus, without detailed information regarding the rationale for such a decision, my first inclination is to be suspicious of the motivations of the parents, although professionalism dictates not showing it. [Edit] See also[Edit] External links and resources[Edit] Books
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