QUOTE (Supra Sheri @ Dec 20 2007, 05:08 PM)
very well said Doug, As a Home School educator I can relate ( the past 3 years) and the many that have literally just went and got their kids and took them home to educate are saying what you are..or the ones who have to subsidize the curriculum as i do with my middle son... one has to have all the data to even make informed opinons , too often converstations are based on: "This is what I beleive, and that is wrong..". many use cnversation to validate their pov and to be right....."
I have seen both amazing successes with home schooling and dismal failures. Two examples: A young man I know recently returned from Scotland where he was a Rhodes Scholar at St. Andrews. He is a student at a large mid-western univeristy this year, due to a lack of funds to study abroad. He is already a published historian at age 20. He has compiled his family's genealogy back to MacGregor of the Golden Bridles (Middle Ages). He was able to trace my mother's family back to Finland, even though they were refugees from the Winter War and one of them was being hunted by the Cheka (predecessor to the KGB) and had every reason to cover their tracks, providing some names of family members we didn't know about. He even found a second cousin I didn't know I had. I attended a "graduation recital" he gave on the piano; it sounded like a professional-quality performance. He could fit right into a professional symphony. He was home-schooled; both parents participated in the effort. He told me that he found public school "boring."
Another individual was home schooled by her mother who felt that public schools didn't give sufficient instruction in religion (They're conservative Christians.). Following "high school" she attended a Bible college where she got a Bachelors degree. Then she tryed to enroll in a Masters program in psychology at a large state university. Because she didn't have most of the needed entry-level credits, they required her to take remedial courses in chemistry, statistics, algebra, English - the basic Freshman courses. Without the background she needed, she was failing. She tried to plagiarize a paper from the Internet, but got caught and was expelled for academic dishonesty. Personally, I don't think she knew this wasn't allowed: her previous schooling had left her totally unprepared for higher education. First her mother and then the Bible college completely failed her. I wonder if she might have grounds for a lawsuit against the Bible college for failing to accomplish the educational goals it claimed it did in issueing her a degree.
I'd say that home schooling is great if the parents actually know how to do it and are willing to put in the time it takes. It's as more work for the parents than it is for the kid. Too many parents pull their kids out of public school and then don't get the job done at home.
QUOTE (Supra Sheri @ Dec 20 2007, 05:08 PM)
you are obviously an educator too or should be one... kudos to you for stepping up to the plate .. really if things are gonna change its on us, no one else is gonna do it..it begins by exploring ones beleifs and the willingness to let them go if one can observe they arnet getting yo to where you say you want to go......clarity and wisdom and insight is derived from an all inclusive path .....
Thanks for the compliment, but I'm actually a forestry and climate researcher. I'm located at a large university, so I'm surrounded by educators, most of whom are also researchers. I study the Holocene and the changes that forests have undergone as a result of climate shifts (Try to fit an 11,000-year tree-ring callendar into a 6000-year-old earth.). History is a hobby: I'm studying biblical Egypt (The Pentateuch was derived from Egyptian sources.), the early Middle Ages in Britain and Ireland (Vortigern), the Thirty Years War, the War of 1812 and the American Civil War (My gg-grandfather fought for the Union at Bloody Angle.). My life-time goal is to become truly educated; this includes religion, history, mathematics (statistics and heuristic), music (I play the bagpipe at a Grade 3 level.), art (I do hooked yarn "paintings," usually about 4'X6' in size; current project is a wall-hanging of the Stone Kings from Lord of the Rings.) and literature. I'm currently working on a paper on the effects of ice storms on shortleaf pine, a history of the story of Moses and the Exodus and a novel set in the 1960s/70s. Fortunately, the ice storm project is my job, so they pay me to do it. I don't consider this to be unusual (One of my colleagues studies quamtum mechanics and chaos theory as a hobby.), but our local newspaper thought I was unusual enough that they did a full-page feature article on me, complete in full military piper's uniform.
Anyway, I have to agree hole-heartedly that education isn't what it ought to be. One other example: when I was in a junior high American history program, they told us that Ponce de Leon was looking for the "Fountain of Youth." The teachers told it as if he was some kind of nut job. The truth is that he had heard there was a spring whose waters cured impotence and he was planning to bottle it. History a la public schools is more fiction than fact.
Doug
lol
.....I will have you know that I like my trident very much. 