A little rant about home schooling

Yes, I do have some (liberal) friends who home school their kids, and I respect their opinion and, of course, their right to do so. That said, I think this is a horrible idea, and one that has the potential to seriously harm this country over the next several decades.

The basic idea of home schooling is that parents can do better than teachers, especially when the choice is the public school system. This is misguided at best. Of course some teachers are under-trained and over-worked. Of course some (but by no means all) public school systems are of really low quality. But this still doesn't make home schooling a better choice, for a variety of reasons.

Let's start with the common criticism of public schools. I have a very good friend who sent his kids to private school on the ground that the public ones where he lives are not good enough (which is actually debatable, since he lives in an area where public schools have a good reputation). As much as my friend is a kind person, smart, and generally speaking liberal, I still haven't been able to making him understand why public schools perform, on average, less well than private institutions. The answer is two-pronged, and rather simple: good private schools have more money (which implies a variety of things, but chiefly a better teacher/student ratio, the single best predictor of a quality educational experience), and of course private schools can select the best candidates and discard the rest. But neither less money nor the inability to fail students are ingrained into the definition of a public school, they can both be changed, if the public so wishes.

Now back to home schooling. First off, the very idea is an affront to the teaching profession, because it implies that anybody, and I mean anybody, can do a better job at teaching than those people who are actually professionally trained to do so. The fact that there are incompetent teachers is no excuse, because that applies to any other professional category. Just because there are incompetent mechanics, doctors, and constructors, that doesn't mean that each of us has to turn into a full time mechanic-doctor-constructor-and-whatever-else-is-needed in order to make it in life. A major point of living in a society is the division of labor that it affords all of us, with the consequent ability to specialize and do a better job at specific tasks.

Moreover, even when parents manage to do reasonably well at teaching the curriculum, they are simply unable to expose their kids to genuinely different viewpoints, which is arguably one of the best features of a public education. Of course, that's exactly why home schooling is popular among religious fundamentalists: because they are not interested in raising a generation of critical thinkers, but rather a bunch of ideological robots. And they are succeeding! I've met home schooled children from fundamentalist families, and their naive view of the world, as well as their total lack of inter-personal skills (unless they find themselves among equally trained little robots) are at the same time pathetic and scary.

American society is on the brink of seeing millions and millions of these robots come of age, get jobs, vote, and -- in some cases -- get elected as public officials. Most of them think that evolution is a dirty word, are convinced that abstinence-only programs are the best form of sex education, and fervently believe that God personally favors the US of America in its Manifest Destiny. These are not bad people, just unbelievably uneducated (in the broad sense of the term) ones. It doesn't matter that their scholastic achievement tests are comparable to those of public school kids, that isn't the point. Knowledge of facts is necessary for education, but it is not what education is all about.

Please, tell your friends not to home school their kids. Instead, they could put their energy and resources into demanding better support for public schools and their teachers. That would really make the US a better place to live for all of us.