Heidi has three good posts on homeschooling over at her blog. In the order they were posted one, two, three.
Heidi gives excellent reasons why we should be homeschooling, especially in her third post. In the comments are the usual "its a choice" and "public schools are just as good as homeschooling" and my personal favorite, "they are called to be the light and being in public schools will save all those other kids." I have heard these arguments before, numerous times. What they largely boil down to is, "please don't make me feel guilty."
It is self evident that a child is not made to conform, to have every hour of their day regimented. Children naturally have short attention spans, they are naturally curious and are explorers at heart. But for convenience and selfish reasons we send them off to a place where they are confined and in most cases held back from their abilities. They sit for 8 boring hours, a feat which many adults have problems with, and are expected to conform at an age when discovery and imagination should be the rule.
Schools kill off the hunger for learning that all children have. Rather than gaining the knowledge themselves they learn to wait until it is fed to them, lest they get in trouble for reading ahead or asking questions, or worse... they become outcasts for being smarter than the other kids (especially hard on girls.) And so they learn to conform to the baser nature of the crowd.
Our boys are energetic by nature and they are underfed at these schools (seen their hot lunches lately?) and not fed often enough and so they get antsy. Teachers then label them ADD/ADHD and demand that we drug our children. In many cases they will get their demand enforced by the school not accepting the student that doesn't get doped up. And what is Ritalin? Well, when given to lab rats who can self dose themselves with either cocaine or Ritalin, they show no preference. What does that tell you? Speaking of drugs, 7th grade is when most students are introduced to them. It is so prevalent now that there are actually home testing kits.
Children are routinely bullied, often for things that they have ZERO control over. Violence at school is becoming a more and more common occurrence (often due to this bullying,) with death now a very real possibility. And I shudder to even think of how many students are now being sexually abused by their teachers! New cases are discovered weekly!
Dissent and free thought are punished, religious speech is effectively banned, sex-ed is pushed upon students (they even have kids signing "non-disclosure" agreements that state they can't tell their parents they took the course or a survey etc.) Poor thought processes are pushed, critical thinking is nowhere to be seen, high school graduates are illiterate, and the school's answer to all this is to lower the standards even more.
Is homeschooling a choice? Of course it is. But it isn't a light choice such as what to wear that day. It is a choice between duty and dereliction. It is a choice between raising the child you brought into this world whether you intended to or not. It is a choice to be able to say at the end of it all that I did everything I could. That I fought and didn't back down.
Or you could make the choice to watch Oprah, eat bon-bons, own two $40,000 cars and a $300,000 home. It's up to you. But as Dr. Laura would say, "Go do the right thing."
**Update**
Look what is in the news today. Another fun study asking 12y/o girls what their favorite sexual positions are!
And here a "Teacher of the year" molests one of her female students.