New Jersey home schooling: The Wild West of education

“One of the goals of creating clear, agreed-upon curriculum standards is to protect kids against people who have extreme ideological positions,” said Robert Schwartz, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “This crosses some serious boundaries, which wouldn’t be allowable in a public school.”

Translation: Even if you are born into a family with different ideology we intend to change that for you and make you just like us. Yeah, that’s embracing diversity…S.K.

“Home schooling has had plenty of headliner success stories: Mozart, Theodore Roosevelt and Susan B. Anthony were educated at home. Home schoolers have swept national spelling and geography bees, and taken home the top prize at the famed Siemens Westinghouse Competition.”

By Julie O’Connor/The Star-Ledger

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Imagine your kid came home from high school one day and recited the day’s lessons:

• Modern kangaroos are descended from two ancestors on Noah’s Ark.
• Dinosaurs may still live among us.
• Islam is one of the world’s most violent religions.
• Evolution is racist.
• Many liberals don’t think lying is wrong, and even delight in it.
• Public schools make homosexuals.
• Atheists tend to be fat, and obesity impairs brain function. (This point is accompanied by photos of overweight atheists.)

Many parents would march into the principal’s office or storm the next meeting of the school board, demanding an explanation for a misguided curriculum that defies science and, well, common sense.
http://blog.nj.com/perspective/2011/07/new_jersey_home_schooling_the.html
Comment by Dan
“Imagine your kid came home from high school one day and recited the day’s lessons:”
– Human life originated from some sort of primordial soup billions of years ago.
– The attacks on 9/11 were a result of actions of the United States government.
– Homosexuality is a completely acceptable lifestyle and no moral judgments can be made about it.
– There is nothing wrong with pre-marital sex, so here are some ways to practice it safely.
– The US Constitution was written by a group of rich, racist white men hundreds of years ago and cannot be applied to life today without dynamically interpreting it to say what we want it to say.
– The government is in need of more progressive policies to better carry out the “social contract” with it people.
“Many parents would march into the principal’s office or storm the next meeting of the school board, demanding an explanation for a misguided curriculum that defies science and, well, common sense.”
And the principal and the school board would tell the parent to go out and pound salt because this is what the school is teaching and that parents should leave teaching to the professionals.
The scenario in the article just does not make sense – in homeschooling the PARENT is in control of the education – parents would not have their children in Mr. Schafly’s class unless they wanted them in there. It is in the PUBLIC SCHOOL scenario that the parents have the least amount of control over their child’s education.