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Homeschooling: An answer to our drastically dumbed-down public schools



Homeschooling my children has given me quite the education. For example, never again will I doubt the capacity of some people to opine on topics they know nothing about.

Take Dr. Waitman W. Beorn, a historian who specializes in “Holocaust studies." He says you’re not qualified to homeschool your kids.

Apparently, Dr. Beorn isn’t all that qualified himself, because despite having his own Wikipedia page listing many awards and accomplishments, he’s only an assistant professor at a college that’s been around about as long as grunge music. Thankfully, that isn’t his only gig; he’s also the host of a podcast with under 1,000 followers on Twitter.

The only thing that warranted him moving on to ninth grade was the fact that he was 15, and school leaders could not have a 16-year-old eighth grader driving to school every day.

But I’m not here to judge. Academia is a tough gig. I should know — I taught in the public school system for a lucky 13 years. And I’m here to tell you that while maybe Assistant Professor Beorn is right about you not being qualified to homeschool your kids, I know for a fact that the public school system isn’t qualified to teach your kids.

Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it right now. Take this eighth-grade exam from Bullitt County, Kentucky, dating back to 1913. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

I’ll be surprised if half of you even knew where to start with half the questions on that test. And remember, this was a test for eighth graders. In Kentucky.

Too old to fail

The fact is that we’ve all been robbed by the government’s deliberate dumbing down of the school system, and today’s kids are continuing to be cheated out of their full potential.

Let me give you a firsthand account of how the bar is lowered and we're all being short-changed as a result.

It is fundamentally misunderstood by the public how this actually goes down. I remember multiple times when I was still in the school system that teachers would be on the chopping block. Administration was mad, guidance was mad, anybody with any kind of authority in the school was mad if they had more than one or two kids failing their classes.

You're not allowed to fail kids because it messes with everything.

We were on the block schedule, so you’d have one set of classes in the first semester and a different set the second semester. If you fail all your classes the first semester and you go on to the second semester, then when do you make up those credits? How do you get those credits so that you can graduate on time?

Because guess what? If you don't graduate on time, who gets penalized? Not the student. The school is who gets penalized.

8th graders who drive

And that right there is the downfall of the American education system: when you can't hold a child back because of their age. I had a student like this who had already failed enough times in his school career that he was 15 years old and in eighth grade.

When the time came to discuss promotions to high school, he was moved forward. He did not show any capability for this. The only thing that warranted him moving on to ninth grade was the fact that he was 15, and school leaders could not have a 16-year-old eighth grader driving to school every day.

That kind of stuff really sticks in my craw because then they want to blame the teachers for all of this stuff, when teachers are those actually holding kids to a standard that penalizes when the kids don't pass. So what does that lead to? Mediocrity all the way around.

And I had kids who would not do a thing all semester long — as juniors in high school — knowing that they had to have Spanish to graduate. They would come to me in the last few days of the semester and say, “Could I have my makeup work?” You want an entire semester's worth of work? Right now?

Give me a break!

But I guess I did what I did because I had to? I gathered up all that work and then they wouldn't even do it all! They would do just enough to pass.

It's like they asked themselves, “How much of this do I actually have to complete to pass?”

'Do you wanna graduate?'

I had this one boy I remember in particular. He started off doing the work, and a couple of pages in, it was obvious he had handed it to somebody else, and it was a girl at that. I knew it was a girl because of the handwriting. And half of it was wrong anyway.

The kicker? This was a Spanish class, and he was a Mexican. From Mexico.

So I found him, marched my happy little self down the hallway, and I chewed him out right there in front of God and his friends and everybody.

And I said, “You are going to do this work. You're going to come to my room right now and do this work.”

He wasn't happy about it.

I said, “Do you wanna graduate?” He was a senior. A senior in a junior-level class. It was May. And did I mention he was a Mexican in a Spanish class?

This system isn’t fair for the teachers who take the brunt of the work and blame. It’s not fair for the kids who do the work. It's not fair to anyone. It especially wasn’t fair to kids like him, because all that told him is he can continue to go through life not doing anything, and then at the end, everything that he needs will be handed to him.

Beorn yesterday

And here’s the flip side of that kind of scenario. I once had a student who broke his thumb playing football on the school team. We had a pretty strict technology policy — no personal cell phones or laptops allowed.

We had a new administrator that year, so I tried to make sure that everything was kosher and asked my principal if I could allow this student to use his laptop since he broke his thumb on his dominant hand and couldn’t really write. And I was told no, because of the technology policy.

How is it I was expected to accommodate the kids who don't do Jack Diddley but then I was not allowed to do something to help a child who had very good grades, was a very good student, had no discipline problems, and who had broken his thumb playing football for the school team? Explain to me how that was the right thing to do.

This is the American education system in a nutshell.

I have a question for you, Dr. Beorn: If I’m unqualified to teach my children, then what does that say about the system that trained me for 30 years? And why would I send my kids into that?

Until very recently, you had to be fluent in Greek and Latin to even be considered for admission to Harvard and other fine universities. Now, we struggle to get kids through two semesters of Spanish, and nearly a quarter of Americans are nigh-illiterate.

Maybe I’m not qualified to teach my children, Dr. Beorn, but I at least recognize where I’m deficient. Maybe, just maybe, if I do my job right, my kids will be competent enough to teach yours.