Homeschooling is the way
An Article By Sasha Mercer
Charlotte Mason is a woman revered by many home schoolers and, if they were knew her story, would be reviled by politicians and the teachers’ unions. Born in England in 1842 and orphaned at 16 she became a teacher in a time when, not much different than now, children were taught according to their social class.
The poor children, mostly the children of coal miners, were taught a trade while the upper class were given what use to be a well respected education known as “liberal education” which meant it encompassed all aspects; writing, reading, history, fine arts and foreign language. Unfortunately that term has been dumbed down to mean a hodgepodge of a whole lot of worthless women’s studies classes that won’t get you a job to pay off the $50,000 in student loans that you took out.
Miss Mason quickly discovered that despite what all of society thought at that time, all children, regardless of what class of family they came from, had the ability to think and learn and develop brilliant minds. She said it started at home and gave many parent lectures and wrote a series of books. She simply taught what God told us in the beginning; we are all created in His image and we all have the ability to bear fruit in wisdom, grow in understanding and soak in knowledge.
Politicians, community activists, drug companies, psychologists, special education teachers and our national education association wants us not to believe this. They want us to reject God’s creation and have us believe that we cannot succeed unless we are born in the right zip code, with the proper skin color, or with a certain last name. When a certain school system has a majority of their minority students unable to pass the basic reading, writing and math portions of a standardized test, they shrug their shoulders and say these kids are unable to think because of where they come from. It’s not their fault, it’s not the teachers’ fault, it’s rather like teaching a fish to read, it just can’t be done. The schools don’t have the money that the wealthier schools do, if we just had more money maybe we could get these kids prepared for McDonald’s level jobs after 12 years, then when that doesn’t work, the teachers tell us they could teach these kids if they were in school at a younger age, six isn’t early enough. Eventually we will be dropping our babies off on our way home from the hospital. Teachers and politicians will have us convinced that our children won’t make it unless they are in a properly certified, structured environment, housed with properly certified young twenty somethings that know better than the parents. After all, they were taught herd management, how to read a lesson plan, and never to refer to a beige crayon as “skin color.” Yes, this is what our children need to succeed, but eighteen years later, when they can’t do long division, or read beyond a fifth grade level, or tell Jay Leno’s man on the street who the current vice president is, we will strike in the streets and demand that McDonald’s pays them $17 an hour, because after all, they can’t do any better.
This is why politicians and the teacher’s unions hate home schoolers. No, I am not using the word “hate” too loosely. Homeschoolers prove all these groups wrong; the special educators, the psychologists, the drug companies, the politicians. A regular, every day parent, can take their child through all the grade levels, without having spent four years at a university to become certified in how to teach a child everything they themselves learned before the age of eighteen, and the child will out-test, outshine, and do circles around their public school counterparts, all without that parent paying one union due, not asking a doctor to prescribe one psychotropic drug, and without requiring the employment of a whole team of school administrators over twelve years. Not hard to see how home schoolers may be the enemy to a lot of people that need their pockets lined.
An older gentleman came up to my family in a fast food restaurant one day. He struck up a conversation with us about our boys and their good manners and then asked about where they went to school. When speaking with the older generation about home schooling I often get a mixed response. Some have a hard time understanding that the local school system in no way shape or form resembles what they went to fifty years ago.
With this in mind I took a deep breath and said we home schooled. He smiled sincerely and said, let me tell you a story. When he was twenty one, he walked into the teacher’s lounge as a new teacher. He sat amongst the veteran teachers and listened as they complained about the class sizes they were forced to teach. Too many students, they complained, for them to teach efficiently. As the years went by, he sat amongst the veteran teachers as he listened to them complain about the new home schooling movement which was taking children out of their classrooms and keeping them at home. Wait a minute, he said to these teachers, I thought you wanted smaller class sizes? He told me they just looked at him and then it all clicked. I smiled and nodded in understanding. “It’s all about the money,” I told him, to which he nodded. “Exactly. Keep up the good work with your kids,” and he left the restaurant.
These groups in our society would like us to believe that we aren’t created in the image of God, that we have evolved from the lowest form of feces throwing apes and that unfortunately, some of us have evolved further than others. This group of elites sit in power over us, whether in the school system, the doctor’s office, or the white house with its band of cohorts in congress and they tell us we can’t be like them, we aren’t in the right stage of the evolutionary process. We were born in the wrong neighborhood, with the wrong skin color, and we are doomed to be mediocre. We can’t get out score any better on that test, or get out of that fast food job, so we better demand that test scores don’t matter and that minimum wage job better pay a “living wage,” which simply means enough to keep you content so you won’t try to better yourself to compete with the rest of the elite. They want your votes, they don’t want competition, after all.
The Romans in power knew that before voting time came around, they better hand out bread and salt to keep the people happy with their status quo so they could remain in power. You don’t want your constituents too poor to be unhappy with their situation but you certainly didn’t want them wealthy enough to compete with you. Like an abusive husband that beats into their wife that they are nothing without them, a huge portion of our country thinks they are nothing without their prescription drug, union, or political party. As Apostle Paul said in Galatians 4:17 “They are enthusiastic about you, but not for any good. Instead they want to isolate you so that you will be enthusiastic about them.” Emphasis mine.
Reject the voices that tell you that you aren’t good enough to teach your own children, or good enough to get yourself out of a fast food job. You don’t need a higher wage at McDonald’s, you need to get out there and make the world a better place and tell the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Clintons and the Bushes that you don’t need a last name to succeed in the United States, God gave you something better than that. He created us in His image, there are no limits to what we can be and learn.
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