Say ‘No’ to school?

OSAKIS, Minn. — “Can I stay home today because I think I am not feeling well?”

This was the kind of excuse I sometimes gave my parents when I wanted to skip a school day, which I believe many kids have tried. But 9-year-old Samuel Paradee, who lives in this small town in central Minnesota, had never bothered to do so because he doesn’t go to school at all, even though he should be in the 4th grade.

I met the cute blond boy and his family at a gathering when I stayed on a farm in Minnesota to experience rural life as part of the four-month WPI fellowship. I was shocked when I learned that Samuel and his six siblings, instead of attending traditional schools, all had been taught at home until the 12th grade by their mother, Janine Paradee, who had a year-and-a-half college education.

At first I was concerned about the loss of a comprehensive and normal school experience for the 7 kids and their mother’s ability to provide a quality education. But these worries gradually dissipated after Paradee explained what she had done in her 16 years of home schooling.

“I teach all the normal subjects — math, science, history, phonics, spelling, reading, composition and geography etcetera,” she said. “My kids, as many other home-schooled children, usually have higher academic achievement. The reasons for this are many. Who is more interested in a child’s education than their parent?”

Home schooling is a fast-growing trend in the United States in which parents have great freedom to choose what they think is the best school setting for their children. In 2003, an estimated 1 to 2 million children, scattered in almost every state in the country, were being taught by their parent-teachers for primary and secondary education. This accounted for nearly 4 percent of U.S. schoolchildren.

Parents home school their children for many reasons

Paradee told me that firm believers of home schooling were often Christians, like herself, who were not happy that public schools did not teach the Bible. Moreover, more parents were opting to home school their kids for many other reasons, she said. “It seems as though in government schools, students can get too interested in clothes, their friends’ social status, peer pressure, etcetera, and are not interested in education. Most U.S. citizens know very little about geography, our own Civil War and the other history of our nation. That is very unfortunate.”

Complaints about the country’s tuition-free public schools were mounting in many areas. A professor who taught reporting at the University of Florida School of Journalism said to me, “It’s shocking that some freshmen in my class cannot even write a grammatical sentence. I am supposed to teach them how to write interesting reports to attract readers but now I have to do some correction, first, as primary school teachers do. I wonder what’s going on in our public schools?”

Yet Kate Parry, a senior editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the second-largest daily newspaper in Minnesota, was quite satisfied with the quality education her two daughters have received from their local public schools. She agreed that many at-home learners have done well, but she wouldn’t home school her kids because of other major concerns such as less exposure to social life.

Because of the flat economy after 2001, public schools in the U.S. experienced budget cuts that resulted in cuts in staffing and some so-called non-core curricula such as art, music and physical education. In the meantime, violence, poor discipline and drug use among teenagers presented new challenges for both teachers and parents at a time when many developing countries were struggling to secure basic educational opportunities for their children.

It seemed education and other social issues were not drawing much attention from either the news media or the public while the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq continued to top the headlines. But some people did question why the Bush administration would rather spend billions on bombing Iraq than improving the school system. Some parents worried that their children would or maybe already had begun to pay the cost of war.