You can laugh at nutty right-wingers who home-school their kids because they don’t want them to learn about evolution; you can sneer at dirty hippies who unschool their kids at home because they can’t be tied to the Man’s curriculum, man. Laugh and sneer all you want, but those home-schooled and unschooled kids are not being hounded to death — literally, in a case documented on-screen in “Bully” — by their peers.
I have an 8-year-old child, and I can say that watching this documentary about bullying in schools was more viscerally disturbing than sitting through almost any horror movie I can think of.
Maybe, in other words, it might help our kids if we got a little more paranoid about schools. Perhaps we should at least consider the possibility that the best way to improve schools is to empty them. And if home-schooling and unschooling aren’t for you — well, Internet distance learning programs...
Isolate the kids from their folks for 6-7 hours a day and they form their own culture of sorts--like filling a vacuum, which I don't see much if any evidence of in the home-schooled kids at the churches I've attended. They seem remarkably more mature and independent than I and my public-educated peers were when we were their age. Makes me feel quite jealous whenever I see them.
I wasn't home-schooled but I can see from those who have been that they have the blessing of having had one less subculture to have to deal with. The one made up of social casts and classes with names like "jocks", "nerds", "sluts", "burnouts", "preppies", etc.; which from everything I can tell is a totally manufactured subculture (byproduct) of our current mass-education system (or "assembly-line education system, as my college English teacher--and modern society critic-- used to call it).
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