Liberals, Don’t Homeschool Your Kids: Why Teaching Children At Home Violates Progressive Values//Dana Goldstein//Slate

zincfingers:

ourcatastrophe:

“This overheated hostility toward public schools runs throughout the new literature on liberal homeschooling, and reveals what is so fundamentally illiberal about the trend: It is rooted in distrust of the public sphere, in class privilege, and in the dated presumption that children hail from two-parent families, in which at least one parent can afford (and wants) to take significant time away from paid work in order to manage a process—education—that most parents entrust to the community at-large.

…there’s something creepy about giving in totally to the terrors of the outside world harming one’s child. In a country increasingly separated by cultural chasms—Christian conservatives vs. secular humanists; Tea Partiers vs. Occupiers—should we really encourage children to trust only their parents or those hand-selected by them, and to mistrust civic life and public institutions?

…Of course, no one wants to sacrifice his own child’s education in order to better serve someone else’s kid. But here’s the great thing about attending racially and socioeconomically integrated schools: It helps children become better grown-ups. Research by Columbia University sociologist Amy Stuart Wells found that adult graduates of integrated high schools shared a commitment to diversity, to understanding and bridging cultural differences, and to appreciating “the humanness of individuals across racial lines.”

this is pretty interesting but i don’t know how much i agree with the premise. i think there are some reasons to pull your kid out of school if you have the resources to, such as severe bullying, a school’s failure to accommodate learning disabilities, or just extremely shitty public school quality (getting your kid, who is dependent on you, a good education is more important than ~sticking to your progressive populist ideals~ IMHO), but in general public school is an important social/cultural experience for young children to have (exposure to people different than oneself: often unpleasant, but probably good for you) and supporting local schools should be a priority for any parent who calls themself progressive. and it’s important to remember that the ability to homeschool or “unschool” (jesus christ i hate that word so much, SO PRETENTIOUS) is based in class privilege.