Wednesday, April 29, 2020

In Defense of Homeschooling

Dear Harvard University and Harvard Magazine,

Contrary to your woeful stereotyping of homeschoolers in the biased, speculative and wholly unsubstantiated portrait painted in Harvard Magazine currently, here is photographic proof that my homeschooled 10th grader is not chained to the kitchen table by horrible authoritarian parents who isolate and indocrinate him. 


There he is at the *Harvard Museum of Natural History* taking in the *gasp* evolution and zoology exhibits.  He wants to be an evolutionary biologist and a paleontologist.

Here he is at Columbia and Yale and MIT participating in enrichment programs for high school students, rather than languishing in a bookish prison as your article depicted. 


He has recently walked the Freedom Trail in Boston and visited Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Art, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Historical Society, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University, Yale Art Gallery, and too many others to list here.

I will stack his DIY interest tailored education against any public school in the nation and feel confident it is at least equivalent, if not far superior. 

In some of the photos, he has on a ballcap that reads "Assume nothing." I would like to suggest that you adopt that as your mantra in attempting to understand the diverse and wonderful practice of homeschooling.  If Veritas is your motto, you need to seriously reexamine what you have published and your call for a presumptive ban on an educational modality that is effective, creative, and stimulates a lifelong love of learning.

Sincerely, an Ivy League educated libertarian retired lawyer who finds your latest foray into journalism laughable.

Sunday, April 26, 2020

Hey, Harvard Magazine!

Here's something that I wrote a long time ago that I would like to serenade Harvard Magazine and a certain ignorant law professor with...  In case it isn't painfully obvious, it's to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic.

BATTLE HYMN OF THE HOMESCHOOLER

Under the Department of Education
We’ve produced some hopeless dolts
But at least they are quite passive
And the bulk of them don’t vote.
“There must be accountability!
Now teach them to the test!”
And stupidity marches on…

CHORUS: 
Glory, Glory education
Is a joke in this great  nation.
Glory, glory education
While testing marches on.

We have hamstrung all the teachers
With our great assessment tools
We have killed their creativity 
And generated fools
The kids are bored to tears
So that the brightest of them drool
Public education marches on.

CHORUS

If you live in a great district 
Then your kids have got a prayer
If you’re poor or from the city
Well, the rich folks do not share
When there’s 40 children in a room
Then chaos reigns supreme
And testing marches on.

CHORUS

The No Child Left Behind Law
Makes sure no one gets ahead.
They will drill and kill the subjects 
Till the kids wish they were dead.
We give lipservice to improving
But the game is rigged, you see,
And Bureaucracy marches on.

CHORUS

We tell kids that they must study
And that college is the goal
But when graduation comes
They’re in a financial black hole
And the jobs that they have worked for
Have been shipped out overseas
As propaganda marches on.

CHORUS

If you’d have your kids be thinkers
Then you need a better tool.
Pull them out of institutions,
Roll your sleeves up and homeschool.
Though they won’t have a diploma
Stamped and sealed by government
They will think for themselves!

Glory, glory education
Take a permanent vacation
Join the happy homeschool nation
And learning marches on.


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