Potentiality

Dream Team: a parent led, then –in adolescence at some real point– student-led, problem-solving team. The problem to be solved: “What is the best route to the best realization of this individual’s potential”*

Summary: I follow up on yesterday’s entry by stripping away several of the unexamined assumptions of a career schoolman — , e.g.,me. Here’s a partial result: Instead of asking the famiiar “Should we home school?” parents are entitled to ask “Under what conditions would we consider sending our child to public schools?”. In short, a family should believe that its natural and first obligation is to undertake the complete education of its children. I have come to believe that a ‘real’ family, one that is other than a convenient target for both situation comedy ridicule and the corporate quest for more consumer spending and cheap labor (consequences and values be damned) must follow this sequence of reasoning. For starters: the state is not entitled to strip children out of the home and to place them in a school. This is not now, nor has it ever been, a sanctioned (let alone honored) duty of the state and its agents. In fact, court tests by parents protecting their right to educate their children find it otherwise. Dana Mack (see references below) summarized the experience of the Perchemlides family in Amherst PA. That family pursued its right to home school their children after discovering the less than desirable results of public school “processing”. Their son, shy and quite bright, was led to believe that he was

’supposed to be into TV and games and not aware of the world around him, that he [must be] most comfortable with kids his own age and [have] a developing a consumer consciousness’. The schools, Susan [Perhemlides, parent] further charged, were so intent on the teaching of “social skills” to the detriment of academic learning [to the extent that their son] that [their son] had lost all interest in school.”[Dana Mack, p 243] In defense of their right to educate their own child, when it was obvious that family goals for their son’s development were being thwarted and undermined by school educational efforts, the Perchemlides asserted their general right to educate their children, without school harassment and interference. They did so in court after court until they finally received a favorable ruling from the Massachusetts high court. Judge John Greaney, writing for that court, articulated the rights of parents vis-a-vis the state’s legitimate interest in assuring that children are appropriately schooled. Mack’s summary of his ruling reads, in part, as:

the [Amherst] School Committee did infringe on their rights inasmuch as it sought to ‘eviscerate’ a constitutionally protected educational alternative by imposing unreasonable objections to it. ‘The state has an interest in regulating the education of school-age children,’ Greaney affirmed, but only insofar as it must ’see that children are educated to[sigma] bonafide academic and curricular standards.’ It did not have the right ‘to reject an alternative to public education solely because it did not mimic public education in its socialization aspects.

He added, ‘Under our system, parents must be allowed to decide whether public school education, including its socialization aspects, is desirable or undesirable for their children.’(Dana Mack, p 244) At a more general level ( in The Constitutional Basis for Home Education ,thanks to New Hampshire Politics, John Holt notes that

“After a detailed expansion and interpretation of these and other legal precedents he concludes by saying, Let me sum up what I have said here. The courts have held that parents have a Constitutional right to exercise control over the education of children, and the schools have the power also to exercise control over the education of children. But the rights of the parents are very broad, the power of the schools very narrow. Some might argue that the power of the state and the schools, as defined here, are so narrow as to be equal to no power at all, but that is not the case. The state does not have power under the Constitution to tell parents how to educate their children, but it does have the power to assure itself that they are in fact doing something, and that what they are doing is not manifestly harmful. Thus the state would be altogether justified in being very skeptical and critical of the educational proposals of parents who were alcoholics or heavy drug users, or in constant trouble with the law, or whom it knew, or had strong reason to suspect, were physically neglecting or abusing their children.

How then might, and should, the state exercise its power in the matter of home schooling? As good fortune would have it, what the state has a Constitutional power to do is the very thing that it would be wisest to do anyway, which is to say to parents who wish to educate their children, as some school districts are already saying, “Tell us what you want to do in educating your children, and why you want to do it, and how you plan to assess it; send us a report once a year or so about what your children are doing and learning; don’t hesitate to ask us for advice or help; and above all, feel free to use our schools and their many resources whenever you wish.”[emboldening is mine, Spike Hall]

Several school districts in the state have said to home schooling families that their children are welcome to use the school when and as they wish, i.e. to use the library, take a special course, sing in a chorus, play a sport, go on a field trip, or whatever. Clearly a school system that has declared itself a friend and supporter of a home schooling family is much more likely to know what they are really doing, and to be in a position to help them [again, the emboldening is mine, Spike Hall], than a school that has told a home schooling family that they can’t teach their own children at all or can only do so if they use methods identical to the school’s.

There is, after all, an inherent conflict of interest and a possibility for injustice when we ask state schools to evaluate the merits of a family’s home schooling plan. It is a little like telling people they can own any kind of car they want, as long as they have the approval of the local General Motors dealer. Judges must disqualify themselves in cases where they have a personal and/or material interest. Yet the state schools, with their declining budgets, can hardly be disinterested evaluators of family education plans; many a school superintendent has flatly told a family that he would not let them teach their children at home because of the state aid he would lose. (Though it is not clear why schools should not be able to collect state aid for children they are helping to learn at home, as they would if these children were being tutored at home only because they were ill.) People asked to assess home schooling plans should, at the very least, be disinterested, and should not disapprove of home schooling on principle.

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All of this may be a shock to the school-centric thinker. Resistance to the most extreme interpretation of this vision, which has teachers and teacher union leaders envisioning a huge reduction in the number of schools and teachers– has the NEA, for example, lobbying, year after year, against home schooling.

However, and my answer to the following question is what has turned me around, isn’t each child’s potential-realizing “dream team”, the parent led consortium of teachers and school personnel that targets the individual’s best realization of potential? I ask, even given that the dream team will new always exist or produce, “Shouldn’t we work toward the creation of such child focused consortia ?”

In short, I believe that if the design of the school [including school governance, evaluation, curriculum choice, etc].should be such that it is intensely friendly to the processes and aims of home schooling. I believe that the combination of professional educational ideals of school educators* and parental advocacy for the here-and-now actuality that is their child will lead to the best being delivered to each individual.

*particularly ones that have risen in the Fair Shares pay system I have described in recent entries

References and Resources:

• Dana Mack, 1997, The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family, New York: Simon and Schuster”
• John Holt: The Constitutional Basis for Home Education
• Home schooling reading list at The Military Home Schooler
• A selection of research resources on home schooling at theHome Schooling Legal Defense Association (HSLDA).
• Home education research references

*A slight edit of an written entry written in February of 2004. My entries on the problems of realization of potential “forced” me to give a bigger billing to the issue of potential realization in the problem-solving team.