Ugh.
I just spent a worthless hour reading posts on a forum board
questioning homeschooling and there were several posts from "educated
teachers" who explained how parents without college degrees in teaching
can't possibly provide an adequate education for their children.
Please.
First of all, I do have a college degree - in juvenile
counseling. To get this degree, I had to take several courses in
elementary education and you know what? These classes were
nothing short of a joke. We spent way too much time doing "group"
projects in which I wound up doing all the work myself - because my
peers' ideas of doing a project involved writing one page of nonsense
backed up by "research" that didn't even apply, and I didn't care to
get a failing grade just because these folks were lazy and
careless. My 12-year-old son writes better papers now than these
college students produced, and yet they graduated and now at least some
of them are presumably tenured teachers. Why am I supposed to be
impressed by this?
To
give you a better idea of what I'm talking about - one of our projects
was to write a paper on the effects of television on learning. We
had an entire semester to write this paper. Yeah. A whole
semester. Any of you parents feeling like maybe you aren't up to
snuff because you don't have that hallowed teaching degree - don't
worry. Six or seven days of researching teaching styles and
you'll be pretty much as "educated" as the ladies I graduated with in
1992. Everything else was silly "filler" stuff, like a class that
involved us sitting around discussing "Ways to Motivate Parents" or
"How to Read Out Loud".
One girl in my television study group produced a poorly written page
that said television promoted violence, not really on-topic per se, and
her one and only source was actually a quote about video game
violence. She sat two rows behind me at graduation. And
now, according to some people, she's better qualified to teach my
children than I am. Another girl in my group managed to write two
pages, but once I edited out the number of times she used "like" (I am
NOT making this up!), it dropped her length to just over a page and a
quarter.
One of the posters on this forum I read today actually said "when us
teachers graduate" in her post claiming teachers have the proper
training parents do not have. I guess that proper training didn't
include any basic grammar!
Actually, thanks to my own college experience, I'm not particularly impressed by anyone
who has a college degree. Not to disparage anyone who went to a
college or university and genuinely worked hard, but I went to college
with a lot of people who seemed to think the only purpose of being
there was to party, party, party. My husband, OTOH, was a
Marine. I always said, if I ever owned my own company, I'd hire
retired/former military people over college graduates any day.
While the college kids I knew took pride in doing the absolute minimum
to get by, the Marines I knew were trained to be polite, respectful,
punctual, well-groomed and to get the job done- well.
Now that I'm involved in the homeschooling universe, I'll add that I'd
take homeschoolers over public schoolers any day, and in many ways, the
reasons are the exact same!
