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School's Out Forever?
[American Greatness] Homeschooling certainly has its challenges, especially when foisted on families with little or no warning. But many families may find that its benefits outweigh the costs in this time of virus induced homeschooling. Expect the number of permanent homeschoolers to rise as a result.With just about every public school in the country closed at this time, the only way for kids to get an education is at home. Many see this as nothing less than tragic. Writing in Education Week, Stephen Sawchuk claims that schools are an "absolute necessity for the functioning of civic culture, and even more fundamentally than that, daily life." If Sawchuk is correct, the country’s troubles extend way beyond the Wuhan virus. While shutting down public schools is certainly a massive disruption, our civic culture was just fine before the government’s monopoly on education came to be. The push for the government’s role in education began in the 1830s when a group of dedicated reformers declared that state involvement was needed to ensure all children get a better, more unified education. Leading the charge was Bostonian Horace Mann who, with like-minded souls, campaigned for a greater state role in education. They argued that a centrally planned system of tax-funded schools would be superior to the independent and home schools that existed at the time. As the late Cato Institute scholar Andrew Coulson noted, "Shifting the reins of educational power from private to public hands would, they promised, yield better teaching methods and materials, greater efficiency, superior service to the poor, and a stronger, more cohesive nation. Mann even ventured to predict that if public schooling were widely adopted and given enough time to work, ’nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete,’ and ’the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged.’" (Emphasis added.) While Mann’s utopian goals obviously didn’t quite work out as planned, they did create a link in people’s minds between the "institution of public schooling and the ideals of public education" that tragically still exists. A look at literacy rates is instructive. In 1840, before compulsory public schools existed, literacy rates were about 90 percent. Posted by: Besoeker 2020-03-30 |
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