What Makes People Think They Are Qualified To Teach Their Own Kids?

[TexasBill]

137. But Kip was a genius

I see Heinlein quoted so often, from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long to the "an armed society is a polite society" from Beyond This Horizon to "grok" from Stranger in a Strange Land.

Robert Heinlein was a master storyteller and a very intelligent man. However, he and his wife, Virginia, were not able to have children. As a result, his "children," who were more often adolescents or young adults were constructs, budding John Galts. Perhaps Podkayne, from Podkayne of Mars, was somewhat more of a typical teenager, but she had her supergenius brother Clark for balance.

Kip Russell was a genius: At the end of the book, Professor Reisfeld, Pee Wee's father, describes Kip's father as one of the great minds of the age, says Kip's mother was his father's star student and opines that Kip is no less gifted.

And, don't forget, Dr. Russell did not pull Kip out of Center. Kip got the "occupational therapy for morons" along with the advanced topics he studied at home.

As Mark Twain put it, "I never let my schooling interfere with my education."

Successful education depends on two things: a teacher and one or more parents with a dedication to learning. There's nothing in the rule book at says they have to be different people. Conversely, there's nothing that says they have to be the same.

The important thing is the educated child capable of functioning well in society and interested in continuing to learn on his or her own. With that goal in mind, outcome should matter more than delivery. Yes, there may be subjects in which the parent may be weak: there are resources online and usually tutors can be found to take care of those gaps. In fact, if the parent is as interested in learning as the they are in the child learning, home schooling can be a richly rewarding experience with a likely successful outcome.

On the other hand, being in with other children and exposed to the differences found in most modern classrooms, can be a very good experience for a child, as can learning to coexist in a group governed by rules that apply to all. If the scholastic program isn't all the parents would desire, Dr. Russell's method is always available. My parents taught me an awful lot that I would never have learned in school. So I had the benefit of some good teachers and parents interested in my education.

So what makes parents think they are qualified to home-school? All sorts of reasons: a poor public school system, a belief they can deliver a higher-quality of education that is suited to the child's ability and needs or the necessity of protecting their child from the evil coterie of Satan-worshippers running the school district without daily prayer and a curriculum that includes sex education. This last group might be a subject for concern as they will leave the child ill-prepared to deal with the Godless world outside, but that's not up to us.

In the final analysis, parents think they are qualified because they are the parents and they are willing to take the responsibility for educating their child at least to the point the child can pass the standardized tests most states require.

And what's the real objection? We are already accustomed to distributed learning at the college level: look at the University of Phoenix. Similar resources can be made available for any grade. The curricula are already in place, it's a matter of transferring them to systems that can handle many connections with enough bandwidth for the traffic.

Rather than referencing Heinlein's work, I would recommend a short story written by Isaac Asimov (who did have children) about seven years before Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. It's called "The Fun They Had." It's worth a read because the future Asimov envisioned for 150 years from now is already here.