So I Went To The Library...

I wanted to find some new books on homeschooling.  Last year I was hard-pressed to find more than one decent home education book at our public library.  This year was slightly more successful!  (They've revamped things a bit and their selection has increased, without having to ship things from other libraries in the region.)

Here's my list!
Home Learning Year by Year - How to Design A Homeschool Curriculum from Preschool Through High School  by Rebecca Rupp   (I glanced at this one last year, but am getting quite a bit more out of it at this point!)

The Dan Riley School for a Girl by Dan Riley  (so far I love this one!  just an entertaining book about a father who took his daughter out of what was considered a good public education system, in middle school, because she was suddenly failing, rebelling, and lacking any desire to learn...  not finished yet, but a good read thus far!)

A Survivor's Guide to Home Schooling by Luanne Shackelford & Susan White  (haven't begun to read it yet - but it looks like a very informative, Biblically based book, that will be easy to get through!)

Family Matters - Why Homeschooling Makes Sense by David Guterson  (I've only read bits and pieces of this one, but I've already found sound arguments for home schooling, on a variety of levels.  Another one I'm looking forward to delving into.  )  Two sections, in particular, that I'd like to quote from this book...

"... Educators complain about unsupportive parents who blame everybody and everything but themselves for the fact that their children are poorly educated; teachers decry career-track professionals with no time or interest in their children's learning and bemoan the fact that many of their charges come from homes where both parents, facing poverty, must work.  Yet career-track parents are only doing what they've been taught to do by an educational system that prepared them for economic life while simultaneously excising them from their families; their absorption in self, work, and money are the inevitable products of our sociopathic schools, where they learned to compete for external rewards and to claw their way toward the top. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, the parents of poor children are at the mercy of an economic system that mostly precludes a life beyond their work.  How can they cultivate learning in the home after long hours spent at dissatisfying jobs that consume almost every ounce of the psychological energy?..."  He goes on - but I want to get to "quote 2".  (Which I like even more!)

"...Schools are supposed to teach critical-thinking skills in order to nurture citizens fully able to enter into a democratic society.  Business, however, prefers an uncritical consumer society guaranteed to purchase its products.  In fact, as John Goodlad's researchers found - a point made once before in this book - less than 2 percent of instructional time in many public schools is reserved for discussions requiring reasoning skills; Goodlad concludes that for the most part schools teach passivity.  Yet even if we were systematically to change this, replacing the entrenched curriculum of passivity with a new, more democratic curriculum of independence - one that emphasized critical thinking - we would still find that in the case of schools, as elsewhere, the medium is the real message.  For all our talk in the classroom of freedom, for every in-class critical-thinking exercise, there will always be a countervailing bell, a strict schedule demanding movement in herds, a dark background of authority, discipline, and regimentation that in the end constitute the truest lesson of schools and the truest preparation for modern economic life.  'Think of the economic tragedy that would result if schools taught critical thinking,' asks John Taylor Gatto.  'Who would crave the mountains of junk our mass-production economony distributes?  Who would eat the processed foods?  Who would wear the plastic shoes?... How could the mass economy survive without the training 'schools' provide?' "

hmmmm... how indeed.

I believe many, many parents are beginning to ask this question, and a plethora of others.  The number of homeschooling families is rapidly rising in the United States, especially, and around the world!