Liberals, Homeschool Your Kids! Homeschool Atheist Momma Responds

homeschool atheist homeschool atheist homeschool atheist homeschool atheist homeschool atheist homeschool atheist homeschool atheist homeschool atheist 
Well, I read another article where the author was very anti-homeschooling. At first I thought I guess I AM pretty sensitive, as my family always says, maybe I need to chillax.  

Now that this article has been out for awhile, I see that many homeschooling parents are riled up about it. And I have to ask, what are we doing to this author that makes her so hostile and vehemently against our choices for how we educate our children?

Since I don't know this author, all I can do is apply the information that I do have in order to understand her stewing and brewing about homeschool. Especially as I see no evidence that she has done much research on the subject. 

Many people who have "anger issues" tend to be very insecure and tend to feel very personally injured by events that often have nothing to do with them. Comparisons and negative self judgement can also bring forth an angry response, seemingly out of left field. Belief systems, unique to each person, often contribute to the activity in the mind of a person that leads to anger and angry outbursts.

In short, the root of anger can usually be found right inside the mind of the person expressing the anger. Have you ever thought of that? A person who is frequently angry can often name forty eleven reasons, causes, triggers, or roots of their anger outburst. While the truth is, it is the assumptions within their own mind that actually "cause" the resulting anger. Assumptions that, usually, result in the effected person feeling an overwhelming sense of anger.

Without the self awareness necessary for recognizing this, chronically angry people tend to lay blame squarely on outside issues. They tend to feel antagonized by relatively neutral stimuli. In other words, my guess is that it is the writer's own personal "demons" that are causing such a stir on the internet these days.

I don't know Dana Goldstein, the author of the now-infamous article against homeschooling. I'm sure she has her own reasons for looking in the extreme margins of homeschooling in order to characterize the entirety of homeschool as so negative.

For example this concluding excerpt from Goldstein's article says:

...government is the only institution with the power and scale to intervene in the massive undertaking of better educating American children, 90 percent of whom currently attend public schools. 

(And it’s worth remembering that schools provide not just education, but basic child care while parents are at work.) Lefty homeschoolers might be preaching sound social values to their children, but they aren’t practicing them. If progressives want to improve schools, we shouldn’t empty them out. We ought to flood them with our kids, and then debate vociferously what they ought to be doing.

Maybe she is afraid of the responsibility of homeschooling children.  Maybe she feels unable to undertake such a lifestyle.  I can generously wonder if, perhaps, she has observed some negative homeschooling examples out there.  I can only guess.  What I do know is that none of "us' needs to respond to her hostility.  I also hope that homeschoolers and others who read that piece will not let it's opposition cause them to doubt themselves or their homeschool choices.

I can see that her anger over the audacity of parents to homeschool their own children is not based on research or observation, but on something a bit more...close to home.

I read here, on Dana Goldstein's own website that she is the child of public educators. In fact, I am the sister to a remarkable public school teacher. But I am not invested in supporting the school system because of my love and affection for people who have, themselves, invested in it. I am not as optimistic as her "13 years" of wonderful public schooling have made her. I have seen the schools; haven't you? Goldstein claiming that homeschoolers "jumping ship" of the ailing schools is a part of the problem. I suggest she consider the possibility that she is confusing "cause" with "effect".

Dana Goldstein does remark that her main argument again homeschooling is that it is not healthy for the common good. Honestly, I have never considered this point of view much. I can see no way that our being in school would even begin to touch the major problems with the school systems in our country. 

The common good. Eh?

I say to the Liberals as I say to the Conservatives:  Get your facts straight and your nose out of my family. AND I pay my taxes:  the state schools get my support whether I would have them get it or not.  

They don't also need my children.

Have YOU read this Goldstein article and seen it written about and written about and written about and discussed elsewhere on the net?

Don't you wish the furor would simply die down?

She's wrong.  It is as simple as that.