Home Schooling

Home schooling is catching on, big time. The Fireside Academy Community Co-op for Homeschoolers recently organized an educational fair wherein kids gathered for science fair-type presentations and made plans for social activities including a prom and musical productions. In a related development, Fireside may round out the educational experience for its students by importing some bullies to beat up on the wimpier home-schooled boys and snippy cheerleader-types to shame home-schooled girls into anorexia with rude comments on their weight.

One mother commends home-schooling as a means of instilling family values and a Christian world view. "I really didn't feel good about turning my children over to strangers who I didn't know," she said. Actually, if she knew them, they wouldn't be strangers any more, but it's a point well-taken. What can we possibly learn from strangers with years of experience in science, math, or the arts that good old Mom and Dad can't better teach us in the comfort of our own home? It's not as if the progress of humankind over the ages has relied on the next generation exceeding the knowledge of the current one.

The home-schooling mother continues, "I'd rather have my child be a postman who loves the Lord and is an outstanding person with great character than a CEO that's in jail." Of course, the home-schooled postman might very well "go postal" and shoot up the neighborhood in shock after being exposed to the real world for the first time at age 20 and any CEO worth his salt will have squirreled away sufficient ill-gotten gains to allow his Mom to cruise the tropics while he serves out his sentence.

But seriously folks...the educational system not only provides the "book knowledge" to participate in society, but the "street smarts" as well. The lessons learned while interacting with all manner of people between classes, at lunch, and in the school yard may be as valuable as the Pythagorean Theorem. You can't keep your child at home forever, Home School Mom.