Quote:
Originally Posted by B-Stealth
This is my real beef with homeschooling:
You can live anywhere in the world; but yet your so mistrusting of the general public you must isolate your children from the community you choose to reside.
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It takes a village to raise a child. - Hillary Clinton
It's not so much a distrust of the general public, so much as a recognition of the failure of government in the area of education.
If you don't trust government with your children's healthcare, why trust them with your children's education. Please, if you have signed up for Obamacare, please let us know, so we can't unjustly consider you inconsistent. In what other areas do you trust the government to do a better job than motivated individuals or the private sector?
Home schooling is not isolation at all. Our children all spend 10-20 hours each week with their peers outside of our home. But it's the inadequate education and supervision in the government schools that is problematic for us.
We have a great church and have also found a wide variety of sporting and extracurricular activities that our children participate in. Our children also attend courses at a local college. I often tell my wife and children that I don't think a college degree from that school would be worth very much, but it does make for a good high school experience. In areas where the local college is weak, we've had our children do distance learning courses through UC Berkeley, Rice, Duke, and other institutions.
Why not move? Louisiana has a tremendous amount to offer both adults and children in just about every area of life other than public education. We can easily make up the education gap by home schooling, but the other quality of life gaps are much harder to make up in other places. We may relocate to qualify for in state tuition in a place with better universities. But I'm sure we'd work hard to return to LA as soon as that is squared away.
Ultimately, I'd like to live either on Holly Beach or Grand Isle. I recently turned down a job offer that would have provided living accommodations on Holly Beach, because it would have been unfair to my children who really need a bunch of closer recreational activities (their favorites, not mine) and college classes.