Parents supervising their children’s remote learning have experienced a rude awakening: The in-person version of the education being provided is subpar. This is how the Bethesda Beat’s Caitlynn Peetz sets the scene for her story on abysmal reading scores in a wealthy suburban county outside of Washington, D.C.:
“What does ‘forgive me’ mean?” the 8-year-old asks.
Her mom, Courtney Patterson, stops reading again — Eloise asks a lot of questions — and gently explains.
Eloise wants to read, but it’s easier for her to listen. As she enters third grade, she is at a lower reading level than her peers and she struggles.
And she’s not alone.
In Montgomery County, half of the approximately 23,400 third-graders ended the 2018-19 school year unable to read at or above grade level, according to the results of a state assessment obtained by Bethesda Beat.
Her mother is the one catching her up, and she will be for the foreseeable future with schools in the area running “virtually” due to the pandemic. More parents should consider doing the same, not as a stopgap to try to repair the work being done in schools, but as the primary providers of their children’s education.
Parents’ belief that they are not “education experts” and therefore cannot provide adequate instruction for their own children is leaving many families feeling handcuffed to the public education system, even when those families might have other options. What happens when they find out the education experts can’t provide suitable instruction either? Only one-third of fourth graders nationally are reading at grade level — a stark example of the unconscionable failure of our schools. And yet, those schools and their advocates put forth no plan to fix this aside from asking for more taxpayer money. It’s a national crisis proving the need for a different approach.
It wasn’t always this way. In his bestselling treatise against compulsory public schools, Dumbing Us Down, John Taylor Gatto writes, “[If you] pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 (when the public school system began) you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level.” Not only are the majority of our children struggling to read and do math on grade level, they are failing to meet our considerably lowered standards of today. And even if they met those standards, they are lower than they should be and keep dropping.
Later in his book, Gatto asks, “Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.”
His point is that children need education. Sometimes schools deliver that and sometimes they don’t. But the act of going into a school building every day doesn’t automatically bestow knowledge; what matters is what happens in the classroom. And when the classroom is insufficient, parents begin looking at alternatives.
And at this moment, a lot of parents have been forced to do just that. For the first time since mass and compulsory schooling was instituted, every parent in the country had months to evaluate how their children are doing, and many don’t like the answers. Even Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard professor who writes extensively on the “dangers of homeschooling,” admitted in a recent interview in Harvard Law Today that “some parents have discovered that public schools are worse than they thought, and have been surprised at how little their kids have been learning.” Bartholet went on to estimate that it’s possible that the number of homeschooling families may rise from 3% to 6%. Those estimates are conservative, judging by a recent survey from EdChoice, with 15% of families saying they are “very likely” to switch to homeschooling full-time, which would mean an increase of 7.5 million homeschoolers.
One thing these new homeschoolers will discover, if they haven’t already, is that the term “homeschooling” is a bit of a misnomer. Home education isn’t recreating school at home, but instead educating children at home. It’s an alternative, not an amateur mock-up. With schools around the country closed, millions more people will be wondering: What does this look like in practice? Do we have to read the same textbooks, do the same workbooks, and sit at our kitchen table for eight hours a day “working”? Homeschoolers around the country are getting this question from newbie friends and answering: Why replicate school if school isn’t working? These textbooks and workbooks aren’t doing the job in one building; why would they work in another? No, home education is a radical departure from what we’re used to, and, in our home, instead looks like the kind of education our Founding Fathers received.
The philosophy we follow is called the Charlotte Mason method, based on the writings of a 19th-century British educator. Starting in fourth grade, children begin reading Plutarch’s Lives, a series of 48 biographies of famous men from the Greek and Roman era. This isn’t just history and literature “class”; it’s instruction on citizenship and morality. Boys and girls starting from age 6 work on “handicrafts,” a general term that can encompass sewing, needlework, baking, woodworking, and more. The main focus of the method is on literature, art, music, and nature study; the majority of our days are spent reading out loud and chewing over the big ideas in the books we’re reading. And the school portion of our day is over by lunch, with enough time left over for nature walks, piano practice, and gym or dance classes.
While Charlotte Mason is among the most popular methodologies in the homeschooling world, home education varies widely. It’s this level of personalization and the lack of centralized control that scares homeschool opponents such as Professor Bartholet of Harvard and attracts the parents who know what kinds of instruction their children need and can see they’re not getting it.
It is no doubt nerve-wracking for a system to be upended this way. But the public’s response has already accomplished something important: The myth that parents are incapable of guiding their own children’s education has been busted once and for all.
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a stay-at-home and homeschooling mother of four, editor at Ricochet.com, and contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
