Dennis,

I really beg to differ with the majority of point about home schooling in your USA Today article.

I currently have my children in public school, but in many cases, the state's desire to "average" children is preventing my child from getting the best education he could get.

Let me tell you about my 3rd grader. He just turned 8. He's read all 5 Harry Potter books. He read the new 900 page one, Order of the Phoenix, in 2 weeks this summer, after he got it for his birthday. He does 2x2 multiplication on paper, adds 2 and 3 digit numbers in his head. Most of the time, he's bored at school.

The public school will only let him check out 2 library books at a time, so we got him 3 more at the public library today, Tom Sawyer, Fudge 'A Mania, and a book of poems. He'll have all 5 read in 2 weeks.

Yet, the "public school" system considers him to be "smart", but not "gifted and talented".

The reason I disagree so much with your attack on "home schooling", is that we are very active in all 3 of our children's education. If my wife had the temperment, or we had the money, we would home school our kids.

We "home schooled" our children before they entered public school. My 3 year old will be reading when he starts kindergarten. We "home school" our children on nights and weekends. We use every life experience as an opportunity to teach them something.

My problem with public schools, and academics like you, is that you want to set policy and "standardize", you want to make sure that a standard history, science, etc. curriculum is taught and you preach about tolerance and diversity, when you have no tolerance for anyone who might decide to teach their children multiple "theories" of how the world and universe began. You refuse to even allow a biblical view as even a possibility, then teach evolution of the species as FACT.

As my children age, I fully intend to be involved in their science, pre-calc, calculus, biology and chemistry as they enter middle school and even high school. I'll teach them things you can't even begin to teach in a public school, because of safety and legal reasons. My personal high school chemistry experience, in 1981, was that the school could not allow me to mix any chemical that I could possibly injure myself with. No acids, no chlorine. I learned about chlorine as a teenager by adding it to the swimming pool at home. I learned by reading the directions and receiving training about how dangerous it was. And, I'm sure the public system hasn't changed much, since I was in high school. The students now, probably do even less.

"Can there be anything more important to each child and thus to our democratic society than to develop virtues and values such as respect for others, the ability to communicate and collaborate and an openness to diversity and new ideas? Such virtues and values cannot be accessed on the Internet. "

I completely disagree with this statement. If there were any tool that CAN teach virtues and values, it IS the Internet. Why? Because my son has no idea (without a picture), whether the author of an article was white or black, or even hispanic. My son, researched Martin Luther King's involvement in the Memphis garbage worker's strike and his involvement in the Rosa Parks bus boycott. He knows more about it than I do.

I interact with several people on a computer chat board. I really have no idea if they are black, or white, or yellow, or green. That's the beauty of the Internet. Watch the recent movie, "Bringin' Down The House", and you'll get a taste of what I'm talking about.

Even though we're a "white" family, we listen to the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. We watch movies with Queen Latifa. We listen to rap (but not gangsta' rap). He researched Martin Luther King from the Internet, with our help.

My son wants to "be" Martin Luther King, when the school has it's patriotic play in the spring. He won't be able to "be" Martin Luther King. Can you guess why? Well, he's white.

"The isolation implicit in home teaching is anathema to socialization and citizenship. It is a rejection of community and makes the home-schooler the captive of the orthodoxies of the parents. "

I disagree with this statement, also. The FIRST place socialization and citizenship SHOULD be taught is in the home. My eight year old has two siblings. He learns about three times the lessons he learns at school at home about socialization. Why? Because he will try a lot of behaviors at home that he won't attempt at school. He is learning how to interact with these other two siblings as a citizen in the context of authority (parents). He already has a good idea of what rules he can bend, and which ones he HAS to follow. By interacting with different age groups (instead of all his own age at school), he learns that people of different ages are at different developmental capabilities. He knows that even if he doesn't like these "younger" people, he still has to respect authority. He is learning how to lead his siblings, under the context of authority.

I agree that children in older age groups, teenagers, for example, need more social interaction than the home. But children below 9 years of age need the close social context of home and values and a balance of love and authority, to grow and flourish. This balance of love and control allows them to test new theories, but still have a loving parent or authority figure to run back to, when the theory doesn't work or make sense.

Finally, I completely disagree that the same-age socialization that occurs at the middle and early high school age is productive to the development of good citizens within society. The rebellion of the baby boomer generation in the 1960's grew out of a post WW-II desire to educate all children in "age appropriate" settings. This created the spirit of rebellion, which the advent of Rock 'N Roll music, radio, and the media industry were able to leverage into creating the moral relativism, rebellious, and age-discriminatory culture we have today. Teenagers rejected the morality of their parents, and attempted to implement their own "generational" morality. Every teenage generation since the creation of age-specific schooling has attempted to reject the values of the "elder" generation. And it will only get worse, as we continue to group people by age, instead of teaching people that the advice of people in all phases of life (especially our elders) is valuable.

Home is the first place you learn social skills. Then, you attempt to use those models in the context of a school situation. However, many societies flourished for centuries under a model where there was no "school" context, but teenagers applied what they learned at home to the "real" world as apprentices, under the leadership of responsible adults.

Dennis, I would like to believe that you have an open mind. I would like to believe that you are more than simply a "shill" for the educational institutions that you teach for, and belong to. I sincerely hope that my e-mail will challenge your educational assumptions, and begin to think of education in a different context. I would like you to believe that children are taught as much at home, or IRL (In Real Life) as they are at a public school. I agree that there are a small minority of extemists in our culture that want to teach their children things that will make them anti-social in life. But these people exist in all cultures, and the diversity of the United States makes those extremists even more rare than, for example in the Middle East.

However, your attempt to brush all "home schools" as attempts to teach children extreme views is in very poor taste, and is mean-spirited. Please reconsider your views.

Glen Austin
Caring Parent
Frisco, Texas