Back to school?

By Rebecca Hagelin

Have you seen that clever TV commercial in which the father, much to the chagrin of his two young kids, gleefully shops for school supplies to the sound of the Christmas carol “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”?

The dread of returning to the grinding routine of school is an almost universal experience for children. That being true, I often wonder whether there could there be an alternative to the standard school model which is employed by most government schools, private schools, and even many home-schoolers? Better yet, is there an alternative model that would reduce or eliminate the current competition between these three schooling concepts?

We hear today that education in America is failing. That’s ironic – every politician for at least a century has vowed to fix our education system, and more money is thrown at it today than ever before. We also hear a lot of debate about the advantages of a public vs. private education, vouchers and the like, but it seems unlikely that that debate will soon be resolved.

Most people seem to agree, however, on at least one point – that parental participation is directly related to the success of the child’s education. Since that is a universally held belief, then it would seem that incorporating it to the utmost into our school systems would go a long way toward erasing the existing conflict between the public, private and home-schooling camps.

Mind you, I’m not using this space to repeat the timeworn mantra about more parental involvement in the schools – attend the PTA, assist with assigned homework, ask your kids about their day, meet with their teachers on conference day, sell raffle tickets, blah, blah, blah. Those may be good things, but in the end they amount to little more than the parent becoming a cog in the machinery of the educational system. I’m also not advocating disproven concepts like the “open classroom” idea of the early ’70s, which amounted to nothing more than educational anarchy.

I’m simply advocating that we remove from our school systems all unreasonable barriers to parental control over each individual child’s education, and that we as parents neither neglect our God-given parental responsibilities nor allow them to be usurped.

Schools should be set up in a way that encourages, rather than grudgingly accepts and marginalizes, the concept of parent-directed education. The school curricula should be flexible, allowing creative teaching opportunities to be employed by both faculty and parents.

Ideally, in my opinion, schools would abandon the “lockstep” concept of year-by-year grade advancement in favor of an open structure which recognizes only individual achievement. Parents, subject to the student’s demonstrated mastery of prerequisite skills, should elect the educational units in which their child will participate.

Schools should allow for and recognize education which occurs outside the school, even in non-traditional learning environments and students should be able to easily move in and out of the school’s class structure throughout the year. Just as importantly, schools should allow access to their facilities for learning activities (such as lab work), which are approved, but not necessarily assigned, by a faculty member.

Schools, particularly the public schools, have been very slow to embrace the concept of parental control. That may be because parental control over an individual child’s learning is often misinterpreted as parental control over the school system itself, which is a different issue altogether.

I believe that a public school system structured for maximum parental control would provide broader educational opportunities for all children without having to disassociate any of them from the benefits of the public “system” which their parents’ taxes support. At the same time it would allow for seamless cooperation between the currently distinct and often competitive “public,” “private” and “home” school concepts.


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Rebecca Hagelin

Rebecca Hagelin is a media commentator, public speaker on family and the culture, and the author of "Home Invasion: Protecting Your Family in a Culture that's Gone Stark Raving Mad." To learn more about her book or to invite Rebecca to speak at your event, visit HomeInvasion.org. Rebecca's next book, "30 Ways in 30 Days to Save Your Family," will be released by Regnery on April 6.
Read more of Rebecca Hagelin's articles here.