I suspect Clarence Page (“Home schooling enters a new era,” Commentary, June 7) and many others are reaching a hasty conclusion when they decide that the results of the recent National Spelling Bee prove home schooling is superior to all other current methods of education. A more logical conclusion would be that individualized attention caused the student to excel. Or better yet, lack of individual attention caused the competitors to underperform.
Based on the success of the factory assembly-line system during the first half of the 20th Century, we applied the same principles to our school system.
It was adequate when readin’, ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic were all that was taught. Those graduates were capable of performing the mindless assembly-line jobs.
We now are in the space age, not the assembly-line age. Yet our public schools still are producing for old needs. Conservatives’ stock response is that we shouldn’t throw good money after bad, because it’s useless to increase spending on education, a system that doesn’t work. It should be clear when we go begging to foreign nations for welders and computer programmers that we are not meeting the demands of the current age.
Students need more individualized attention to succeed in a highly specialized world. One model to fit all is no longer adequate. The fields mentioned by Clarence Page, spelling and geography, are those that require a high degree of rote memorization. A parent can tell the child to memorize the first 10 pages of the dictionary or a map of Africa and leave the child alone.
A spelling bee is almost unique to the English language. The words in most other languages are spelled just as they sound. There would never be a serious Spanish language spelling bee. Spelling is nothing more than an unnecessary burden that English-speaking people must bear.
How many parents are qualified to teach a child at home? Besides the spelling difficulties, English grammar is a nightmare. Most adults don’t know proper grammar. How are they going to teach their children? The English language is bad enough without burdening our children with ill-conceived notions from neophytes about what the problem is.
