Two days ago, Psychology Today's website featured a blog post from Laura Brodie, author of
Love in a Time of Homeschooling. Dr. Brodie's subject was
"Should Homeschooling Parents Have College Degrees?" Comments were open for a day, but now seem to be closed.
Points in the article were:
- Why home-educated children are not held to the same "minimum standards" as public school students.
- Parental competence
- The perception that GED certificate holders were granted their certificates, rather than earning them.
- Parents' proficiency in English.
- Americans' inherent interest in the production of an educated citizenry.
- Should parents who choose to educate their child(ren) at home be required to demonstrate their competence to a public authority?
These concerns range too widely for me to answer them in one post -- I'm too wordy -- so I thought a re-write of the original piece would make my point more easily than justifying the importance of academic freedom for everyone.
For the most part, every day our society sends helpless firstborns home to be cared for by new parents, care that is unregulated except for existing laws against abuse and neglect. If these parents can learn enough to make decisions to ensure that their infant will not only live, but thrive, and manage to keep up their level of 'continuing education' until their child reaches the age of traditional school attendance, why, when the kid turns five, would these parents suddenly get stupid?
Why do we think that parents can't shift from raising their four-year old to raising their five-year old? In our information-heavy world, why is it assumed that parents won't be able to find the information they need to school their child, just as they have been schooled? And if parents manage to school their child(ren) to the age of traditional high school attendance, why would they not be able to continue learning, or find a tutor, or program, or video course, or textbook, to continue?
Few first-time parents have had experience raising a child, but we've all been through some form of school. New parents may need an infant orientation course, but most of us are already clued in to what learning consists of, especially concerning a small person who has been sharing our lives for years, and especially with subsequent children.
If homeschooling families lose their freedom to allow their children
to learn at a different pace and in a different manner than the public
school template, then that applies across the board, and where does that
leave parents and their children if school problems develop? Any parent can have the need to homeschool
-- it's not just for those outside the mainstream.
In the following adaptation, I've only replaced school-words with
words about the care of a child: feeding, housing, clothing, need for
medical care, and so on. The rest of the article is the original. See what you think of the Psychology Today's writer's thoughts applied to all raising of children.
===========adaptation===========
Should Stay-at-home Parents Have College Degrees?
Here's a subject that can make tempers flare: staying home with children. Some parents feel that our federal and state governments should keep their fingerprints completely off of whether or not children should be raised at home only by parents. Others believe that modest oversight on a state-by-state basis is acceptable. And then there are plenty of observers outside the stay-at-home community who wonder: Why aren't stay-at-home children held to the same minimum standards as children in daycare? And shouldn't stay-at-home parents be required to get a parenting license?
I'll consider the question of standards for stay-at-home children in a future post. For now, let's focus on the second issue: the qualifications of stay-at-home parents. Child care books and magazines often insist that all parents are capable of caring for their children. Parents know their kids best, and are their natural care-givers, right?
Not necessarily. While the vast majority of parents might be well-suited to "care for their own," not all parents are cut out for raising children unsupervised. Not only does it require double doses of patience, humor, and the financial freedom for one parent to forego a fulltime job, stay-at-home Moms and Dads need basic competency in food preparation and elementary medical concerns, and that's where the government tends to step in.
Most states require that stay-at-home parents have high school diplomas or GEDs. Only one state, North Dakota, expects the parent-caregiver to have a college degree, otherwise a family's child raising program must be monitored on a weekly basis by a certified caregiver. My state, Virginia, used to include a college diploma as a requirement in its original at-home statute, but in 1996 this qualification was lowered to a high school diploma.
Whenever I mention these facts to friends outside the stay-at-home parenting world, they tend to be shocked, saying things like : "Are you kidding?...A high school diploma or GED? Some people can get a GED without being able to read."
I admit that I share their skepticism. To me, the idea that parents with GEDs could, if they desired, turn around and raise their children until they're teens is setting the bar very low. More problematic is the fact that several states have almost no home-inspection regulations, including no specified qualifications for stay-at-home -- not even a basic elementary education.
Don't get me wrong-the vast majority of stay-at-home parents are bright and diligent and well-qualified to raise their kids. My own brief sojourn into the world of stay-at-home parenting left me greatly impressed with the SAHMs I met. And there are plenty of child care facilities that are doing a poor job supervising children. When we talk about child care regulation, the question is whether there are rules that can help minimize worst-case scenarios, and whether all children have the right to a basic level of care that should be ensured by the state.
Years ago I worked as a child care volunteer in my local community, and I saw how an inability to maintain a home environment can be passed from generation to generation. Children with parents who can not read often repeat the pattern, occasionally due to problems with dyslexia or various learning disabilities. At a minimum, should all states require that stay-at-home parents demonstrate a certain level of literacy? Taking it further, should all stay-at-home parents show that they can read and write English, or is it OK for an American child to receive no stay-at-home care in English, and be spoken to entirely in Spanish, or Japanese, or Arabic?
Because Americans value freedom and self-reliance, the idea of regulating any aspect of the parent-child relationship makes some people furious. Nevertheless, all Americans have an interest in breaking cycles of poverty and producing a civilized citizenry. A college education might not be a fair requirement for stay-at-home parents, but what does constitute a reasonable baseline?
In my next post, I'll share more of my own, constantly evolving, thoughts on the subject. But before I offer my opinions, I invite anyone who cares about this topic to voice their own:
How much education should a stay-at-home parent be required to have? A high school diploma? A two-year associate's degree? A four year college degree? A teaching certificate?
Should all stay-at-home parents be required to pass a test demonstrating their ability to read and write in English, and calculate math at a basic (say, fifth grade) level?
Is all regulation bad regulation?
===========end adaptation===========
Further reading from Home Education Magazine:
Communicating the Strengths of Homeschooling
Problems with Legislation to Prevent "Unqualified" Families From Homeschooling
Watchdogging the Media
Homeschooling: Our Perspectives, Their Views
Parents' Work: Invaluable but Nearly Invisible
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