Salon: Home-schooled and illiterate - for some kids it means isolation with little education

[Alcibiades]

9. A lot of it depends upon the child

My son is seven now, but performs as well as a ten year old on most measures--off the scale on most tests used to assess academic ability in first graders. From the time he was born, I read to him 45 minutes a day, until, when he was three, he was able to read on his own. Now he reads material on a middle school level, and I just hang around and help him on his vocabulary. I've tauight him math, science, etc. I worked hard at it, though I never thought of what I do with him as homeschooling, it is.

And yet there are gaps. My freakishly bright son needed the public schools to get him to sit down and shut up. The discipline and structure is good for him. Plus, they ahve done a better job at some of the nuts and bolts of getting him to write his letters well and write sentences than I ever would have.

I have a PhD and have taken a deep and abiding interest in the education. Nonetheless, I regard it as a kind of arrogance to assume that I or most any other parent can really do a better job of teaching than the public school system--almost any public school system. Some of these institutions have been around a long time, and they have an institutional memory about the subject of educating children that is hard to match, even if you have "every advantage." I'm qualified to teach college kids, but it's different from elementary age kids. Sure, some of the on grade level assignments my son gets are, for him, too easy, but we make sure he's challenged, and this year he's had a very good teacher who also makes sure he's challenged, so that he does have the experience of having to work hard in school.

I also have a three year old girl. I've done everything I did for the boy with the girl, with little result. I can tell she's smart by the things she does, but she's speech delayed and so we're sending her to speech therapy: they assessed her as speaking at about the 20% percentile for her age. She knows her letters and numbers, but at this point my son was way past that. For me, educating a very bright child has proved to be much easier than one who has challenges.

I'm going to do everything I can to get her ready for school, but I am glad we have a good public school system, one that has experience working with kids who have learning or other problems. One thing I've learned about this country is that there are two things everyone thinks they are qualified to have an opinion on, and those are politics and education. The truth is that's just not the case. Public education is a jewel of great price, and folks can only doubt that because they don't know what this country would be like without it. I think it would suck.