Lessons Learned

April 29, 2005-
This was written as what is now commonly known as Parent Partnership Programs were sweeping the nation, gathering up homeschoolers and would-be homeschoolers left and right. into the public school system. Many families were swept directly into public school without even knowing that they were no longer homeschooling under the home-based education law that so many homeschooling families worked so hard to get on the books.

Lessons Learned
Wisdom is a defense, and money is a defense:
but the excellency of knowledge is that wisdom giveth life to them that have it.
................................................................................................ ECCLESIASTES 7:12

A gift has arrived! Local school districts now extend new alternative school programs as an outreach to the home schooling community. It's not regular school of course, it's "alternative school," an alternative to the traditional public school classroom, but it still public school and it's coming to a school district near you.

Homeschoolers should look carefully at this gift, because at first glance these programs look a lot like what has traditionally been thought of as "homeschooling." They may look like homeschooling, feel like homeschooling and may even be called a "homeschool" program, but anyway you look at it, it is not homeschooling. The sad part is that these cleverly crafted programs seem to have a lot to offer. They come with a price however. Their cost: freedom, and taxation.

In a letter dated April 2005, I was personally invited via a letter in my mailbox, addressed to me, asking me to consider their kind offerings. Their literature offered me, an average homeschooler, “additional support,” and even “ a reprieve,” from the daily routine of homeschooling. "

Complete with the testimony from other homeschooling families, they offered the recipient of their letter elective classes, a meeting place for classes, financial aid, a sense of belonging to a community, and even their own professional expertise in goal planning. It was obvious to me that the offer believed itself to be the homeschooler’s dream come true. To receive such gracious benefits all I had to do was go to the local school and enroll today.

Funny, I never knew the public school was in support of homeschooling. In fact, history shows they are not. They have been supporting the homeschool community for five years? Really? That's funny. I have never known the public school to like it when parents remove thier kids from the roster at the local school. I had heard about these programs though and I knew they were not homeschool. But could I be wrong? Was it possible the students in the program are still "home schooled"?

I immediately called the PPP school office and specifically asked if students in the Parent Partnership Program they offered were homeschoolers or if they were public school students. The secretary who answered the phone said, “They are public school students.”

People in these programs, people who write these letters to homeschooling families must understand, these public school programs are not homeschool. Furthermore, people who value, not only homeschooling, but the public education system should have a sense of responsibility regarding the money spent by our government on education.

Homeschoolers need to remember that the freedom to homeschool was not something simply given to them by the friendly school district who believed it really was the best thing to do for children. It's time to count the real cost of these strange public school programs. Maybe it's even time to look a gift horse in the mouth.

It looks a lot like a horse to me, a Trojan Horse. A long time ago, after a great war between the Greeks and the Trojans had finally ended, a great lesson was learned, a lesson we all could learn from.

The war was over. The Trojans had been victorious. The Greeks, defeated at last, had taken every last one of their marbles and gone home.

At last all was well in Troy. That is, until one day, just outside the city gates, the still happily celebrating Trojans noticed a very large beautifully crafted wooden horse. They could tell by it's decorations that it had been made by the Greeks, for it was beautifully ornate, larger than life, and it was truly a sight to see! Some people in the city thought it must have been left as a gift, an offering of peace. After all, it was a horse, and as a horse, it was, no doubt, perfectly suited for Troy, which was known as the City of Horses.

Other people of the city were suspicious. They could not help wondering why the enormous, although beautiful horse was there. They wondered why the Greeks would leave a gift behind, after all, they had lost the battle. They were suspicious, however they were nice people, and because they were nice people, and because the horse appeared to be so magnificent, all the suspicion slowly dwindled away into a teeny tiny doubt, and then even that disappeared as they became enamored with the beauty of the magnificent horse.

Enamored with the horse’s appearance, infatuated with its possible monetary value, some of the more prominent people of Troy who decided that they felt good about the horse, even thought it was the way the God had blessed them for their victory in war, tied ropes around the huge wooden beast and pulled it through the gates of the city. There they could really marvel at it's beauty. They talked about how great the horse was and how wonderful the Greeks were to have left it for them and then night fell and the gates were locked and they all went to sleep, happy that they had been given a gift of such great value.

Unfortunately for Troy, sometime in the night something strange happened to the horse. Enemy troops emerged from the inside of the horse and Greek troops overtook the city. In the morning there was nothing but a city was left in ruins and all the inhabitants of Troy were destroyed.

Fact or fiction, history or myth, it doesn't really matter, the lesson is the same today as it was 1500 years ago. It's a lesson in the nature of deception. The “gift horse” was a lot more insidious than what it appeared to be. To believe that the public school has created a wonderful gift for the homeschooling community is ludicrous, akin to believing the defeated Greek warriors left a gift.

In case you do not know, it was not long ago that state run schools and private schools were the only options for people with school aged children to comply with the compulsory education laws mandated by the state. Private schools were expensive and public schools were battlegrounds, full of anti-God and anti-family philosophies propagated by men such as Charles Darwin, Benjamin Bloom, Paul Brandwin and Chester Pierce. With educational excellence waxing cold and madmen usurping parental authority as they crowned themselves the custodians of the next generation, parents did not sit idly by and do nothing. Some sat on school boards, others started PTA and some rendered unto Caesar what was due Caesar, they paid their taxes, took their own children out of the government school and proceeded to teach them themselves, at home.

That is when all out “War” ensued. There was courtroom battle after courtroom battle and the battle raged all the more as people choose to stand firm in their convictions to educate their own children at home. Parent after parent, family after family went to court and took a stand against the public school system. It was years of legal combat, but after thousands of court cases demonstrating earnestly that homeschool was a viable option for a child's education, laws were made and the war was over.

In 1993, by the grace of a power greater than “we,” the right for parents to actually keep their children in the home and teach them to read and write without the interference of the state was won. The Home based Education law was established and homeschooling became a viable option, an option set into law. Legally defined in black and white, in all 50 states, home-based education became known as "homeschooling."

All of the assertions of the NEA and friends were relegated to silence. Homeschooling, proven to have merit made a new option, one where parents could raise and educate their children without the direct involvement or interference of the state. It was a defeat for the NEA and other entities who wanted more than anything to have greater influence in classrooms, even to the point that they would happily prevent parents, especially Christian Parents, from rocking their own cradles.

It's interesting that in an effort to recapture the funding loss due to the mass exodus of “independent educators” who took their children out of government schools through this movement of homeschooling, school officials all over America have taken up the business venture of 'creating special partnership programs that target "homeschoolers." You would think that perhaps they would instead focus on kids in the classroom, making the existing schools better. Instead, they find creative ways to spend the national deficit.

The amount of capital given to a school district to operate depends on the numbers in enrollment. When parents do not enroll their children in the local school, these numbers go down and so does the funding. When more students enroll in school the numbers go up and so does the funding. The solution then might be to have a higher enrollment. The problem is, it takes a while to grow a kid, besides that a lot of kids who used to be enrolled are now homeschooling.

By offering a partnership program, the district can receive full funding for the student, but they end up with a surplus because the students in the alternative program do not have to be in school like all the other students. They only have to be on school premises, for so many hours per week, and the funding for them is the same as every other student. Staffing is less too because the teaching is done at home by the parent. The school saves on space and teachers and gets all the money for a student! Well, they get almost all the money because, after all, this is a partnership. A set portion of the districts amount per student is delegated for use by the parent. Parents get money that they can spend on books, materials, classes and curriculum used for the education of the student enrolled in the public school PPP.

Yours and my tax dollars hard at work. And while a public school student in a regular classroom has no freedom to input what teachers they spend the year with and brings home a list asking parents to buy crayons, pencils, paper and a tissue box for classroom use for the poor starving school district, the Partnered Parent is having the school pay for whatever they'd like including ballet class and piano lessons.

These PPP's so graciously offered by the schools are beautiful aren't they? It will be whatever you want it to be- just dream up any class you want … tell the district exactly what you desire and “poof” it magically appears. Never mind that over time you sense that the program is changing. Never mind that it appears slightly unstable as new directives from the state fall into place that were not there in the beginning. Never mind that you suddenly feel as if you are under some odd restraint. Never mind that it's a partnership and your yoke is showing. Remember how beautiful the public school system and all it's philosophies really are. After all, it's everything you ever wanted, you and your tax dollars are working! Nevermind that it's all done in the name of the entire public school system.

History tells of duplicitous horses and Greek bearing gifts.

If the home school community is anything like the city of Troy, then it is only a matter of time before everyone will see the true nature of the beast. Meanwhile, the program is appealing, the monetary reimbursement is alluring, and the camaraderie of the many trusted freinds involved in the program is appealing. There is even a beautiful, newly remodeled building to call your "home away from home." How interesting that the same entity that ferociously fought parents in every state across the nation now wants provide quality opportunities and resources to enhance “learning goals” for the potential home-schooled student!

A horse? Look at it this way... it's a manageable horse, one that you can train yourself to do anything you want it to do. It will help you carry your burden, you know, give those home schooling parents a reprieve from the daily routine of schooling their own children in their homes around the kitchen tables, that is, only if they will let it in.

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Benjamin Bloom, mentioned in the article above is the author of Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, a 1964 work considered to be a "landmark" in education and a textbook used in teacher education courses, In it he says, "a large part of what we call 'good teaching' is the teacher's ability to attain affective objectives through challenging the students' fixed beliefs...A child is not truly using his higher order thinking skills until he no longer believes in absolutes of right and wrong."

Bloom is a psychologist, and humanist and is perhaps best known for developing Outcome-Based Education and Mastery Learning. He is renowned for promoting the notion that there are no right or wrong answers and is quoted as saying, “The purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students”

(How is it that schools are a place not to simply learn?)


Chester M. Pierce is Emeritus Harvard professor and an M.D. a psychiatrist. He's published over 180 books over the years and was founding president of the Black Psychiatrists of America, was national Chairperson of the Child Development Associate Consortium, a Commander in the US Navy and has been senior consultant to the Surgeon General of the US Air Force; advisor to the Children's Television Network (Sesame Street, Electric Company); and advisor to the US Arctic Research Commission.

It is this same man who, at the 1973 Childhood International Education Seminar, openly declared that five-year-old children, when they first go to school, go there “mentally ill.” He is often quoted (from transcripts of the event) as having said, “Every child in America entering school at the age of 5 is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well — by creating the international child of the future.”


(Where I come from, parents send their 5 year old kids to American school expecting they will come back home still respecting authority in the classroom, in the neighborhood and community and even in the home. They hope that kids in school will learn to read and write and maybe even learn some history, embrace the ideal of freedom and understand what it stands for. What comes back home from school is many times vastly different than most parents would expect, and we can only wonder if it's because of influential words from men like Pierce and what is carried forth into educational arenas, by their teachings.)