WOW!!

I read in the Parade magazine this past Sunday about the debate on the whole homeschooling issue in California (can read about it here) and came across this comment left by somebody. I thought it was wonderful and wanted post it on my blog. This is WELL SAID!

"As a homeschooling mother of a teenage boy who has his own business and has been more involved in the community in his young years than most people are in a lifetime, I am appauled and disgusted at CA's proposition to make homeschooling illegal! What the public needs to ask itself is why it isn't illegal for an institution to hold everyone between the ages of 5 and 18 prisoner for the best years of their lives, force-feeding them disconnected information that is not developmentally appropriate nor of interest to most children and effectively brainwashing them to be obedient cublicle workers and puppets of a comsumeristic, power-obsessed government. Homeschooling, especially John Taylor Gatto and John Holt's vision of homeschooling, allows children to live life now, passionately, fully, playfully and intelligently, not waste away in some pseudo-human stand-by mode in which they are IV fed the line about "what they can be someday" if they just sit down and shut up and robotically do what the teacher says. Forced schooling is a human rights violation that produces a passive, dumbed-down populace. Children's basic physical, emotional, developmental and intellectual needs are denied and ignored in public school. Powerless children form cruel and toxic peer cultures in order to grasp at some semblance of power in their immature, regimented lives. Children can't play anymore. There is no joy to childhood in public schools. Children who cannot conform to this excrutiating system are diagnosed with fabricated "brain disorders" and are drugged with dangerous, neurologically-altering chemicals. Homeschoolers are often exceptional youth who live a rich, vibrant life that public schooled children can only dream of! Instead of taking away this fundamental right for children to learn in freedom, we should be asking ourselves why it is legal and accepted blindly that we turn our children over to the government at age 5 to be isolated from family and from their own lives, interests, needs and passions for the best hours, days and years of their lives."