Keep
Young Kids at Home
GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Gennady Stolyarov II
08-21-07
Many parents
today send their children to day care, preschool, kindergarten, and
public school, thinking that these institutions will educate their
children and help them form vital skills.
Yet, if
anything, attending these places of collective “learning” retards
rather than stimulates education – especially in the youngest kids.
To assure greater academic progress and, above all, greater
happiness for children, it is essential to educate them at home for
as long a time as possible.
We only need to contrast the two environments – the home and the
collective education facility – to see the overwhelming advantages
of home learning.
At home, the child has adults devoted primarily to his or her
learning – as well as that of any siblings he or she might have.
These adults know their child like nobody else, and the strength of
their devotion is usually unmatched. Furthermore, these adults will
be in charge of raising the child for at least sixteen to eighteen
years and will continue to play crucial roles afterward.
At the collective education facility, there is typically one adult
for twenty to thirty children – and that is considered a fairly low
ratio! These adults have too little time to devote to the
development of any individual child, even if they tried in earnest.
Furthermore, they typically interact with any given child for only a
few months of the year, and thus do not have a compelling stake in
that child’s further development. Even if they cared for a
particular child who has moved on from their classroom, they cannot
act on their sentiments. After all, they have twenty to thirty new
children to supervise and focus on!
At home, parents have the incentive to provide the best educational
resources for their children: books, software, educational toys,
films, and even private tutors for subjects in which the parents
themselves are not highly knowledgeable. Furthermore, these
resources will often be targeted toward the specific aptitudes,
interests, and skills of the child.
At the collective education facility, the resources devoted to each
of the many children are necessarily less in quantity than those
which parents can provide to a few children. Furthermore, the
resources are often distributed in a communistic fashion. It is
impossible to overlook the fact that “everybody’s” toys,
“everybody’s” classroom, “everybody’s” books, and “everybody’s”
education are truly nobody’s toys, classroom, books, or education –
and thus nobody among the children has a real incentive to approach
these matters with the care and attention they deserve. Besides, in
collective education facilities, too much emphasis is placed on the
virtue of “sharing” and not enough on the value and absolute
necessity of private property.
When at home, parents and children can agree on educational
schedules that suit the child. Some children might be early risers;
others might like to sleep in. Some children like to work
continuously for long periods of time. Others work better in short
bursts of productivity interspersed with breaks. So long as the
children accomplish their learning objectives, parents are likely to
be lenient about the structure with which they like to work.
At collective education facilities – especially for the youngest
children – every child is subjected to the same schedule,
irrespective of needs and preferences. Perhaps the sheer torture of
having to wake up at 6:00 a.m. might make some children less eager
to learn and less adept at processing information than they
otherwise would have been. Collective education facilities –
especially public schools – are regimented in a Draconian manner.
Everyone eats at the same time, has recess during the same time, and
– at some day care centers and preschools – takes naps at the same
time. Many public elementary schools force children to walk in lines
as a class to any destination whatsoever. Are these children or
soldiers? Or are they prisoners? Surely, only the military camp and
the prison have policies similar to these.
Some might argue that such regimentation prepares children for the
workplace. However, they overlook the fact that adults choose their
jobs and their schedules; many explicitly base their decision to
work at a firm on the kind of work environment, work hours, and
travel opportunities or lack thereof that the firm offers. In fact,
virtually all of adult discipline in a free market is voluntarily
sought after by those who perceive some great personal advantage in
following it. On the contrary, collective education facilities force
children to behave in seemingly arbitrary ways without even any
explanation as to those ways’ merits (or the fact that they
primarily stem from administrative convenience). While they
rigorously impose the kind of external discipline that deprives
children of the freedom to make their own decisions, collective
education facilities fail miserably at cultivating the internal
discipline – both practical and moral – required for any functioning
adult.
At home, bright children are praised, rewarded, and given additional
materials to further stimulate their curiosity and develop their
abilities.
At the collective educational facility, bright children are bullied,
taunted, and pressured to conform to the lowest common denominator.
The better teachers protect the intelligent and productive students,
but all too many of them side with the majority and accuse bright
kids of mysteriously “monopolizing” the learning environment.
At home, children have strong incentives to learn from their parents
and adopt the habits, attitudes, interests, and even fashions of
older and wiser adults. They are surrounded by opportunities to
acquire knowledge, prudence, good taste, and moral habits.
At the collective educational facility, children are primarily in
the company of their peers and thus are strongly pressured to adopt
fads that are at best inane and at worst devastating to proper
development. This is also where children learn to curse, make
obscene jokes, harass kids who are “different,” and equate fun with
dissipation.
In a society that is, thankfully, still largely characterized by a
free market, it is a shame that the very young largely live under a
system of genuine communism. This system not only leads them to
under-perform academically; more importantly, it leads them to
regress in their morals and practical habits while tormenting and
repressing the brightest among them. Parents who wish the best for
their children are well advised to keep them at home – preferably
until college. The child’s higher standardized test scores and
abundance of knowledge and character will speak for the merits of
this approach.
Gennady Stolyarov II is
Editor-in-Chief of
The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles
or Reason, Rights, and Progress. His works have been published by
Le Quebecois Libre,
Enter Stage Right Magazine, the
Ludwig von Mises Institute,
Rebirth of Reason, and other organizations. Mr. Stolyarov can be
contacted at
gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.
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