Wednesday, December 3, 1986 -

North Shore News

Bob Hunter

@ strictly personal ®

THERE MAY be more than 4,000 children now being
educated at home in B.C., according to West Vancouver
parents’ advocate Tunya Audain. Certainly there are least

2,000.

Of course, many parents who
keep their kids at home prefer to
adopt a Jow profile rather than at-
tract the attention of the education
cops.

These would be people who are
thoroughly disgruntled with the
public school system. Tunya
believes that, by far, the largest
number of such parents in Canada
are in B.C.

That would be in keeping with
our rugged far-West individualism,
wouldn’t it?

The over-all effectiveness of
home education, of course, re-
mains to be tested and it has its
share of critics, not all of whom
are merely defending a vested in-
terest in the public school system.

There is the serious question of
whether or not parents are quali-
fied to teach, especially to teach
their own children. Also, there is
the legitimate fear thai home
schoolers might grow up to be lone
wolves, unable to cope with social
activity.

It is this second fear, I know,
that has held me back several times
when I was on the verge of yank-
ing my kids from school out of
frustration with the system or
some particular teacher.

Yet a lot of the behaviors which
kids pick up in school are so nega-
tive that we really might be wiser
to bypass the ordeal entirely.

I recall one poignant moment
when my younger son broke down
crying after a screaming match
with his mother over homework.
“fused to be perfect,’’ he wept.
‘Then I went to school.’’

Of course he wasn’t ‘‘perfect’’.
Nobody is. But the fact is, he was
a sweetheart of a kid, easy to get
along with, eternally cheerful and
optimistic.

School hit him like a barn door
slamming in his face. After three
years of endlessly struggling to
keep him in line, make him move
at the pace of the rest of the class,
and generally learn to snap to at-

. Canyon Gardens is
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tention when ordered, he is, I’m
sad to say, a much less happily-
adjusted child.

- He is given to fits of depression
and outbursts of anger which never
used to happen. He has picked up
the attitudes of the other little boys
in schvol, who think girls stink,
who always want to fight, who
throw stones and swear
outrageously.

Terrific! In exchange, what have
we got out of it? Sure, he reads.
But we had him started in that
direction anyway. His grasp of
ccithmetic seemed negligible until
my wife started sitting down with
him, and with a couple of nights
worth of effort, showed him basic
stuff that he just hadn’t been lear-
ning at school.

The point was the personalized
attention.

There is another, more subile
factor. My kid is used to being
talked to at home as though he was
an intelligent human being with
something like equal rights, pro-
viding he accepts his share of
responsibilities.

You can imagine his horror and
confusion when he got to school
and started being told to line up
for this, sit down for that, so here,
don’t go there, etc.

The great anti-establishment
educational thinker Ivan Lich says
that schools simply program peo-
ple to be the perpetual clients or
lawyers, doctors, teachers and so
forth.

That’s a sweeping indictment,
more cruel than complete.

Tunya Audain's analysis is more
specific. The growth of school
boards into the Jarge middle
Management operations of today
‘thas become counter-productive
to education,’’ she says. ‘\

“Unless the schoot board system
is quickly modernized, there will
be more calls by parents and public
alike to abolish or radically reform
this system. The rush for education
can no longer abide an inefficient,
arrogant and outdated system

which serves more as an obstacle
than a facilitator of education.”

She adds, unrelentingly:

“We can speculate why the
system has become so bogged
down and defensive. Is it
bureaucratic connivance, designed
to protect an industry which is

self-perpetuating and self-rewar-
ding? ts it blind faith in the belief
that lay crusices, elected from the
comauinity, can stl operate a
complex, highly unionized, and
centralized systen?"*

Whatever the reasons, the cur-
rent situation leaves us with ‘the
inefficiencies of a monopoly with a
captive audience.’ Tunya  con-
cludes.

A voucher system, or some
method of rebates, would provide
a degree of parental control that is
lacking right now. And to that
end, EF think it is a great notion.

Indeed, |} think our public
educational system, for all its
self-conscious mystique of profes-
sionalism, is, in fact, quite
primitive, quite brutish, quite un-
willing to seriously consider chang-
ing the status quo.

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