Ken Bramble’s recent letter to the editor contained a clever sleight-of-hand. No thinking person would disagree that school truancy is going to have long-term consequences for our society. If children are uneducated, they will be unemployable, which means that they will spend a lifetime collecting social assistance (or worse). That affects all of us.
But in the second last paragraph of his letter, Mr. Bramble deftly turns from school truancy to homeschooling, and somehow equates the two. He then writes, “I am both shocked and dismayed by what I am seeing. I see it as nothing less than child abuse and a serious consequence for our Canadian society.”
Is Mr. Bramble implying that homeschooling your children is equivalent to child abuse? It sure seems so. As someone who was himself homeschooled for five years, I find that statement incredibly ignorant and offensive. During my homeschooling years we only had four hours of “school” per day, because the efficiency of one-on-one tutoring means the student is not slowed down by other people in the class. By the time that I started Grade 7, I was reintegrated into a regular classroom.
Because I had been homeschooled I was so far ahead of my peers that I was reading at a first-year university level. I also was the local winner of a provincial mathematics contest that year. And I am not what you would consider “gifted” by any means. I just had a patient mother, and the opportunity to learn at my own pace.
After I graduated from high school I went on to university to get my Bachelor’s (with Honours), and later my Master’s.
So no, homeschooling is not child abuse. Calling it that anyway is an insult to all parents who simply want what they know is best for their children, and who don’t need an inefficient public school system to tell them what that looks like.
Abel C. Pol