Curriculum Required?

Part of a series of posts on the book, Smarting Us Up: The Un-dumbing of America by Luz Shosie and Ned Vare. Available by mail, details on Ned's website, http://www.school-is-hell.blogspot.com/.

The authors advocate giving school districts and employees as little information as required by law. "The reasoning is that the portfolio review is not a good time to try to show the state what a wonderful and thorough job you are doing and, more important, those who 'show off' lots of work might raise the bar for others unnecessarily... Ask homeschooling friends if they will show you what they presented in order to find out how little you can present."

And why should you give the state more assurance than they give you as to the quality of a particular child's education? "The schools are usually required only to OFFER INSTRUCTION. They are not required to be sure that everyone (really anyone) actually learns anything."

"We all know how absurd it is for people who have opted out of the public schools for many good and varied reasons to be required to be judged (or even "reviewed") by the same people who run the schools we reject, distrust, and do not respect... This is not a battle of homeschoolers against public school employees. It is against bad laws and irrelevant and stupid regulations, and that battle is being fought in legislatures, not schools."

(Quotes taken from pages 86-88. I'm done with school and hate reading papers with a bunch of documentation throughout. I like papers and books with the documentation in an index at the very back. I hate reading cluttered works as it distracts me.)