School Choice Public Education Vs. Home School Essays - Youth

School Choice: Public Education vs. Home School When American's think of education, they almost automatically think of public education. Through the years it is slowly changing. Many parents' today are deciding to home school their children. Although most people think that a public education is better, most statistics and facts tend to show that home schooling is beneficial in more ways. It is estimated that parents are now teaching over two million children at home, rather than in public or even private schools. Education in our public schools has been on the down slope for over twenty years now. Public schools have lost all values and biblical morality. This was what our country was founded on and it has been replaced with humanism. One example of humanism in our schools is that they teach evolution, not creationism. Some people believe that this problem is happening because of the removal of God and prayer in public schools; the U.S. Supreme Court did this in 1962. Beginning in 1962, SAT scores plummeted. Teen pregnancies, teen sexual diseases, teen suicides, teen alcohol, drug abuse, pornography, and illiteracy rates abruptly increased 200 to 300 percent (Klicka 48). Violence is one of the main factors effecting are schools today. Rape is a growing problem among juveniles. A juvenile commits one out of every five rapes that occur in the United States. There is also a higher use of drugs and alcohol among kids in public schools. Over 80 percent of public high school students drink alcohol and 45.7 percent have used marijuana. Drugs and alcohol make most people extremely violent. That is also why our violence and crime rates are so high. Over hundreds of millions of dollars are spend on the security of our nation's public schools. In The Right Choice Home Schooling, Christopher Klicka says, "In Washington, D.C., drugs and violence were such a problem in one Elementary school, that the principal banned regular recess, and the children are only allowed to play outside in a pit enclosed by eight-foot concrete walls, or on a small section of playground monitored by the police (Klicka 51)." The disciplinary problems of children usually start even before they reach public school. In the last ten years, research shows that infants raised in daycare "are more prone to behavioral problems as young children than their home-reared cousins (Klicka 124)." If you keep your child at home from the start, you will be able to discipline and raise your children with the right morals. Because so much time is spend trying to clean up and keep our schools safe, we are more or less falling behind in our education. American's are farther behind in educational status than countries such as Japan, Taiwan, and China. The teachers spend too much time on the little things and forget the real reason why the children are there. Not only that, but the textbooks hold inaccurate information and do not contain the whole story. Some textbooks stated that the atomic bomb ended the Korean War (instead of World War II) and that only 53,000, rather than 126,000 Americans, were killed in World War I (Klicka 24 25). One book summarizes Abraham Lincoln's and George Washington's life in approximately six lines each. Not only are the wrong things written in the textbooks, they teach the children wrong values. In public school textbooks, marriage is never mentioned as the foundation of the family, and yet these books are supposed to be the textbooks that introduce the child to an understan ding of American society. Abortion is another issue. Mel and Norma Gabler's document states, "Abortion is discussed as an aspect of birth control in biology and health and homemaking books" (Klicka 56). Not only that, virtually all sex education textbooks used in public schools throughout the country teach that any kind of sex is all right; such as premarital sex, adultery, masturbation, homosexuality, and lesbianism. A lawsuit has been filed against one Michigan school district after seventh through eleventh graders received instruction in "Self-Pleasuring Techniques" that involved techniques in masturbation, and descriptions of sexual fantasies involving group and homosexual acts (Klicka 56). On the Massachusetts State Board of Education, in October 1991, they enacted a policy to encourage local boards to adopt