WHY EDUCATION?

Hi, homeschoolers and educators!  For many years, the author of Steps wrote articles for a blog, called Homeschool Hows & Whys.  The point of the blog was to provide great ideas and food for thought, for new and experienced homeschoolers alike.  We continue that tradition here with our first blog post on our Steps site!  Here is an excerpt from Mr. Horwich's first book, Poor Cheated Little Johnny, about why you really do need to homeschool.

Let's start with the most essential, basic idea, the foundation
of education. That would be the answer to the question: "Why do
it?"

Why do parents go through the vast expense (around $300,000 per
child in the U.S. today) to educate their children? Why invest
tens of thousands of hours in a child's education? Why take
years (and more thousands of dollars) to teach teachers how to
teach? Why invest billions of dollars to open schools? Or from
another angle, why invest the incredible amount of hours and
commitment to homeschool a child.

Please note, in this chapter I'm not going to discuss methods of
education. For a few pages, let's agree to undercut that entire
discussion with the more basic question I've asked above. In
later chapters, we'll definitely discuss the approaches
available to educate a child, workable and not. Before
dissecting how we can or should educate our young, let's make
sure we want to educate them and that if we do wish to, we know
why.

Historically, there are many examples of great men and women who
accomplished remarkable things and who had little or no formal
education. From Mark Twain to Shakespeare, military leaders to
political adventurists, inventors, doctors, lawyers and Indian
Chiefs, many of our greatest and most venerated men and women
had almost nothing of schooling to back their efforts. So why do
school?

Obviously, not everyone is a Shakespeare. Abe Lincoln learned
about politics and the law while interning under a local lawyer,
as he could not afford a better education. And while he did
okay, we're not all of us Abe Lincoln. Matter of fact, none of
us are Abe Lincoln.

What marks a Lincoln, a Shakespeare, a Twain or an Edison for
greatness is their remarkable personal drive. It is unique. Few
people are as driven as these men, and without that drive some
sort of formalized and structured educative experience is going
to be necessary in this complicated world. Those marked for
greatness by their unique drive provide themselves with an
education. They are not “uneducated”, as the fools who like to
attack the idea that Shakespeare wrote his plays like to
suggest. They are simply “unschooled”. Right here, right now,
let’s make the correct and sane differentiation needed for this
discussion. “Schooling” is not “education”, and “education” is
not “schooling”, though they may sometimes conjoin. They are
absolutely not the same thing.

Schooling is spending time in school, being regimented and
disciplined and tested in the way that we tend to think of as
“school”.

Education is the acquiring of information and the development of
it into skills, concepts, ideas of use.

“Schooling” and “education” are simply not the same thing,
folks. Never were and never will be. The fact that, on
occasion, “education” can happen in a “schooling” environment
speaks more to the rare and remarkable teacher or student, than
the system that we call “school”. Education that takes place in
school is manufactured by individuals and occurs in spite of the
system.