private schools aren't the answer.. well kinda, but not really.. only the rich can afford them and it makes their kids feel elitest (sp?) and they lose some social skills.. its the same way with home schooling.. sure you can keep your kids from being exposed to all the bad stuff but at what cost..
School is a great tool for those that want to learn. Some people are fine with a Good Enough Diploma (GED) and go on to to work very successful part time jobs that barely let them scrape by. My personal opinion is that school is too easy and moves too slow. If you push the kids and stop letting them sit idle then they will be move motivated. It's easy to kick a ball once and get it to roll, but when you have to keep kicking it, then it turns into a burden. Also, if a kid doesn't want to be in school, do not make him go to school. If I had a dime for every time we had to cancel class because someone wanted to be an ass and argue with the teacher and then got wrote up and sent to the principals office then I would be a very wealthy man. Leave all the rejects at home.
private schools aren't the answer.. well kinda, but not really.. only the rich can afford them and it makes their kids feel elitest (sp?) and they lose some social skills.. its the same way with home schooling.. sure you can keep your kids from being exposed to all the bad stuff but at what cost..
Here is an interesting statistic someone told me once (I'll need to verify it though), families in the United States with incomes under 25,000 USD are more likely to send their children to private schools than families with incomes between 25,000 USD and 125,000 USD. So it's not necessary to be either rich or elitist to go to a good private school. I think the reason behind this is that poorer immigrants are likely to want to pass on their values to their children so they send them to parochial/language-specific schools or they want to keep them out of the gang-violence common in inner-city public schools. Another statistic I heard is that for lower cost private schools, they charge half of what public schools take from taxes. So it should be affordable to almost everyone.
It states that you have to remain in school until you are 18, and is also what makes truancy an offense, as well as several other rules which I can't remember at the moment. It was made with the best intentions, but it's a double-edged sword in that it keeps all the idiots at school.
There are tons of home-schooled kids in the town where I live, and most of them are pretty chill. There's a few who are pretty deprived of social skills though. I blame it more on their parent's way of homeschooling than the homeschooling itself.
