Here is a great article on the differences between public school and home school when it comes to teaching history… and other things.
The article makes several valid points, and I encourage you to read it.
Parents aren’t specialists in the areas that high school teachers are, and so theoretically they can’t teach as well, according to critics of home schooling. The article points out that frequently the teachers of many subjects aren’t specialists, but are simply moved into a particular course because of the needs of the school, regardless of their own preparation. And I know that does happen, because I’ve seen it and experienced it myself.
But, bluntly, the fact is that too many teachers can’t teach effectively in the area that is their purported specialty. And their school systems usually can’t get rid of them, even if they want to. The only way to fire a teacher, short of criminal acts on the part of the teacher, seems to be when the state is broke, and can claim “financial exigencies.”
I have known some great public school teachers. I know some now. But I’ve also known some pretty bad ones. They are all still teaching, as far as I know.
Public school has become a giant political correctness factory in too many places. It virtually always indoctrinates in a left-leaning direction, sometimes radically so. If your child is assigned to an incompetent teacher, or simply a doctrinaire leftist one, there is not much you can do about it, all too often. I’ve tried. And failed.
Some of our kids have had some decent teachers in the public schools. But they are swimming against the tide, and there is no way for even a competent teacher to avoid the political correctness that masquerades as “critical thinking” in the schools.
And there is no way for even a good teacher to do much about all the social/political nonsense and experimentation that goes on in the schools today, that wouldn’t have been tolerated 30 years ago, because much of it is mandated by the state.
That’s why we are a home-schooling family.
