South St. Louis County News

St. Louis Call Newspapers

South St. Louis County News

St. Louis Call Newspapers

South St. Louis County News

St. Louis Call Newspapers

Reader: Children should be educated as individuals, not as a group

Letters+to+the+editor

Letter to the Editor

To the editor:

I am responding with a kind rebuttal to Michael Nolan’s letter titled “Educating children in public schools has a positive effect on society,” in the Jan. 24 edition of The Call.

I graduated from a St. Louis Public Schools high school in 1959. Even back then, there were things that students should never have been exposed to. My social-studies teacher was a card-carrying Communist who taught us nothing but the Communist Workers’ songs and the glories of Marxism.

A literature teacher told us several times that, “An unborn baby is not a human; it is a candidate for humanity.”

In these past six decades since I graduated, there has been a great loss of morals and values in our nation, and even most congressmen are woefully lacking in knowledge of our history and our Constitution.

I homeschooled my children from kindergarten through high-school graduation, 1987 to 2000. I did so for many reasons. We could not afford private schools and I did not want my children to be victims of social change, since I was well aware of the dumbing down of true education in exchange for turning students into like-thinkers.

As for “what is best for society,” what is truly best for society is having well-educated, thinking adults who have been educated as individuals and not as a group.

Homeschooled children excel in both their studies and in adult life. I did not home school for the benefit of society. Even public education should not have as a goal the benefit of society, but the benefit of the individual student.

I am ending with your sentence, “But if… all the students go to public schools and focused all our resources on public schools…”

The public schools do not need more resources. Every few years, they beg for more money by scaring people into voting for an increase in property taxes.

The cry is that the value of homes will drop if the district schools don’t have more resources. The most I ever spent in a year on each of my children while homeschooling was $500. And that was for an excellent video homeschool program the last three years of high school.

G.N. Bouaoun
Oakville

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