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January 05, 2005
Home Schooling and School Violence
There is a long post on home schooling and reporting child abuse over at junkyardblog. The article he critiques goes over the potential problem of isolated home school kids not having people report abuse. From speaking with the public school teachers I know, they do occasionally report abuse to authorities, usually in the form of neglect. Whether this actually helps the situation much is debatable since these families are often reported multiple times by different teachers in the same school or by the same teachers as different siblings come through the class and the case workers do little or nothing to help. Even reporting a case can be difficult as it can take over half an hour to do so and a teacher can not easily step out of the class for half on hour very easily.
The other issue the article ignores is the endemic violence in public schools. Homeschooling might prevent some abuse from being reported, but sending your child to a public school knowingly exposes your child to a potentially violent environment. I attended five different public schools in my life and there was bullying and violence in each. Elementary school was not that bad compared to my high school which had one shooting and a couple of small race riots, but it was not uncommon for fights to start even in elecmentary school. The worse part about it was that it was usually the same kids staring the fights each time. Maybe they would get suspended or detention, but a few weeks later they would have started another fight. I did not get into fights very often and generally avoided most of the bullying. The only fight I got into in high school was my P.E. class in 10th grade with a guy who had been picking fights with other people in the class all semester. These people had tried to ignore him, but when he pushed me and said he was going to kill me, I pushed back. We only fought for a few seconds and the teacher saw that he had clearly started it. So he sat out P.E. for the rest of day and was back again the next day to threaten me and the rest of the students in the class. If my experience was an isolated incident than that would not be a big deal, but it is not. This seems to be the standard practice at many public schools with the kids who threaten other students and start fights getting minor punishments while the rest of the students who want to live in peace have to watch their backs in the locker room and walking down the hall.
There is either an unwillingness or an inability in many administrators to expel the kids who cause most of these problems. A public high school teacher I know told me a story about one of her worst students a few years ago. This student was physically larger than she was and she had tried to send him to the administrators for punishment after he had disrupted her class. He was always sent right back to her. She eventually allowed this student to sleep through her class each day as this made him happy, did not distract the other students, and kept everyone out of physical danger. Partly because of situations like this she no longer teaches. The administration failed in its duty to maintain security and order in the school. Expulsion is an underused tool by many administrators in situations like this. If a child is a physical danger to the other children (or to teachers) in the school they need to be removed. I would say the same is true for the kids who are constantly causing disruptions in the classroom (often they are the violent kids), but the violent ones need to be removed first.
Posted by Pete at January 5, 2005 10:43 AM
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