Home-schooling

is on my mind today. And I vacillate.

When our

girls were approaching school age, I rejected any notions

of keeping them home to study - for selfish reasons.

I loved them dearly, but was so glad to have them out of

the house that I used to bake a cake and celebrate the

day school started each fall.

In worthier

moments, however, I had my reasons.

I thought

home-schooling was over-protective and elitist, akin to

private schooling, and failed to teach kids about

differences and real world issues. They needed to

discover that not every family had two parents and a

house with a porch on a shaded suburban street.

They needed

to learn to deal with kids who lie, whose language or

clothes are dirty, or who vacation in Bermuda and get

what they want when they want it. They needed to

understand that different is just different, neither

better nor worse, and that one holds to one's own

standards regardless of the behavior of others.

I deeply

believed, and still do, that public schools are

strengthened by exactly the kind of people who too often

desert the public system: well-educated, cultured,

financially secure families actively involved in their

children's education.

After mine

were well through their education - public, every

day of it - I read a thought-provoking essay by my

friend and journalistic mentor Bert Roughton. Agonizing

over the same decision for his own son, he wrote a lot of

what I've said above, plus this:

With the

"best and brightest" educators reportedly

abandoning the public schools, "my faith in their

quality trembles." We get only one chance at

educating our kids. Should we "gamble our child's

future?" If we mess it up, we can't start over.

That was

the beginning of my tentative swing to an opposite

viewpoint. Public schools too often do fail to educate,

while many private schools and home-school curricula

offer outstanding teaching techniques.

Some

parents find that a totally flexible school day allows

parent and child to tour museums, travel to historic

sites, attend legislative or court sessions - things

many public school kids only get to read about - and

in little more time than they used to put into

school-mandated homework and science projects.

(Not to

mention that your kids don't have to go door-to-door on

fund-raising projects. In 1999, that suggests one more

terribly disturbing reason to keep kids home: safety.)

And now

there's the availability of the Internet and virtually

limitless resources organized by educators. An

interesting compromise model some churches have discussed

is to combine three days a week of home-schooling with

two days of classroom study.

Evaluations

show home-scholars do very well on standardized tests and

in meeting the challenge of college.

Our

daughter plans to home-school her children, for many of

the reasons I just listed, even though they've done very

well in a church-related school. (If you came in late,

Jean became an instant mother of girls, 14 and 11, and a

son, 6, when she married their widowed father in

January.)

One factor

is that Abigail, the eldest, would have gone into a

satellite school this year with classes beamed in by

closed-circuit television.

With

excellent video resources, she can do that at home.

I mentioned

her plans to a friend who never lacks for an opinion, and

who opposes home-schooling. One objection she expressed,

however, was thought-provoking.

She said

she doesn't worry about the so-called socializing skills

or quality of learning that home-schooled children might

lack. Kids will find other kids, and most smart kids will

learn, given the slightest opportunity.

But what

home-schooled kids may not learn, she said, is the

"arbitrariness" of the school environment, and

of life itself.

"It

was my turn. That's not fair," protests the child,

and the teacher replies, "Sorry. Life's not always

fair."

Or,

"Yes, she got a better grade than you did, but hers

represents greater effort than yours."

In fact,

that old "not fair" issue came to mind when I

read one of the many letters to the editor spawned by the

recent Atlanta shootings. If Mark Barton's rampage was a

reaction to losing huge amounts of money in day trading,

one letter-writer suggested that perhaps Barton had never

learned how to deal with failure.

When we

give every kid in the class a blue ribbon for awful

drawings; make sure the worst hitters get to bat even

when the league championship is at stake; let kids walk

with their class to "Pomp and Circumstance"

even though they haven't made the grades to graduate,

they never learn how to fail.

In real

life, we probably fail more often than we succeed. If

there's always someone to place a cushion or to run

interference with teachers or employers, we never learn

to fail.

I blame the

idolatry of self-esteem. The best thing that can happen

to most kids is an occasional bruised ego; they'll grow

stronger for it. You never again misspell the word that

sets you down in the school spelling bee. (Would you

believe mine was "genealogy"?)

Teach

children that failure is a building block, a challenge.

That having to stretch beyond their reach will make them

grow. That embarrassment is the price you pay for not

finishing an assignment on time, or for being called down

for misbehavior. That shame can make you strong.

These are

lessons that might be better learned in school, through a

collaboration between parent and teacher.

But I still

don't know what my decision would be today if I had young

children whose future depended on it.

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