Home School vs Public School

Given the state of the average public school, no child, especially a Catholic child, should set foot in one!

With the lock down in effect, everyone with school aged children is getting a taste of what home schooling could be like and according to at least one survey I saw, a significant number of parents have an increased appreciation for homeschool and some have indicated that they intend to keep doing it after the lock down is over. So as someone who went to public schools when I was growing up but has chosen home schooling for my kids, I thought I’d be ideally positioned to share what I think is the most important advantage or each. So, like I said earlier, I was raised in a public school setting and I think my own experience is a revealing use case for what makes these two approaches distinct and where the advantages lie in each, so I’ll start by sharing a bit about my own story.

Believe it or not, I have been accused by a few people of being intelligent and since a surprising number of people are willing to listen to me mumble my way through these commentaries, that seems to further advance that premise. But, according to my public school record, I was incredibly mediocre in my academic performance. None of my peers would have suspected me of being exceptionally clever and if they had any doubts, a quick report card comparison would have dissuaded them. But I scraped by and went to college in the hopes of becoming a graphic and web designer, which I did. And then I landed my first job and it was the only job I was qualified to do and probably the only one I would ever be qualified to do, but something strange happened around that time too. I became Catholic and this led to an immersion in reading philosophy and theology which exposed me, for the first time in my life, to studying what was known in the liberal arts as dialectic and rhetoric. Dialectic was the study of logic and rhetoric was the study of persuasive communication.

Now, I wasn’t formally studying these things as a student would have, but I was getting exposed to them and they were wearing off on me and they had a dramatic effect on me. I started to grow in my ability to think critically and logically as well in my ability to articulate my thoughts accurately and persuasively. And it was this exposure that conditioning that caught the attention of the kinds of people that could provide access to new opportunities for me in my life. I often found myself getting invitations and access to important people and not really being sure why I was there. The YouTube channel is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I wouldn’t be doing this and I wouldn’t be approached by the kinds of opportunities that it has afforded me without that exposure. And frankly, it unlocked new aspects of my intelligence and my personality and equipped me for a wide range of challenges in life that I would have had no idea how to confront but have since seemed to navigate with a confidence I wouldn’t otherwise have. And this was all because of the fact that I had grown in my ability to think logically and communicate persuasively which are traits that I had very little exposure to because the emphasis in my public school formation was on STEM fields. There was no time for philosophy and whatever attention we paid towards language was just enough to get by for academic purposes.

Nobody ever would have guessed that reading classical literature would provide any value beyond priggish dinner party conversation. But the classical liberal arts place a huge emphasis on these disciplines which included grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric and they were called “liberal” arts because they produced liberty in the student. They freed a person from the bonds of ignorance ineptitude by asking the most fundamental questions about life and then offering the best answers that we have produced as a thinking species. And in my case, I have found myself achieving greater degrees of freedom, flexibility, and opportunity. My public school formation funneled me towards a one dimensional career and if I ever wanted to stray from that, it would have cost me significant time and money to redirect from the path I had chosen when I was 17. But a person who is educated in a broad spectrum of disciplines that are meant to produce a person who is fully acquainted with their identity as a human being and aware of the deep questions of life rather than a gear in an economic machine. Read the whole transcript at https://brianholdsworth.ca