CommenTerry

Should Home-Schooled Kids Be on Public School Sports Teams?

There is currently a major debate going on in the Virginia legislature over whether or not home-schooled kids should be allowed to play on public school sports teams. Many home-schooling parents are saying their children should be allowed to. I say they shouldn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I am very much an advocate of home-schooling. However, it just seems to me that home-schooling parents want to have things both ways here. On one hand, they don’t want any part of the public school system. But on the other hand, they want their kids to be able to enjoy one of the major benefits of that same public school system, at the expense of other kids (and parents) who have stuck with said school system. Sorry, but that just doesn’t seem right to me.

Now something I would support is the idea of all the home-schooled kids in a given locale getting together and forming their own team(s) to compete against the public school teams. Their teams could even join the same leagues or districts that the public school teams are in. The public school systems would probably welcome such a concept, as many public school sports teams have difficulty filling out their schedules each season.

Physical Education Is Not Taught Correctly

One of the reasons we have so many overweight and out-of-shape kids in this country is that physical education is not taught correctly is our schools. It is taught as complete drudgery. Instead, it should be more fun and free-style, with the kids deciding on their own which activities they want to participate in. Kids need to learn how to play again. On the contrary, physical education classes long ago left play behind. In fact, they have become a holy terror to some kids. It's high time that changed.

The Benefit of Learning by Rote

A lot of people, especially the academic elite, like to pooh-pooh the notion of learning by rote. They claim that this type of education results in schools turning out graduates who have memorized a lot of facts but don’t know how to think for themselves. While this may be true if taken to the extreme, I see a great benefit in learning by rote.

When I was in elementary and middle schools, most of my teachers utilized the rote method of teaching. They drilled the facts about history, arithmetic, English, science, and other subjects into our little heads by constant repetition. To this day, my mind is filled with little axioms such as “no taxation without representation”  “i before e except after c”, “you can’t divide by zero”, and “cells are the building blocks of life.”  That was just a minute sample. Obviously, there would be no way I could include them all here, as they would be far too numerous.

The information I learned during those years has served me well during my entire life. However, once I got to junior high school, things changed. My teachers began expecting me to do a lot of the research and learning on my own. They would only cover a portion of the material during class, and without a great deal of repetition.  This continued to a greater extent when I reached high school. When I got to college, things got even worse, as most of the learning was left to one’s own initiative and the classroom pace was very quick, leaving no time for any repetition.

The funny thing is that while I still retain much of what I learned in elementary and middle school, I have forgotten almost everything I learned in junior high, high school, and college, even though they were obviously more recent. If the methods used in the latter part of educational experience are supposedly so much better than those used in the earlier portion, then why has this happened? If I learn something and then quickly forget it, what good is it to me?

It is my belief that students would be far better off if teaching were done by rote all the way through college, provided that they were also taught how to think for themselves and apply this knowledge to everyday life situations. That would be a great potential improvement to our system of education that almost everyone seems to be overlooking.

A University for the Left Out

If I were a billionaire, one of the things that I would seriously consider doing would be to establish a new private university. I would spare no expense to make sure that it attracted the best possible professors and other staff members to ultimately transform it into one of the most elite institutions of higher learning in the entire country.

However, this university would have one major difference from all the rest. That difference would involve the way in which it would determine who would be admitted and who would not. Like most universities, it would be looking for students with high academic standing in high school. However, it would intentionally deny admission to the so-called “well-rounded” students that are so highly sought after by almost every other university.

Other colleges, almost without exception, emphasize participation in extracurricular activities and community service nearly as much as they do one’s academic achievements. As a result, those who do not participate in such activities, even if they have excellent grades, find themselves left out of most of the nation’s top colleges and universities. Those are the very students that my new university would seek to admit.

While there’s nothing wrong with stuff like extracurricular activities and community service, they should be completely optional for everyone. People should do things like that out of a willing heart or the simple joy and satisfaction they get from them, not because they are expecting to get some kind of a reward such as admission to an elite college or university. The latter smacks of ulterior motives.

 
I think it’s a crying shame that potential college students are judged by their participation – or lack thereof – in such activities. Many students need to spend so much effort on their studies that they don’t have time for anything else. Other students are merely not interested in outside activities. It is not fair to them that those things are taken into consideration by most institutions of higher learning. My new university would serve the purpose of trying to right that wrong.