Word: classrooms
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Many teachers have come to see themselves as casualties in a losing battle for learning and order in an indulgent age. Society does not support them, though it expects them to compensate in the classroom for racial prejudice, economic inequality and parental indifference. Says American School Board Journal managing editor Jerome Cramer: "Schools are now asked to do what people asked God to do." The steady increase in the number of working mothers (35% work full time now) has sharply reduced family supervision of children and thrown many personal problems into the teacher's lap, while weakening support...
These parents got fed up in different ways, but what they have in common is a willingness to sacrifice--money, career opportunities, watching soap operas--for their children's education. Sometimes these sacrifices are small, like giving up a dining room to make a classroom. But consider the Carnells of Columbia, Md., who started home schooling Erin, 6, because a shoulder injury required occupational therapy that would have interfered with school hours. The Carnells decided to keep teaching her at home because they feel they can do a better job than local schools. To teach her math and science...
Then again, if a parent lives in, say, California, where 30 kids pack the average third-grade classroom, who can blame her for home schooling? If it's a choice between being good to one's family or good to one's community, it's not much of a choice at all. Many, of course, try to be both, but some parents say the schools are too far gone. Amy Langley, who home schools her son and daughter in Decatur, Ga., believes two-income families don't participate enough to make public schools work. "And too much class time...
...could change anything about his teen years, he would want more interaction with people his age. "I don't date, and that's something I attribute to home schooling," he says. Or consider Rachel Ahern, 21, of Grand Junction, Colo., who never set foot in a classroom until she went to Harvard at 18. As a child, she socialized with older kids and adults at church and in music classes at a nearby college. "I never once experienced peer pressure," she says. But is that a good thing? Megan Wallace of Atlanta says if she had gone to high school...
...traditional techniques of watchmaking live on in classroom 401, where seven students are studying for a two-year higher diploma. "By the end, they'll have mastered the history of watchmaking from the 15th century to the present day in both theory and practice," teacher Pascal Lindwerlin says proudly. Lindwerlin graduated from the same course himself in 1984, before spending 12 years building prototypes for a clockmaker in La Chaux-de-Fonds...