by Earl Lee (author of Libraries in the Age of Mediocrity and Raptured; Earl also wrote the scholarly foreword to The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition; See Sharp Press will publish Earl’s final book, the time travel novel The Unkindness of Raves, in April 2016)
Some people are no doubt puzzled by the fact that I support home schooling. You would think that a rationalist like myself would object to the idea of letting people force their crazy religious beliefs on their children, and especially under the guise of “education.” Not me.
I may be a rationalist, but I am also a Darwinian. While my three kids did well in the public schools and are now starting their careers, the children of homeschoolers are also coming onto the job market. These home schooled kids have a strong work ethic but very poor skills in the areas of logic, writing, and arithmetic. Years of being taught “magical thinking” can have that effect. The vast majority will do very poorly on the ACT or SAT tests, and those kids who do manage to get into college will probably fail due to their nonexistent social skills. Having spent many years memorizing Bible verses and learning the proper way to put a saddle on a dinosaur, they are unlikely to pose a threat to my kids in the job market.
And, best of all, all those years they spent memorizing Bible verses will have prepared them for that day—soon to be upon them—when they will need to memorize food orders, the soup of the day, and the names of all the available salad dressings, and to recognize those items on the buttons on the register. I’m sure my children and grandchildren will appreciate it when they get their daily bread exactly as they ordered it.
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