This is what Santorum’s brand of “education” looks like - my experience with home schooling
Let me tell you about my experience with a home-schooled child. Certainly not all home schooling is bad, but when parents’ rationale to home school is entrenched in their own fundamentalist religion, it’s out of ignorance and often racism.
I am a math teacher with a private tutoring business for the past twenty years. I have worked with all kinds of students, but nothing like the experience with a young adult student named Mary who first came to me five years ago. Her short term goal was to take the GED test; long term goal was a college degree. She had not graduated from high school because her Southern Baptist fundamentalist parents had home schooled her, but only through eighth grade, at which time her pastor father deemed her educated enough since her role was to marry and breed. Mary “escaped” her family at the age of 17, went to a vocational school in Minnesota to become a hair stylist. She ended up in Florida, where she found me through her prep-school-educated boyfriend’s family. Let me digress for one moment to opine on home schooling “standards.” Her family actually moved from one state with some loose standards for home-schooled students to another state with NO standards for home-schooled students FOR THAT VERY REASON. They sought out a state where they could teach their children as little or as incorrectly as they wanted to. And the consequences of their desired ignorance was a 22-year-old Mary coming to me with a 5th grade aptitude in math.
I taught Mary fractions, decimals and negative numbers. She was a hard worker and very ambitious, so she learned quickly. She took the GED within a few months and passed, and then started at the community college to earn her A.A. degree. She started with a remedial college algebra course, and did very well. Then precalculus, learning trigonometry, graphing, polynomials and more advanced algebra. She was like a sponge, discovering a whole new world that had been deliberately kept from her. All because her parents think, like Rick Santorum, that a comprehensive education is at odds with the religious indoctrination under which they raise they children.
Fast forward to the happy ending of the story today: Mary earned her A.A. degree and was accepted, on scholarship, to business school at a private university. She took business calculus, and only needed a little of my help, and is now acing the business statistics course totally on her own. She has turned into a bit of a math nerd! She is getting a business degree and wants to own her own salon eventually. I am so proud of her and the obstacles she’s overcome. But I am horrified parents like hers use religion to justify the child abuse that is this brand of “home schooling.” To me, there’s no difference between them and the Taliban not allowing girls to attend school.
