There is less faith now in the public education system than there ever has been. Homeschooling has increased by 75 percent in the last 14 years, according to a recent report in Education News. Homeschooling is growing seven times faster than a K-12 public education. Researchers predict that the homeschooling boom will continue to explode over the next 10 years, as parents seek to provide their son/daughter with a better education, one that is less controlling and less controlled.
Now seeing that the federal government’s no child left behind act has made public education into a factory line, more parents are finding alternative educations at home. As the government continues to intrude, it will be wise for parents to take a closer look at the looming common core standards that states are now adopting from the Obama Administration. These standards do even more damage, seeking to turn students and their emotions into stored, traceable data, using data mining techniques.
Regurgitating information and coloring in bubbles
The onslaught of government programs and standardized testing has rendered students just mere statistics in a database. Many parents feel like their child has become just another brick in the wall. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that the No Child Left behind Act did nothing over the last decade but pressure a narrow curriculum onto schools, a curriculum that taught straight to the tune of state testing guidelines. The subsequent inflated test scores never proved that real learning had improved, but instead created a brainwashing system. This standardized system has stunted creativity in children, scolded skepticism, herded achievement, and reigned in competition to an equal yoke, as kids learn nothing more than how to regurgitate information and color in a bubble.
Turning your children into a traceable number in a database
As government is continually looked to as the answer for education, new Common Core standards are being coerced into each state’s public education system. These uniform standards make the No Child Left Behind Act look like a small appetizer. Common core goes deeper than standardized education. It seeks to turn children into digitized pets tied to a surveillance leash. In fact, Common Core standards reveal data mining techniques, which will record and log a student’s facial expressions and reactions through iris and other biometric scans implemented through sensors on school computers.
Although common core looks like a state initiated plan, the program was actually coerced onto the states through a $4 billion grant from Obama’s Race to the Top program. The federal government, run by controlling surveillance freaks, has effectively lassoed state support. There’s an exception to that rule, though – Missouri. Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer from Missouri has recently wrote a letter to the US Department of Education, addressing several issues with the new Common Core standards.
“We understand that as a condition of applying for [Race to the Top] grant funding, states obligated themselves to implement a State Longitudinal Database System (SLDS) used to track students by obtaining personally identifiable information,” Luetkemeyer said. “We formally request a detailed description of each change to student privacy policy that has been made under your leadership, including the need and intended purpose for such changes.”
The Department of Education applauds the data mining techniques, saying in its February 2013 report, “Researchers are exploring how to gather complex affective data and generate meaningful and usable information to feed back to learners, teachers, researchers, and the technology itself. Connections to neuroscience are also beginning to emerge.”
Nine states have already complied to this new technology, which goes farther than eyeballing student test scores. Students’ personal information, including behavior and reactions are being sent to a database managed by In Bloom, Inc., which is a privately funded organization started by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Benefits of homeschooling
An Education News report actually shows that homeschooled children ultimately attain four year degrees at much higher rates than publicly enrolled students. As a matter of fact, some of the top colleges in the US, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Stanford, and Duke University avidly recruit homeschooled children. Homeschooled children aren’t as socially inept as what others stigmatize. In fact, homeschooled children complete their work faster at home and have more time for community, church, and neighborhood social activities. Family values and character, the most overlooked part of an education, are taught much more strongly from home, making homeschooled children more respectful, higher achieving, and beneficial members of the community. Furthermore, most public schools spend very limited time on three other very important life skills – proper nutrition, hands on skills, and entrepreneurship. These skills are passed on well in a home school environment.
All in all, homeschooling is on the rise as parents “wake up” to the reality that a public education has become nothing more than a watered down, standardized, brainwashing, data mining pool that sells their kids, brick by brick, up the crick for a lousy government granted paycheck.
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