Home School vs. Public School

with the pandemic lockdown in full effect virtually every family with school-aged children is getting a taste of what homeschooling could look like in their family and at least according to one survey that I saw a significant number of people have an increased appreciation for homeschooling and many of them have said that they will consider continuing with homeschooling after the lockdown is over and it's those kinds of sentiments that I think have a lot of people worried which is no surprise why I saw some article that blew up on Twitter by a law professor I don't really remember her name but she was publishing something in a Harvard publication about all the evils of homeschooling and everything that's wrong with it so as someone who grew up in a public schooling situation in formation but has chosen homeschooling for my kids I think I'm ideally situated to begin a discussion about the advantages of both so before I jump right into this I feel like I have to make a few qualifiers and the first is that not all homeschooling experiences are created equal many families will have a diverse array of approaches to home schooling and the curriculums and the styles that they draw from so for the sake of making a worthwhile comparison I'm gonna focus in on one style which is popular among many of my family and friends which is a classical education with an emphasis on the liberal arts and as I get into this you'll see why I also want to point out that anything that I say in this video that could be interpreted as a criticism against public schools is not meant to be a criticism against the people who work in public schools I know a lot of teachers and administrators who are very deliberately and intentionally doing heroic work in that field anything that I might say that is critical is more aimed at the system that they've inherited and the constraints that they have to work with him so like I said earlier I grew up going to public schools and so I think that my experience will provide a revealing use case for what the advantages are and the distinctions are between the two approaches so I'll take a little bit of time to just tell you about my own story so believe it or not I have been accused by more than if people love being intelligent and since there are a surprising number of people who are willing to listen to me mumble my way through these commentaries that seems to further advance that premise but according to my public school record I was exceptionally mediocre in my academic performance none of my peers would have suspected that I was incredibly clever and if they had any doubts a quick report card comparison would have dissuaded them but I scraped by and I went to college in the hopes of becoming a web and graphic designer which I did and then I landed my first job and it was the only job I was qualified to do and it was probably the only job I would ever be qualified to do but then something strange happened around that same time I became Catholic and this led to an immersion in reading philosophy and theology which exposed me to the first time in my life to what the liberal arts calls dialectic and rhetoric dialectic is the study of logic and critical thinking and rhetoric is that is the study of persuasive communication now I wasn't studying these things formally as a student was but I was getting exposed to them and they were wearing off on me and frankly having a dramatic effect on me I was growing in my ability to think logically and critically as well as in my ability to communicate my thoughts precisely and persuasively and it was this exposure and conditioning that caught the attention of the kinds of people who could open up opportunities for me in my life I haven't found myself getting invitations and access to seemingly important people and always being a little perplexed as to why I was getting these invitations and why I was enjoying their company my youtube channel is a perfect example of what I'm talking about I I would not be doing this kind of thing and I wouldn't be approached by the kinds of opportunities that have come my way as a result of that exposure it also unlocked new aspects of my intelligence and my personality that equipped me for a wide range of challenges that I would have otherwise had no idea how to meet and this was because of the fact that I had grown in my ability to think critically and articulate my thoughts persuasively and these are things that I had no exposure to previously because the emphasis in my public schooling formation was on STEM fields we had no time for things like philosophy or the study of language and whatever attention we did give towards language was just enough to get by for academic purposes because well you're gonna have to write a paper from time to time so you might as well be able to string a sentence together it was the kind of attitude that would have been dismissive of classical literature as something that doesn't really provide any value beyond priggish dinner conversation but the classical liberal arts place a huge emphasis on these disciplines which includes grammar dialectic or logic and rhetoric and they're called liberal arts because of their ability to produce Liberty in the student they free a person from the bonds of ignorance and ineptitude by examining the most fundamental questions about humanity and life and then scrutinizing and studying the best answers that have ever been produced by us as a thinking species and in my case with the limited exposure that I've had I have found a greater degree of flexibility freedom and opportunity in my life by contrast my public school formation funneled me towards a one-dimensional career and if I ever wanted to stray from that it would have cost me an excessive amount of time and money to redirect away from the path that I chosen when I was like 17 but the liberal arts are designed as a holistic educational experience to produce a person who is fully acquainted with their identity as a human being and able to address and think about the deepest and most fundamental questions of life and our highest goods as human beings rather than situating ourselves as a gear in an economic machine and if you think about it it's not that hard to see why so in home have mastered the art of language critical thinking and the ability to persuade someone of something someone who's gonna be able to articulate their thoughts with confidence it's also someone who will rarely be taken in by someone who wants to manipulate them with fallacious polemics in order to control them and the most obvious example that we should all be able to relate to today is in the realm of politics in politics we have what we call debates where two or more candidates will get up on a stage and make their case but call these debates is extremely generous debate is a formal discussion which should be scrutinized by and abide by the laws of logic but these televised debates everything that they say in them is a textbook fallacy and nobody ever calls them out on that and why is that it's because we don't know any better we haven't been trained and educated in critical thinking in order to evaluate the things that they say which gives them enough maneuverability to dodge any meaningful accountability from us the very people who are supposed to be holding them accountable and for a democracy to be successful the electorate needs to be able to think critically about who they're gonna vote for and why but without that formation in critical thinking that really is too much to ask for from the average person there's a famous quote out there and I can't remember who said it but off the top of my head it was something like the best argument against democracy is a conversation with the average voter so a classical liberal arts education is the kind of thing that produces a person who is able to know how to think rather than merely what to think they can hear a claim and run it through a critical examination and then judge it for its validity far better than a person can who has no exposure to that intellectual tradition but there is a drawback in this kind of formation because of its holistic approach to education it means that every student has to be well-versed in a wide spectrum of thought and discipline which is great for their individual flourishing but I would argue that it can't produce the kind of material prosperity that we've become used to in the modern world so to try to explain what I mean I want to offer an analogy so imagine an athletic Olympic team so say you've got like a pole vaulter a swimmer and a sprinter and each of them relentlessly trains on their one discipline so that the swimmer becomes the best swimmer he or she could be and the sprinter becomes the absolute best sprinter he or she could be now imagine another team where each member works on all the disciplines so that they become a very well-rounded and capable athlete able to do any of the kinds of sports that they might be invited to do now between those - which one is most likely to achieve the greatest heights and access to think to rewards like gold medals well obviously it's going to be the former because they've sacrificed the flourishing of the individual for the the capabilities of the team to access those great achievements the latter team will produce individuals will have a much richer experience of what is possible with their minds and bodies and therefore a greater understanding of what it means to be human but they won't win any gold medals modern education is designed to transform a student and a pupil into a specialized worker it starts by building up our stamina for what is that near 40-hour workweek even though it doesn't take nearly that long to cover the lessons in the material it teaches us to be compliant with Authority both through social interactions with peers and teachers but also by telling us exactly what to think and then rewarding us with grades when we accurately recite that supposed knowledge back and it's all designed to propel us forward into a post-secondary situation where we become so narrowly focused on a single specialized discipline that we barely have any room in our minds or in our lives for anything else and it's this process that has made it possible for us to create such a technologically and materially prosperous society like the one we have a society that can optimize its members so that everybody performs one task at a at the highest possible level is one that's going to be able to leverage the highest amount of material success compared to a society in which everyone has given a broad education a holistic education that that accounts for all the available academic disciplines but where we gain collectively in that scenario I would say that the individual suffers the individual becomes trapped in that one vocation and not just as a career but also as a thinking person I've met people who are incredibly sophisticated and capable in their jobs but if you try to have a conversation with them about something else like politics psychology literature art or music you might as well be talking to the same person they were in high school I remember once having a conversation with a medical doctor who thought that there was nothing wrong with eugenics and I think that's because he had no exposure to philosophy which examines these kinds of ethical questions thoroughly and critically he was utterly ill-equipped or unequipped to understand why sterilizing people who he or the government thought were unfit to reproduce was a bad thing and by way of reference that's one of the many horrific policies that Nazi Germany had perfected the liberal the classical liberal arts which is something that you really only find for the most part in homeschooling curriculum today is the kind of thing that can produce a society of three people who will flourish in their humanity or who can it's likely to achieve what Aristotle called eudaimonia or enduring happiness modern education represented by public school curriculum produces an incredibly optimized and sophisticated worker it creates an acutely honed means to an end the end being greater material prosperity for the eighty so years we are all able to live if we're lucky now imagine you're the director of that Olympic team and responsible for squeezing the most out of your athletes are you likely to choose an option that produces the most well-rounded athletes who will enjoy the richness of that that flexible athleticism or are you gonna try and optimize your athletes in the pursuit of the most gold medals and if you're a social engineer responsible for maximizing material prosperity within a society you'll likely choose the option that will bring the most gold within your grasp but the question remains is gold what truly makes us happy as human beings and without the logic and the critical thinking about the most fundamental questions of what it means to be a human being without a liberal arts education we won't be able to answer that question thank you so much for watching that I really hope that you enjoyed it and you got something out of it and if you did and you want to consume more content like this then please consider subscribing to my channel or if you saw this on Facebook then like my page and follow along if you're on youtube it's not enough anymore to subscribe because YouTube wants to think that it can tell you what you should watch instead of what you actually want to watch so in this case you actually have to hit that little bell to be notified as to whether or not I've uploaded something more recently so please subscribe and hit the bell at the same time that really helps me out a lot and if you could consider sharing this among your social network that helps me a lot too and if you want to support the making of these videos please consider supporting my business which is a communications 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Channel: Brian Holdsworth

Views: 12,012

Rating: 4.9524245 out of 5

Keywords: Brian Holdsworth, Holdsworth Brian, Worthy Commentary, Home Schooling, Homeschooling, why homeschool, classical education, classical liberal arts, trivium, 7 liberal arts, quadrivium

Id: hUog45Q7BV4

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020