Heroes of Homeschooling

Bizarro is brought to you today by Homeschooling.

I have no doubt that the end of this sentence will get me in trouble with some of my readers, but homeschooling creeps me out. Sure, some homeschooling parents and home schooled children are probably fine. But most of them have to be a shade on the wrong side of psycho.

First, from what I've gathered in the extremely limited exposure I've had to the subject, most parents who choose homeschooling do so because they are religious nuts. That is to say that they don't want ideas outside of their own religion taught to their children. This is the sort of person who looks at their child more as a VCR they are programming than as an organic being with a mind of his own. Good luck with that.

I'm guessing there are also people who do it because they don't think the local schools are providing a good enough education for their kids. Fine, no argument. When my kids were school age, I, too, often suspected that many of their teachers were not all that good. In fact, I knew it. I'm sure that some of them couldn't correctly answer a single question in the first round of Jeopardy!. But I also knew that if I didn't get my kids out of the house for a large part of each day, it was going to end in a murder/suicide of some sort. I figured whatever educational edge the occasional half-ass teacher wasn't providing them, peer pressure and access to recreational drugs would make up for.

Finally, what could better prepare a person for dealing with the cruelty, mediocrity and gang-mentality of a world run by humans than 12 years of public school? When you're not putting up with a dull-witted bully, you're kowtowing to the chowderhead in authority and trying to avoid personal embarrassment by acting like you know what you're doing. Sounds like real life to me.

That's my authoritative, albeit uneducated opinion for today, now read the lengthy comments explaining how wrong I am. :)