What if . . . Institutionalized Schooling Edition

(Disclaimer: This post is just me thinking out loud and is purely hypothetical. I'm not ready to start a petition to start legislation for the following. I've though about the topic for a total of 10 minutes and have done hardly any research that would back up some of my thoughts. So there.)

As you know, I'm a big homeschooling advocate. For reasons that I'll lay out in a large upcoming post (yes, the one I've been promising for almost 2 years now), I am convinced that, all things being equal, it's the absolute best way to raise our children both academically, morally, socially, etc.

And as I was reflecting on the fact that our public schools (and many private schools, for that matter) continually struggle to crank out a "finished product", so to speak, this question jumped to mind:


What if we just closed all the institutionalized schools in the nation?


Sure, it sounds a little drastic at first, but let's explore it a bit.

First off, if I could give two main reasons for the struggles of the public schools, in my opinion, I would offer the following (there are many others, clearly, but these are two biggies):

1) Unbalanced Student-to-Teacher Ration (i.e. too many students in a classroom)

2) Decline of the American family and society


The first seems obvious enough; a teacher could instruct much more effectively if she had 5 in her classroom as opposed to 25. This of course would never happen in a tax-funded educational system, as it would be cost-prohibitive.

The second seems obvious to me and to all the teachers that are currently in the trenches. The home lives of many of our children now are very different than they were fifty years ago (or so I hear : ) A few factors:

1) Astronomical divorce rate; many single-parent homes

2) Double-income families; "day-care" children

3) Lack of discipline in the home; enabling parents

4) Parental indifference; children feel unloved

5) Small family sizes; more than 2 children seen as burden

6) Effects of "culture of death"; measures taken to insure no unwanted children

7) TV/Computer; "third parent"

. . . among many others. Imagine the difficulty of teaching 20-25 children that are coming from this "typical" American household. Nearly none of these things were the case 50 years ago . . . it's easier to imagine a nun maintaining control of a classroom of 40-50 when each child had a healthy respect for their elders (which is clearly the exception now) and none of the previous factors listed.

OK, this is getting long . . . let's make this a 2-parter.