Tuesday Debate: Public Schools vs. Home Schooling

By Glenn and Jake

I can't think of a more hot button topic to debate than public schooling vs. home schooling. Abortion? That's just so trite. Legalization of marijuana? Yeah right, keep dreaming. There is no issue that will turn a dinner party into a chainsaw massacre like this one. This topic will turn a church pot luck into a three mile island of differing opinions.


Jake (Home Schooling): The education of children is a hot button topic in many of the states, not Indiana, where I live. When I was in fifth grade I left Indiana and moved to Illinois. Doing this meant that I was at least four months behind. If I were home schooled I would have not missed out on anything. I would have known how to do the math that we were on, because I would have had the same teachers, my parents. You rarely hear of a home school getting shot up by trench coat wearing social outcasts. The worst that would happen to you at a home school is you have to write an essay because you didn't eat all of your vegetable at dinner or do your daily chores. The best thing that can happen is you become a doctor by the age of 12.

Glenn (Public Schooling): Jake has overstated the value of a home-based education without fully addressing the benefits of learning in a public environment. Home schooling might sound great if you're one of the jocks or cheerleaders that would be killed by a public school shooting, but it deprives you of needed socialization. People who are home schooled end up, later in life, murdering at a rate fifty times the normal population. That's a short term benefit but a long term cost to society. Where do the guns in school shootings come from, anyway? They come from parents and they're found in student's homes. Our public schools are protected like fortresses now. Instead of weapons, they're full of learning and schoolbooks. Plus there are romantic possibilities in a public school that doesn't exist when you learn at home, unless you're a Mormon and thus commit incest.

Jake (Home Schooling): When I have home schooled children I'm going to sign them up for sports or, if they're fat and their playing of sports would be embarrassing, I'd get them registered for a debate club or something that wouldn't cause me shame. Sure, parents have guns, but most of those parents are too busy shooting raccoons to teach their kids the difference between a colon and a semi-colon. Those parents would just send their kids to public school. Another point that could be made toward home schooling is that your children can have hot lunches that aren't 90% cardboard. Children would have nourishment and nutrition, plus they wouldn't be sexually abused by angry male teachers.

Glenn (Public Schooling): As Jake well knows, children are most likely to be sexually abused by members of their own family and not public school teachers. Gay male teachers will always be a danger in their propensity to convert children to homosexuality, but for progressive parents this should not be a real danger. There is nothing wrong with being gay, especially compared to being molested. Home lunches are better than school lunches, but school lunches are free if you're poor. You have to pay for home lunches in that each dollar spent is a dollar that isn't spent on toys. Public school is paid for by people that own property and corporate sponsors, but all home schooling experiences from right out of your parents' income. For children, the choice is clear.

Jake (Home Schooling): Children don't get a choice, that's why so many of them are aborted by alcoholic 23 year old girls. Kids need to get a valuable education, and that's the bottom line. When the youths don't, they end up being billigerent, poor drivers and talk during movies. You can find people doing all three of those things in my home state. When children don't get a good, or even adequate, education then we all suffer when we go see the reboot of Speed or the reboot of Norbit. Home schooling, I feel, is better suited to teach kids at their own pace and the lessons can better focus on what they enjoy, rather than needing to teach 45 kids as fast as possible.

Glenn (Public Schooling): If home schooling was so great, then more people than Mormons would use it. That's a simple test I use to determine the quality of anything: do Mormons use it? If they do, I know it's bad. In public schools, you learn how to put condoms on penises and how to do drugs and smoke cigarettes. Home schooled children don't know how to do any of those things, which is why they have such a high rate of pregnancy and why most of them get very sick when they first try smoking. Home schooling kids means focusing all the attention on the student, which again is great for the teachers but sucks for the children. Why can't we start putting children first?

Jake (Home Schooling): We can put children first when they're on a sinking ship. Otherwise, fuck the kids, they need to not be moronic and ruin my day because they have to text while driving (or doing anything else). A home schooled child would, in theory, be better disciplined than a public school child that has been tossed aside like a t-shirt covered in dried semen. Public school children, while mostly not Mormon, are still 50% more likely to convert to a religion worse than Mormonism later in their life. Do you want a bunch of young Krishnas running around the airport pelting you with daisies? I don't think so. We need to avoid this if we can, and we can by home schooling.

Glenn (Public Schooling): I guess what this has come down to is what is best for the children. That's exactly what this debate should be about, so in this sense we all win. But in another sense, children lose because Jake has made clearer and more effective points in this debate and has probably doomed American children to a life of home schooling. Your house should be your solace away from school - a place where bullies can't touch you, girls can't make fun of you and where no one will ever shoot you just for being different. But now that Jake has won this debate, that's all about to disappear. All of the terrible things that used to be confined to school will now happen at your home instead. I will never home school my own children even if the government orders me to do so. At best, I will give them all A's in classes like "Introduction to Eating with Silverware" and "Advanced Coloring."