In astonishment, I read an article about homeschoolers in Iowa fighting to keep state funded home school programs. The reason for my astonishment is that in my state of Georgia homeschoolers are fighting for the opposite. The vast majority of homeschoolers in Georgia don’t want state supported programs because it invites excessive state oversight into the homeschool. Still, this year, a state funded homeschool program was successfully launched and has many followers. Georgia newsgroups and email lists are quite contentious over it.
In Iowa,however, many homeschoolers have gladly accepted this government assistance, and now that the state is threatening to remove it, they are in an uproar. They feel that without such assistance that their ability to homeschool their children will be hindered. My question here is how did Iowans homeschool their kids before state assistance came into play?
If I were the paranoid person, I would think that the anti-homeschooling school unions thought up this plot just to devastate homeschooling in the state of Iowa. (Maybe I am paranoid…here’s how I see it.)
Homeschoolers surely existed just fine before the public schools decided to get a piece of the action by providing public school based programs and curriculums. Sure parents had to read, and research, and work to find curriculum and resources for kids, but they were found, and I gather there are still many Iowan homeschool families who operate this way. After many years of providing free services to homeschoolers, which also gave the school districts more oversight of homeschooling families, the districts realized that instead of pulling homeschooling families back into public schools, it was actually allowing more families the freedom to homeschool. This was certainly not their original intention, so they yanked the program. This leaves thousands of homeschooling families at a loss as to how to proceed with homeschooling. What better way is there to prove that homeschoolers are useless without the help of the state?
I did not write this diatribe to criticize homeschoolers in Iowa, but to point out a very interesting fact of life that I see being played out in Iowa. It is if you want to control something, then you just need to pay for it. If you want to ruin something, all you need to do is put yourself into a position and responsibility of power then suddenly remove walk away.
*Have a question about homeschooling? Just ask.
* Have you seen the homeschooling curriculum glossary?