by Lee Ann Thibeault

Created on: March 14, 2010

As a mother and a certified teacher, I reluctantly voted "no" on the issue of parents without certification teaching their children at home. Just a few short months ago, I would have voted "yes" in this poll, so why the change?

Because of a few issues at my daughter's current school, I am considering home schooling her in the future. Through the Internet, I've found many wonderful home school resources, including helpful forums and message boards. I have really enjoyed getting other parent's perspectives on how and why to home school. But, a nagging problem often crept into these posts that both concerned me for their kids and helped me to realize that education should not be taken lightly, ever. So many of these posts from home school parents were full of spelling mistakes and grammar errors. It was embarrassing and frightening to me that these parents were "teaching" subjects such as writing skills and parts of speech to their own kids while demonstrating, clearly, that they did not have a workable knowledge of these topics.

I realize that everyone makes typographical errors occasionally. We all do. However, these mistakes are frequent in many posts. Examples of poor grammar that I found on many forum and message board posts include the misuse of the plural pronoun "their" in the singular case as in the following sentence: My child did not finish their work today. Another often seen example of poor writing skills is the use of the wrong verb tense such as , "I seen" or "That blowed me away." Some of these errors are so blatant that it makes me wonder about the basic education of the parents in these situations.

Recently, other subject errors have shown up in posts as well. There is a well known home school science textbook that focuses on the idea of creationism as fact and leaves out any suggestion that evolution, even as a theory, is an alternative way of looking at scientific evidence. Even in the face of evidence including fossil records and carbon dating, some parents want to teach science based just on their only theoretical evidence. Why not give your child a balanced view of the theories and facts that scientists have to offer?

A teacher education program and a certificate enabling a person to lawfully teach within a certain state will not guarantee that a person will know everything there is to know about teaching. But it does provide evidence that someone has passed grammar and writing courses, had access to a basic general education, and understands the complexities of learning styles and potential problems that might arise.

Now, more than ever, it is important that a child have a well-rounded education complete with the knowledge of basic skills in grammar, writing, spelling, math, science and social studies so that he or she will be prepared to face the competition for jobs that is likely to increase in the coming years.

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