My experience as a parent is that it easier and harder than you think. (It's harder because you don't get a lot of breaks - it's easier because common sense usually is a good guide).

Anyway - taking responsibility is one of the keys to success in life.

Specifically:

"Unschooling" is clearly a perfect way to train your kids for all those great jobs that don't require a high school education.

I would strongly encourage my daughters to carry her child if she ever got pregnant - but should she make the decision, I would hope she wouldn't be forced to seek an abortion outside of a trained professional.

Lastly, after reminding my kids I don't expect them to live at home after graduating high school, I like to tell them "You usually find a lot of hard work between being capable and being accomplished."

Have a good and carefully responsible weekend.

You are absolutly correct. Home schooling is a good ption for may parents who themselves are capable of accepting the responsibility for educating their children. But without a planned educational objective home schooling is about as worthless as many public education programs who appear to have only the objective of teaching self esteem and forget about the three Rs.

Part of education is learning self discipline. Do you know why the military requires a college degree for commissioned officers? It has little to do with the degree itself but is is an indication that the individual had the self discipline to complete something that was started. The same with a high school diploma.

There was a time when a high school diploma meant that the employee had more self discipline than a non grad plus there was a much better chance the grad was literate. Not anymore-when ones hires one just has to trust instinct because dipplomas-even college degrees- don't tell you very much.

I agree that today's society has a serious lack of responsibility. I have two children that accepts responsibility and does well in school. I have a third child that tries everything he can to avoid or deny responsibility.

There are many circumstances in which outsiders look at a misbehaving child/student and all is blamed on the parents. Obviously, they (the parents) must be to blame for the child's behavior because if they were doing their job, the child/student wouldn't behave that way.

It's a load of crock! The child's own personality has a lot to do with how they behave. I am not saying the parents are exempt. What I am saying is that parents (like my husband and I) do what they can to teach their children what they need to become productive people in society. But in the end, it is still up to the child/student.
Quit taking responsibility away from the child. A parent can only teach, it's up the the child to learn.

And home-schooling is not a bad thing. I do not home-school, but have many friends that do. If I had the time, I would home-school my children. Today's educational system is 'out-come' based education. Everyone goes in and comes out with the same information. Exceptional or gifted students does the same work as the 'normal' students. This in itself is a great injustice. I have two children that are both gifted. They may take advanced classes, but it's not something that younger students won't take eventually. Gifted students just take it earlier.
Out-come based. Everyone learns the same thing. Phooey!

One of my friends who home-schooled her children, her oldest child won a scholarship to a prestigious university, and graduated with honors from that university. Home-schooling DOES have standardized plans. It's just the order in which you teach them, as well as what 'electives' you wish to teach. They also have field trips and such. Just like to typical public school. Home-schooled children have interaction with other home-schoolers.
True, they may not get as much interaction as a student in public school, but they also do not get the bullying etc. Home-schoolers, in my opinion, get a better education, so long as the parent teaches it.

The bottom line is this;
No matter if you home-school or public school- it's still up to the parents to motivate and teach their child life's lessons. And it's up to the child/student to do their 'work/job.'
If those two things are not happening simultaneously, you have a lopsided circle.

You have to break the cycle, get out of the catch-22. Knowledge brings power. When people have the knowledge, they have the power to change things.

I would say that there is no magic bullet that will automatically make your kids turn out right.

Their lives can go tragically wrong in a just the short bit of time regardless of what their parents do.

Parents can help them have their best shot.

Knowledge does bring power.

I completely agree that college students today by and large are not motivated, and in the least don't work to their full potential. And clearly their trend toward the mediocre started much earlier than their admission to USC. I complain about some of my dumber professors; and they deserve the criticism. But my disdain for them doesn't negate the fact that I still need to deal with them, and still need to complete the absurd papers and exams they assign to me.

I am continually amazed by the narrow field of knowledge so many of my peers possess. I'll be in classes, and the professor will say something I think is just a basic piece of information about the world. Hitler-Stalin Pact, or Nixon wasn't actually impeached, or this-is-what-we-call-a-pronoun and so on. And the other students will be dumbfounded. They will gasp. Looks of astonishment on their faces. I'd have thought 20-year-olds, who have completed high school, and evidently had decent standardized test scores would have already known this stuff.

There's a website maintained by USC's Student Senate at which students can rate their professors. I was looking through it yesterday while trying to decide which professors' classes I should sign up for in the Fall. One of my potential professors has had some harsh student reviews. Last year, he posted a reply to his critics:

Review posted on 2/23/2005 at 4:25:06 PM by Dan Lynch (the professor) Course(s) Taken: 305, 333, 384, 444, 525, 534, 563 A few students complain here that it is impossible to get an A in IR 333 (China), or that "if you care about your GPA, don't take this course." Such complaints are completely unfounded. Out of the 55 people who took IR 333 in Fall 2004, 18 ended up with a final course grade of either A or A- (11 A's, 7 A-'s). That's fully 1/3rd of the class. Moreover, the reading load did not average 100 pages per class session, as one person alleges; it averaged 75 pages, which is exactly the College requirement for a 300-level class. True, sometimes the reading was challenging. But I had thought USC students now enter with higher SAT scores than students at UCLA and Berkeley, and would therefore expect some challenge. I guess that's true for 1/3 of the class, at least. I hope it's true for the rest; otherwise, you're not living up to your potential.

Dan Lynch

Ha.

Link to that professor's comment and his critics, if you're interested: http://www.senatecourseguide.com/profile.asp?Professor=79