Monday through Friday, grocery store aisles belong to stay-at-home mothers and elderly folk. Every now and then, a child, who looks about the right age to be sitting at a desk inside a non-air conditioned school, is shopping with mom. I grit my teeth, holding back a burning question, "Shouldn't you be in school?" I then realize they're probably homeschooled.
While I respect those parents who choose to opt out of public education, I wonder how some think Walmart is a better choice?
It may not seem fair to assume the children strolling the afternoon aisles are homeschooled, but I cannot fathom another excuse for a school-age child to be out of school. I have never seen or heard of a child getting checked out of school for a grocery trip.
This isn't an attack on home school (although I was raised by a teacher and worked in a charter school), but on those teaching under the claim that public ed isn't good enough, so they're taking on the child's education.
If these parents want to teach real-world education then Walmart is just the place. Where else can you see this:
http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/
After reading an article in a local, for lack of a better word, newspaper, I'm curious about children taught by mom and dad. I heard from them while covering the 2007 voucher debate. This article covered a Weber County couple who taught each of their six or seven children from home. The kids looked happy, some being my age, but I wondered if they felt gypped. No school dances, no football games, no choir, no lousy school lunch to force down. Right after Columbine, my class rolled under their desks when students popped balloons in the hallway. Why would you want to miss out on that?
On the flip side, I met my husband at a dance and now have nearly 400 Facebook friends, many of them high school pals. Do grown-up home-school students have only double digits? That alone would force me to enroll Scarlett in public ed, God forbid she doesn't win the FB popularity contest. I guess I could always take her to Walmart to meet people.
