Frontiersman Op-Ed: “No good reason to duck accountability”

Alaska has been the focus of plenty of homeschooling news over the past several weeks, as critics of what most homeschoolers acknowledge as one of the best homeschooling laws in the nation have taken aim and fired articles, letters, cartoons, and opinion pieces to two of the most widely-read newspapers in the state. The latest salvo appeared in the Friday, October 14 edition of The Frontiersman, a newspaper serving a largely rural commuter area close to the state’s largest city, Anchorage.

In an op-ed piece titled “No good reason to duck accountability,” local cartoonist Chuck Legge muses: “Wow! It looks like I’ve been stirring the pot – or cauldron – a little vigorously.

“In the Sept. 23 edition of the Frontiersman, I drew a cartoon depicting a home-school science lesson as witchcraft. I have drawn Karl Rove as a demon, Gov. Murkowski as a pirate, and run Sen. Ben Stevens out of town on a rail. Apparently, home-schooling is a much more sensitive subject than demons, pirates or mob rule because it received more response than anything I’ve ever drawn.”

Legge claims his son was homeschooled: “My wife took on the enormous task of educating our son, and together, they produced something they should be proud of.”

How nice. But then he admits his ignorance of homeschooling in Alaska by stating: “He also took every test the state required.”

Alaska’s homeschool law does not require testing of any kind.

Legge does seem to be aware of that, as he states in his op-ed piece: “Let’s cut to the chase here. The reason I chose witchcraft to illustrate my concern about a lack of accountability or testing is simple. Schools – public, private or home – should not be free to subject our children to any belief and pass it off as science. Two plus two shouldn’t equal five, and science shouldn’t advocate for a supernatural being. Our educational system, in whatever form, needs to meet a minimum basic norm. This accountability is accomplished through testing.”

I’m writing a rebuttal to Legge’s insistence that testing is a good measure of accountability, and I’ll share that here when it’s finished. For now, I’m still trying to figure out what he means by this odd statement: “There is a conglomeration of beliefs, but I don’t think we should displace scientific theory with an esoteric soup de jour. Anyone is free to believe anything they choose. But the difference here is that science deals in theory, not belief. Belief, by its nature, involves faith. It is not provable. It is profoundly felt, and tends to be implacable. Theory, on the other hand, is very provable. It is based on a body of evidence arrived at through experimentation and or the fossil record.”

Theory is just that – theory.

Legge’s reasoning stumbles again here: “I may believe that the theory of gravity is illegitimate, and that the Earth just sucks. I can believe anything I wish, but I shouldn’t be allowed to teach it as a science lesson.”

Science has long been acknowledged an imperfect and always-evolving body of knowledge. Of all the academic disciplines I think it is one of the most flexible, lending itself beautifully to individual interpretation, experimentation, investigation, analysis, testing (by which I mean testing the hypotheses involved, not testing the child), and much more. To state that only certain specific facts must be taught as “science” seem to me one good reason to look for a better way of teaching.

Legge wraps up his piece with a hollow plea: “Let all of us, all home-schoolers, be accountable.”

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that I don’t think this fellow knows much about homeschooling, really. If his wife homeschooled their son it was most likely through one of the public school charter programs which are rampantly passed off as “homeschooling” in this state. His statement that there were tests to be taken (“He also took every test the state required.”) tells me he wasn’t homeschooling under Alaska’s homeschool law. In my book this fellow is simply trying to make himself sound more knowledgeable than he actually is.

Seems to me Mr. Legge needs some educating about homeschooling issues. Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on October 15, 2005 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.