Commotion about Hollywood homeschooling

The school founded by Jada Pinkett Smith and her husband Will popped up in the news reader reports about homeschooling.

Apparently there are others as well, but I didn’t go looking for them.

Normally, I’d give this a pass because my cut-off for homeschooling relevance could be said to be the front door of the house.

Yes, yes, parents can choose any form of information-delivery for their children, and pigeonhole it in whatever way they wish (like the lady behind me on the plane who explained to her seat-mate that she ordered the chicken entree and not the beef because she was a vegetarian [hand-to-heart, she said it, and no, I've not got a clue why she had to justify choosing one over the other] ), but for inclusion here, my own general guideline is that for newsworthy relevance to [James Earl Jones voice] Homeschooling, if the emphasis of the enterprise lies outside the family front-door, then the news applies to another form of education/information-delivery. If I didn’t have some form of cut-off, lord knows how long I’d be sitting in front of this computer.

Unfortunately, the media writers don’t make that distinction, so news outlets publish reports with connections-to-homeschooling such as,

The New Village Academy, a home-school program established by actor Will Smith and his wife, actress-singer Jada Pinkett Smith, will move this fall to the former Calabasas site of Indian Hills High School in the Las Virgenes Unified School District.

[my underlining so you didn't have to guess what I was on about]

Yes, my distinction has a ‘can of worms’ aura about it (“But what if I send my child to an art class??”), and no, I’m not looking to exclude people or form a clique. It’s just that a private school [the mechanics, the laws, the physical plant] is something different from homeschooling. Many forms of information-delivery are effective as education, but lumping them all together as if one equals the other just makes for a muddle. Yes, I could have ignored the stories, but, hey, they’re about Will Smith. (!) (As the boss of the staff here at NewsComm — 2 cats and a scaredy-cat granddog [Zina] on thunderous days — I decide the latitude of the reports. It’s a perk.)

I hope the children of parents who find value … or whatever … in the Smiths’ approach do well. Goodness knows that kids can learn from all manner of instruction.

The ‘story,’ Will Smith’s homeschool program, just ain’t about Homeschooling.

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