I was beaming with American pride as I read this:
England’s Oxford University is widely known for producing some of the world’s best debaters, such as British Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.But last weekend, the school’s moot court team was defeated by two former home-schoolers from a small Virginia college named after American Revolution patriot and orator Patrick Henry.
Matt du Mee, 22, and Rayel Papke, 21, who attend Patrick Henry College, pulled off a victory against their British competitors in the first moot court tournament between one of the world’s most renowned universities and the 4-year-old Christian college in Purcellville….
The students had to argue the case before Thomas Henry Bingham of Cornhill, the senior law lord of the United Kingdom, whose position is equivalent to that of the U.S. Supreme Court chief justice. Brian Hutton, who serves as a lord of appeal, also judged the event. The men are distinguished alumni of Balliol, one of the most prestigious law schools in England.
Mr. du Mee, of Peoria, Ariz., and Miss Papke, of Queen Creek, Ariz., had a month to prepare their arguments and learn the intricacies of British contract law, a set of judicial fiats about which neither student knew much….
Since its opening, the school has experienced significant academic success and boasts student SAT and ACT scores comparable to the nation’s elite colleges. Many Patrick Henry students are required to work in an apprenticeship or internship, depending on their majors. Seven of the nearly 100 interns who worked at the White House last spring attended Patrick Henry.
Almost all of the students come from home-schooling backgrounds.
A bunch of homeschoolers at a four-year-old college beat some of Britain’s best debaters-in-training. Back in the day, government schools produced students like these. But that was another era. We’re not likely to see anything this good coming out of government schools again, at least not in our lifetimes.
Addendum: It’ll all be over soon.
Check out When Worlds Collide. No hyperlink to my blog, but that’s OK.
Update: Voting for the 2004 Weblog Awards closes at 10:00 p.m. EST, and it looks like Captain Ed’s going to win in the Best Conservative Blog category. He surely deserves it (Congratulations, Ed!). I’d like to thank those who nominated me and voted for me. I’ve been blogging for about 13 months, and it’s an honor to be considered one of the best among the best. If you haven’t voted for me today, you still have a chance. 
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Hip, Hip Hooray for homeschooling
Chew on that NEA
Of course this won’t make front page news…
That would mean we wasted billions for decades on a failing federally funded school project
How I regret not home schooling my daughter. She is now 15. The last “written” report she did was in middle school. The 2 years she has been in high school, her reports consisted of posterboard, pictures she printed off the internet that she glues onto posterboard, the title and a few words she prints on the posterboard. That’s it!! She hardly has homework. Lots of crossword puzzles and word searches are what amount to homework. Could it be that the teachers are lazy? I am so sad and very mad about this.
Oh Ms. Barber, I enjoy your blog and the people that comment here. Thanks for keeping the comments “clean”. You do a great job of moderating them. I have been voting for you every day. I found you through Michelle Malkin.
Have a great day!
Thanks, Sheri. Some say I moderate comments too well.
They claim I allow no dissent but fail to understand the distinction between personal attacks and disagreement with my arguments.
About your daughter, are you saying she’s had no written essay assignments in high school? How sad. I’ve spoken with 15 year-olds at a certain private school in DC, and these kids so far advanced it’s scary. In a cool way, of course. If black parents in DC knew the full truth about the atrocities of government school education, they’d form a mob and storm the gates of Congress, demanding reform.
Wonderful essay, La Shawn. You capture the divide between Christians and non-Christians very well.
I for one am glad you moderate comments. Who needs to read the rantings of idiots and trolls? We look at comments in search of intelligence, not the lack thereof.
‘That would mean we wasted billions for decades on a failing federally funded school project’
That would mean accepting that every kid that doesn’t win this competition is ‘failing’. like the homeschooled ones that didn’t win in the past.
But La Shawn – what about ‘No Child Left Behind’. Could it be a code word for ‘All Public School Children Left Behind’? Man – we are in real trouble!
No child left behind is all about standards. Expecting schools to actually teach. It should not be about funding. I’m in favor of teacher literacy and mathematical skill testing.
I am in favor of comprehensive testing based upon what verbal and math skills have been aquired in each year of school.
Yes, i am a throwback. I expect schools to turn out students who can actually read, write, spell, and compute.
Rick.
Oh, and your essay on When Worlds Collide was wonderful. The “religious” liberals get upset when we talk about morals, because they cannot grasp the immorality of torturing the unborn, but the can wax eloquent about the “rights of the mother”. Oh, I mean “rights of a woman to choose” (if she were a mother, she would not murder her child).
La Shawn, our oldest daughter is heavily considering attending Patrick Henry. She wants to be a journalist and is very excited at the prospect of attending a college that is so focused on academics and honoring God with our knowledge, instead of honoring our knowledge with sprinklings of God.
I will pass on the cool news to her
P.S. I haven’t been around much lately as I was relegated to the public computers while we awaited our new one to arrive. So good to read your thoughts
actus-
Failure to win a competition may or may not be a failure in the absolute sense. Failure to read when trying to enter college is a failure in the absolute sense. Somewehere along the line, someone should have realized that the youth could not read (yes, I have a specific example in mind) before he wound up trying to get into my AFROTC group. He was a wonderful person, but the system had failed to equip him with the basic skills necessary to succceed in college. At least he was smart enough to get help from us, instead of coasting by in college as well and graduating with no skills except the ability to play ball until he got injured and was left completely by the wayside.
Rick said: No child left behind is all about standards. Expecting schools to actually teach. It should not be about funding. I’m in favor of teacher literacy and mathematical skill testing. I am in favor of comprehensive testing based upon what verbal and math skills have been aquired in each year of school. Yes, i am a throwback. I expect schools to turn out students who can actually read, write, spell, and compute.
I completely agree with you, Rick. Sadly, I hear too many teachers who want their students to acheive that excellency bemoan the fact that they have to spend too much time teaching their students how to take the tests, rather than teaching them the actual reading, writing, spelling, and math skills that would truly enable them to excell on the tests. What am I missing here? If my 4 sons were still in school today, I would definitely be a home-schooling mom.
Granted, if the students could already read, write and spell at an adequate level, would the teachers have to take much time out to help them cram for the tests?
I wonder how much of the performance of home schooled students can be explained by their better student/faculty ratios.
Is home schooling the answer for all kids? Should we just dismantle public education and have all parents just take care of it on their own? Public schools in certain parts of the country certainly have “challenges” to overcome, but what percentage of parents will produce kids qualified for Patrick Henry? Do you think a few may “fall through the cracks?”
Ok. this is obsessively self-congratulatory, but I attended Christian high school and middle school and a pseudo-christian college in Georgia, and I was national speech champion last year. The kids from the small schools were always the most fearsome in my experience (rhetorically speaking). The never learned they couldn’t rise above the crowd.
I’ll grant that my parents taught me more than my teachers up to about second grade, but when would a dentist and a lawyer have home-schooled me for AP physics and spanish literature? C++ and Java? Calculus I, II, and III?
Of course, I went to a magnet school, but it was Louisiana’s, for crying out loud. Nevertheless, I don’t think I suffered terribly under the yoke of our “failed” educational system, with my measly 1510 SAT and enrollment at Georgia Tech, which my parents – having worked rather than home-schooled me – can afford to send me to.
I guarantee you my graduating class could have beaten these kids, by the way.
scarshaped,
I doubt many people think that all public schools have failed, and that all students therin are disenfranchised. But when the schools are failing, parents need options. Luckily for you (and for me, mostly) we were in districts that made the more extreme options unattractive.
As a State Champion debater and a current competitor on the college parliamentary debate circuit, I could think of nothing more intimidating than going up against the Oxford team in front of Thomas Henry Bingham. I am proud of the Patrick Henry team. They must have balls of steel, and debate skills to match.
-Grace
Yessss! A decided victory, and a case for home schooling, to impart the knowledge and thinking ability essential to be an educated person, vs the non-academic mush that passes for education since the ’60s when the current schooling system was created.
As I like to point out, as a former high school teacher in an education reform effort: ‘the human mind is an organic computer of potentially infinite capacity. Unless it is loaded with quality academic “software” to create an “operating system for thinking and reasoning ability, and establish an academic data base of facts and knowledge on which to draw when arriving at a rational conclusion based on data input from the senses, it cannot function any better than an electronic computer lacking software. This is true whether then individual is entering college, a technical school, vocational school, the workforce, or getting along in life after high school graduation.’
RHB, you hit the nail. The important thing any student at the very least is the 3 Rs. It doesn’t matter how educated one may be, without critical thinking, the kid is just a walking encyclopedia — able to sprout facts without discerning the truth therof. With the ability to apply critical thinking comes the opportunity to absorb any subject.
According to the book of Proverbs, wisdom is worth far more than knowledge.
My daughter requested to homeschool when she was to start middle school. I homeschooled her for the next two and half years until she wanted to return to the public school system. She completed college this past spring and now she works for Gonzaga University. I am extremely proud of her.
Ho ho hey hey we dont need the NEA. Do we need anymore reason the eliminate the Dept of Education and return to home schooling?
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