By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Weekend Editor

Home-schooling is on my mind today. And I vacillate.

When our girls were approaching school age, I rejected any notions of keeping them home to study — for selfish reasons. I loved them dearly, but was so glad to have them out of the house that I used to bake a cake and celebrate the day school started each fall.

In worthier moments, however, I had my reasons.

I thought home-schooling was over-protective and elitist, akin to private schooling, and failed to teach kids about differences and real world issues. They needed to discover that not every family had two parents and a house with a porch on a shaded suburban street.

They needed to learn to deal with kids who lie, whose language or clothes are dirty, or who vacation in Bermuda and get what they want when they want it. They needed to understand that different is just different, neither better nor worse, and that one holds to one's own standards regardless of the behavior of others.

I deeply believed, and still do, that public schools are strengthened by exactly the kind of people who too often desert the public system: well-educated, cultured, financially secure families actively involved in their children's education.

After mine were well through their education — public, every day of it — I read a thought-provoking essay by my friend and journalistic mentor Bert Roughton. Agonizing over the same decision for his own son, he wrote a lot of what I've said above, plus this:

With the “best and brightest” educators reportedly abandoning the public schools, “my faith in their quality trembles.” We get only one chance at educating our kids. Should we “gamble our child's future?” If we mess it up, we can't start over.

That was the beginning of my tentative swing to an opposite viewpoint. Public schools too often do fail to educate, while many private schools and home-school curricula offer outstanding teaching techniques.

Some parents find that a totally flexible school day allows parent and child to tour museums, travel to historic sites, attend legislative or court sessions — things many public school kids only get to read about — and in little more time than they used to put into school-mandated homework and science projects.

(Not to mention that your kids don't have to go door-to-door on fund-raising projects. In 1999, that suggests one more terribly disturbing reason to keep kids home: safety.)

And now there's the availability of the Internet and virtually limitless resources organized by educators. An interesting compromise model some churches have discussed is to combine three days a week of home-schooling with two days of classroom study.

Evaluations show home-scholars do very well on standardized tests and in meeting the challenge of college.

Our daughter plans to home-school her children, for many of the reasons I just listed, even though they've done very well in a church-related school. (If you came in late, Jean became an instant mother of girls, 14 and 11, and a son, 6, when she married their widowed father in January.)

One factor is that Abigail, the eldest, would have gone into a satellite school this year with classes beamed in by closed-circuit television.

With excellent video resources, she can do that at home.

I mentioned her plans to a friend who never lacks for an opinion, and who opposes home-schooling. One objection she expressed, however, was thought-provoking.

She said she doesn't worry about the so-called socializing skills or quality of learning that home-schooled children might lack. Kids will find other kids, and most smart kids will learn, given the slightest opportunity.

But what home-schooled kids may not learn, she said, is the “arbitrariness” of the school environment, and of life itself.

“It was my turn. That's not fair,” protests the child, and the teacher replies, “Sorry. Life's not always fair.”

Or, “Yes, she got a better grade than you did, but hers represents greater effort than yours.”

In fact, that old “not fair” issue came to mind when I read one of the many letters to the editor spawned by the recent Atlanta shootings. If Mark Barton's rampage was a reaction to losing huge amounts of money in day trading, one letter-writer suggested that perhaps Barton had never learned how to deal with failure.

When we give every kid in the class a blue ribbon for awful drawings; make sure the worst hitters get to bat even when the league championship is at stake; let kids walk with their class to “Pomp and Circumstance” even though they haven't made the grades to graduate, they never learn how to fail.

In real life, we probably fail more often than we succeed. If there's always someone to place a cushion or to run interference with teachers or employers, we never learn to fail.

I blame the idolatry of self-esteem. The best thing that can happen to most kids is an occasional bruised ego; they'll grow stronger for it. You never again misspell the word that sets you down in the school spelling bee. (Would you believe mine was “genealogy”?)

Teach children that failure is a building block, a challenge. That having to stretch beyond their reach will make them grow. That embarrassment is the price you pay for not finishing an assignment on time, or for being called down for misbehavior. That shame can make you strong.

These are lessons that might be better learned in school, through a collaboration between parent and teacher.

But I still don't know what my decision would be today if I had young children whose future depended on it.

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