Argument Piece

Dear Mr I.M Balding,
I am writing to you because I believe that your article ‘Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth’ published
In the EDP on the 14th of December is very provocative and pressuring to parents. I have many issues with your article: First, I think that your point that children should attend state education is absurd for many reasons. My main point being that not all children are lucky enough to live ‘normal’ lives. Some, unfortunately are born with disabilities and social disorders who could potentially be taunted and bullied in some state schools. In my opinion these children would fare off better from being home schooled and shouldn’t have to attend state education. Another fact to consider is that in your article you are convinced that all children to state schools yet you describe state schools as ‘concrete jungles’ which is not at all appealing to children and parents alike. I also think that you are being disrespectful to parents of home schooled children by implying that they are lazy and only home school their children because of ‘the inconveniences of the early school run.’ You seem to think that state education is a ‘gift’ to the younger generation. You attempt to make parents of the home schooled guilty by arguing they shouldn’t ‘deny our young people’ the opportunity to go to a state school. In my opinion this is just an attempt make parents send their children to state school. My second problem with your article is that you think home schooling shouldn’t be allowed. some might argue that parents are not capable enough to teach them and get them good grades in their GCSEs. However, this is not the case because there a large majority of parents who are very well educated and who could have easily became teachers but instead, chose to follow a different career path. In your article you state that home schooling and private schooling should be banned.
However, you also say that the ‘working class’ families are ‘condemned to academic mediocrity, while the wealthy can enjoy an unfair advantage by birth right.’ Is it because of this advantage that you think all families of all ‘class’ should be treated equally when it comes to education? Throughout your article you are constantly trying to convince parents to send their children to public schools. You do this by trying to relate to them by using rhetoric devices and the constant use of the pronoun ‘our’. You use this as if to say that all children require the same things.
In actual fact every single child is different and require different things. In your piece you try to convince the reader that public education is better than home school for children. This being said there are many advantages to home schooled children that public school children do not have access to such as being constantly being taught one to one rather than having 30 other students of different abilities in the same room. As well as this, home schooled children can work around times that are best suited to them and learn at times that they will learn best rather than having to work around a fixed schedule and of course home schooled children wont have the problem of forgetting their history text book! In your article you try to convince us that there is ‘plenty of evidence’ to suggest that children who are home