1 | P r o j e t o R u m o a o I T A – w w w . r u m o a o i t a . c o m
Simulado Semanal 05
Inglês – ITA 2012
Professor Jefferson Celestino
As questões de 1 a 5 referem-se ao texto abaixo.
Why Urban, Educated Parents Are Turning to DIY
Education
They raise chickens. They grow vegetables. They knit. Now
a new generation of urban parents is even teaching their
own kids.
Jan 30, 2012 | Linda Perlstein
In the beginning, your kids need you – a lot.
They’re attached to your hip, all the time. It might be a
month. It might be five years. Then suddenly you are
__________ (I) to send them off to school for seven hours
a day, where they’ll have to cope with life in ways they
never had to before. You no longer control what they
learn, or how, or with whom.
Unless you decide, like an emerging population of
parents in cities across the country, to forgo that age-old
rite of passage entirely.
When Tera and Eric Schreiber’s oldest child was
about to start kindergarten, the couple toured the
__________ (II) public elementary school a block away
from their home in an affluent Seattle neighborhood near
the University of Washington. It was “a great
neighborhood school,” Tera says. They also applied to a
private school, and Daisy was accepted. But in the end
they chose a third path: no school at all.
Eric, 38, is a manager at Microsoft. Tera, 39, had
already traded a career as a lawyer for one as a nonprofit
executive, which allowed her more time with her kids. But
“more” turned into “all” when she decided that instead of
working, she would homeschool her daughters: Daisy, now
9; Ginger, 7; and Violet, 4.
We think of homeschoolers as evangelicals or off-
the-gridders who spend a lot of time at kitchen tables in
the countryside. And it’s true that most __________ (III)
parents do so for moral or religious reasons. But education
observers believe that is changing. You only have to go to a
downtown Starbucks or art museum in the middle of a
weekday to see that a once-unconventional choice “has
become newly fashionable,” says Mitchell Stevens, a
Stanford professor who wrote Kingdom o f Children, a
history of homeschooling. There are an estimated 300,000
homeschooled children in America’s cities, many of them
children of secular, highly educated professionals who
always figured they’d send their kids to school – until they
came to think, Hey, maybe we could do better.
When Laurie Block Spigel, a homeschooling
consultant, pulled her kids out of school in New York in the
mid-1990s, “I had some of my closest friends and relatives
telling me I was ruining my children’s lives.” Now, she says,
“the parents that I meet aren’t afraid to talk about it.
They’re doing this proudly.”
Many of these parents feel that city schools – or
any schools – don’t provide the kind of education they
want for their kids. Just as much, though, their choice to
homeschool is a more extreme example of a larger modern
parenting ethos: that children are individuals, each
deserving a uniquely curated __________ (IV). That peer
influence can be noxious. (Bullying is no longer seen as a
harmless rite of passage.) That DIY – be it gardening,
knitting, or raising chickens – is something educated
urbanites should embrace. That we might create a sense of
security in our kids by practicing “attachment parenting,”
an increasingly popular approach that involves round-the-
clock physical contact with children and immediate
responses to all their cues.
Even many attachment adherents, though, may
have trouble envisioning spending almost all their time
with their kids – for 18 years! For Tera Schreiber, it was a
natural transition. When you have kept your kids so close,
literally – she __________ (V) her youngest till Violet was 4
– it can be a shock to send them away.
Tera’s kids didn’t particularly enjoy day care or
preschool. The Schreibers wanted a “gentler system” for
Daisy; she was a perfectionist who they thought might
worry too much about measuring up. They knew
homeschooling families in their neighborhood and envied
their easygoing pace and flexibility – late bedtimes,
vacations when everyone else is at school or work. Above
all, they wanted to preserve, for as long as possible, a
certain approach to family.
Several homeschooling moms would first tell me,
“I know this sounds selfish,” and then say they feared that
if their kids were in school, they’d just get the “exhausted
leftovers” at the end of the day. Says Rebecca Wald, a
