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Honestly, when they get their own house in order I'll start to care what these "regulators" think. https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/13-baltimore...
Do you seriously think those same students would do better if they were homeschooled without supervision?
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It's unsurprising that a teacher-student ratio around 1:1 could yield incredible academic results. If that so often comes at the cost of skills necessary to operate in the vast majority of real world environments though, it's kind of useless.
Schools are extremely artificial environments compared to pretty much everything else that comes later in life.
I was homeschooled and I credit much of my success in life to it. It taught me to think logically, taught me to honor my parents, taught me the value of tradition, morality, spirituality. It taught me the value of hard work, of loyalty, of kindness. It kept me out of vices that many of my public-schooled friends and peers got pulled into. In my experience, homeschooling can create well-rounded, upright people at a ra…
Hi Judah, I wrote a blog about parents being teachers, largely inspired by your comment. I hope that it's helpful to you. https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/parentsarethebestteache...
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my wife didn't feel like she had the skills to homeschool. She's not a teacher and feels she doesn't have the patience for it Since you were homeschooled yourself, wouldn't you have been the better parent for the job anyway?
Yes, and if I wasn't working my career, I could probably homeschool. When my wife and I had kids, she wanted to quit her job as a nurse and be a stay-at-home mom. We agreed this was a good solution, even though she's not cut out to homeschool them.
I mean, it could be the classic layman "oh, I could do that!" stance, and since everybody has been to school themselves they have a vague idea what the job of a teacher is like (which, of course, is in all likelihood a fallacy). That, paired with a certain cynicism about the job of a teacher in the first place (here, they've got super-safe jobs, almost no accountability, a strong lobby, lots of days off, and are mostly done work after half a day if they're so inclined) and less than stellar results of our educational system when compared internationally, gives us a certain "we couldn't do it much worse" feeling. As a matter of fact, as a homeschooler, you've only got your own kids to focus on, not a whole class of 30 children with a wide spectrum of different prerequisites.
But then again, maybe we couldn't do it very well at all. It's such a long-term commitment, one that requires consistency over years. And the relation between children and parent is different from a student-teacher relationship, there wouldn't be such a sharp distinction between what happens inside the school and the home.
Topics like bullying and other negative forms of social pressure are omnipresent in school settings, but withdrawing our children completely from such realities might turn out to be less good of a preparation for their later lives.
And lastly, without a doubt school teachings are colored by certain political world views, and they might not always be ones you agree with. But when you send your kids to school, you give up control over what they are actually taught. Of course, it is recommended to keep a close eye on that at any point in time, and also challenge contents where you think things are going wrong. But I also think it will become increasingly difficult to do this as your kids get rooted deeper and deeper in the school system, where the political and worlds views of the teachers will play as much of a role as those of the political parties that are in charge of your country's educational system.
So, whether or not to homeschool is a really tricky question - but as I said above, it does not even present itself in our case, because we have no right to homeschool where we currently live.