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Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

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Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#11

Post by MilStdJunkie »

generalizations wrote: post #3

> a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe Tell me your bias without telling me you're biased.

It's biased in the same way an unchoked shotgun shoots pellets with wider dispersion. K-12 education done independently, atomized from regional or national institutions, means people come out more different, so the edges of the cluster are further away. Homeschoolers are biased about 43% to white and rural, so it's pretty fair that the fring is going to be on that side of things. I'm kind of stumped as to how that's biased.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#12

Post by CharlesW »

brightball wrote: post #7

When I moved into my current house about 10 years ago, the family next door home schooled. I'd never known any home schoolers before and definitely had some notions about how terrible it must be until I learned about it. This family was part of a home school group with other families. The kids went to different houses every day and had an instructor focus on 1 subject for half of the day, mixed in with free time, dep…

There are many home-schooling success stories, and also many home-schooling horror stories.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#13

Post by 303uru »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #5

Good luck to these people, hope it turns out well. Personally, I can't imagine home-schooling kids. I neither have the time nor patience to do that, which is why I appreciate teachers. Besides, I believe school is also a place for kids to socialize with and learn from their peers. I'm very introverted, but I think I would have ended up horribly social-wise if I was home-schooled.

Ya, this doesn't end well. The data isn't amazing for homeschooling, but what I've seen shows a strong bimodal distribution. Extremely wealthy home schoolers with tons of resources have kids that perform well in college and have strong lifetime earnings. Everyone else not so much, unprepared for college, earnings well below their peers. Pair this with the fairly predatory organizations offering "learning materials" and education online. Could probably make a few million launching an overnight online school run by a bible trained LLM.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#14

Post by zaphar »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #5

Good luck to these people, hope it turns out well. Personally, I can't imagine home-schooling kids. I neither have the time nor patience to do that, which is why I appreciate teachers. Besides, I believe school is also a place for kids to socialize with and learn from their peers. I'm very introverted, but I think I would have ended up horribly social-wise if I was home-schooled.

I think possibly the worst place to learn and practice social skills is from other kids who are just as in the dark as you are.

In my experience a home schooled child is significantly more likely to be good at social skills than a public schooled child. They are also adept at navigating adult conversation and social situations much sooner.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#15

Post by tivert »

> Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.

Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either because they're failing at their job or doing things that are disagreeable to some subset of the population?

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#16

Post by brodouevencode »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #5

Good luck to these people, hope it turns out well. Personally, I can't imagine home-schooling kids. I neither have the time nor patience to do that, which is why I appreciate teachers. Besides, I believe school is also a place for kids to socialize with and learn from their peers. I'm very introverted, but I think I would have ended up horribly social-wise if I was home-schooled.

When you have kids your perspective on many, many things changes in very big ways. This is more true when the pregnancy is planned for and you and your spouse are both ready to have children.

We don't personally home school but have many friends that do. It's a very common thing in our church and community. It's hard to tell what kids are homeschooled versus the ones that aren't. Many homeschools engage in co-op programs and use curricula to drive personal engagement. For instance in one family we're very good friends with they use a curriculum that requires community service for middle school ages and up. There are several charities that they engage with in addition to the community service activities that the church is doing.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#17

Post by 303uru »

brightball wrote: post #7

When I moved into my current house about 10 years ago, the family next door home schooled. I'd never known any home schoolers before and definitely had some notions about how terrible it must be until I learned about it. This family was part of a home school group with other families. The kids went to different houses every day and had an instructor focus on 1 subject for half of the day, mixed in with free time, dep…

Sure, that's one model. The underlying problem is the completely unregulated nature. Similarly, there is household in my neighborhood that home schools. The kids (all 8 of them) never leave the house. They have a 8ft. fence and 1 acre yard where I assume they get some outside time. No one visits. Only dad is allowed to talk to anyone and when he does it's extraordinarily weird.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#18

Post by Loughla »

zaphar wrote: post #14
boeingUH60 wrote: post #5

Good luck to these people, hope it turns out well. Personally, I can't imagine home-schooling kids. I neither have the time nor patience to do that, which is why I appreciate teachers. Besides, I believe school is also a place for kids to socialize with and learn from their peers. I'm very introverted, but I think I would have ended up horribly social-wise if I was home-schooled.

I think possibly the worst place to learn and practice social skills is from other kids who are just as in the dark as you are. In my experience a home schooled child is significantly more likely to be good at social skills than a public schooled child. They are also adept at navigating adult conversation and social situations much sooner.

My experience is the absolute opposite of yours. In all seriousness, there is a trend of homeschooled kids coming to the local large high school for the extracurriculars, and the school offering Autism testing, because they are so far behind socially.

I find it interesting that your experience is the opposite. Where in the world do you live?

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#19

Post by keiferski »

CharlesW wrote: post #12
brightball wrote: post #7

When I moved into my current house about 10 years ago, the family next door home schooled. I'd never known any home schoolers before and definitely had some notions about how terrible it must be until I learned about it. This family was part of a home school group with other families. The kids went to different houses every day and had an instructor focus on 1 subject for half of the day, mixed in with free time, dep…

There are many home-schooling success stories, and also many home-schooling horror stories. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...

It seems to me that the only relevant question here is how home schooling compares to public schools when it comes to “horror stories.” And there certainly aren’t a lack of public school horror stories…

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#20

Post by jwestbury »

keiferski wrote: post #8

This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent. It is pretty misleading for this article to talk about homeschooling being a “fundamental change” without mentioning that homeschooling was the default practice for most of human history. If anything, this is just a return to a long-established practice, not a fringe movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling

There are many behaviours which were common throughout human history which would now be fringe movements. Human and/or animal sacrifices, for instance.
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