The problem with home schooling is that it is a solution for the rich and leaves all of the poor kids behind.
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Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
231–240 of 1001 posts
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#232When 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…
It's like people are reinventing all the same stuff schools do at scale. Can't we be more efficient as a society? Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup.
How do you propose we measure that efficiency? Attendance requirements? Standardized testing?
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#233This 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
The majority (non-aristocratic, non-clergy) were illiterate for most of human history.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public schools are highly regulated, and are on average horrible. I'd bet a lot on parents caring more about their kids welfare than regulators.
There are many bad public schools - but it seems a bit hyperbolic to say the average public school is "horrible".
Agreed. I could have phrased that better.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#235I'm noticing several comments to the effect that "teachers" have some particular qualification to teach that other people don't have. But, at least in the US, the qualifications required to become a teacher are intended to protect the teacher's union and they don't confer any special "teaching ability".
People have been teaching things to each other for hundreds of thousands of years, even before there were degree programs in education.
I will grant that some people are particularly good at explaining things well, but I don't associate that ability with "public school teacher" in any respect. In fact, it correlates with being bright, which is negatively correlated with being a public school teacher.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is, and article hit pieces like this are exactly why it will continue to expand. Newsflash, there’s an actual large portion of the population that more and more doesn’t want what is taught to their children regulated by the government.
Yeah, there are a number of people out there who only want to teach their kids what's in the Bible. We should all be so lucky as to be a bunch of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidts. Obviously I'm presenting an extreme example, but society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated. I'm not saying there are no problems with regulations, but I hate how the "deregulate everything!" crowd con…
> there are a number of people out there who only want to teach their kids what's in the Bible
Not all homeschoolers are like this. There are plenty of other good reasons for parents not to want their kids to go to public schools.
> society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated
Yes, but for whose definition of "educated"? In the US, at least, the government was not supposed to decide that. Individual families and communities were. And, as I have posted elsewhere in this thread, the people who set up the US system of widespread, compulsory public education were quite explicit about what they meant by "educated", and that included plenty of things that any reasonable person would consider to be indoctrination, not education--and that was on purpose.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The underlying problem is the completely unregulated nature. I didn't need your permission to give birth to my children, why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate them? > Only dad is allowed to talk to anyone and when he does it's extraordinarily weird. If you feel these children are legitimately being abused in some way, I'm guessing there are plenty of state resources to address that challenge. Do…
>I didn't need your permission to give birth to my children, why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate them? One legal theory that may be relevant was brought up long ago for a case on banned books in school: you have the right to raise your kid according to your beliefs, but many states guarantee children the right to education. So the state could regulate homeschooling to ensure all children have ac…
> but many states guarantee children the right to education
They guarantee the right to /access/ education. This is not at all the same as guaranteeing that all children "must be educated at a state approved school."
> If nobody outside the home ever sees or talks to the kids, there's not much the state can do to even start an investigation.
I read an incredible number of police reports. There's a lot of abuse that gets detected outside of daycare and schools. Unless the children are literally locked into a basement, I doubt that the parents can continually exercise enough total control to keep whatever other abuse their committing hidden.
To the extent that if it is happening, it's an exceptionally rare case, and I doubt that simply forcing all parents to send their children to a third party for education is going to have any impact on these particularly pernicious cases.
I understand the instinct, but I think the solution is wrong, and it's an inappropriate case to use to defend schooling in general.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of 'public school' horror stories because these things are public and can be audited in a great number of cases. You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when they happen because they are private. Maybe you'll be a therapist and years later get to talk to one of these people how they are effectively crippled for the rest of their life. Or you'll be like me that grew up in a place that had a bu…
> You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when they happen because they are private. You're also not going to hear about the homeschooling horrors from the typical HN demographic. Broadly, and obviously with exceptions, there are two groups of parents who choose to homeschool: 1. Parents who have an abundance of educational resources and time and do it to provide a higher quality of education, and 2. Parents…
Assumptions about homeschooling are just a socially acceptable form of stereotyping. I was homeschooled and I'm a computational evolutionary biologist with a Ph.D from a reasonably well known state university.
Yale flew me out to interview for a biology graduate program. I had the credentials and test scores to be considered, but was turned down, quite possibly because of those stereotypes (based on the questions I got in the interview process).
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Can't we be more efficient as a society?" Not the way government tends to work in US.
It is wild that this is the take. This eep distrust of government is at the root of many American problems. It is deliberately created and fed, and it directly leads to some truly awful results: bad education, bad healthcare, virtually no public benefit for all the taxes we pay. But we do get world's largest military, large corporate subsidies, highest per capita healthcare costs. Unlike in most other Western countri…
It's not really a wild take - that's the reality. It's not really distrust in this case either. The question was can we educate more efficiently.
This case is of a group of kids being taught by parents. The parents give up half a day a week to teach one of their homes. They don't need a staff, a building, etc. You really can't be more efficient than that model of using the existing resources.
And you're only partially right about local control of education. There are many federal and state regulations that dictate school policies in every facet. These would rule out many of the local "nut cases". Much of the funding is provided by the state and federal government too, depending on the state.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#240I was home-schooled until high school. Long story short, it was a disaster. I bordered on having no education at all, on top of no socialization. I'm so fortunate I got at least four years of public school. I still think I suffer to this day. For parents who are thinking of home schooling your kids: best of luck to you. If you succeed, maybe your kids will be smarter. If you fail, you could be setting your kids up fo…
People socialised for thousands, in fact hundreds of thousands of years before schools were invented. I went to school and got beat up, colour me sceptical about school as a mechanism for socialisation.
Socialization is broader than just between peers. It's how the individual develops a relationship to society as a whole. The public school system is the primary way the state socializes kids. You learn the difference between the public and private spheres (the school vs the family), how the two relate, and how they relate to the broader community. Some are better served by it than others but on the whole it's a very good thing.