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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

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have any specific issues with this segment, I would be interesting in hearing them.

Let's start with this thread: https://twitter.com/wanyeburkett/status/1715586174658441404

I do appreciate the effort, but I can't see the thread as I do not have a twitter account.

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

#502
post #150

People talk about homeschooling as if it's one single concept, but it's actually a whole bunch of very dissimilar things. There are people who homeschool because they don't agree with the government's viewpoints, people who homeschool because the public school system has failed their kids, people who homeschool because it just happens to fit their lifestyle. Those are all very different motivations. Likewise, there a…

Religion and its associated anti-science (etc) is the majority reason for home schooling. The groups in highly-skilled co-ops are a small minority and are not what the word normally invokes.

> The groups in highly-skilled co-ops are a small minority and are not what the word normally invokes.

Essentially what this sentence says is "the people that don't fit my stereotype are not the image that comes to my mind when I hear ${word}." While this is definitely true (it's more or less the definition of a stereotype), it's not a refutation of OP's point that homeschooling is more complicated than your stereotypes would have you believe.

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

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you prefer your secular type What is secular indoctrination? Kids who grow up without a religion doesn't get told anything, all you have to do is to not indoctrinate the kid into a religion. There is still school etc, but removing religious indoctrination doesn't add anything else, its just less indoctrination overall.

> Kids who grow up without a religion doesn't get told anything I work in edtech with a bunch of former teachers, and this is absolutely untrue. Many elementary and middle school teachers see part of their role (regardless of the subject they're officially teaching) as being to teach morals to their students, and the morality that they choose to teach is every bit as subjective as the morality that comes out of a rel…

You missed the last line I wrote, I never said there weren't other forms of indoctrination:

> There is still school etc, but removing religious indoctrination doesn't add anything else, its just less indoctrination overall.

I should probably have clarified it in the first bit that I meant that the kids weren't told anything about religion, not that the kids aren't told anything at all. My point is that there is no indoctrination required to raise a kid without religion, it is the natural state. I and most people I grew up with were raised that way, religion was stories we read about in school, not some magical thing.

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

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I have basically the same opinion. It's not so much that I believe homeschooling is amazing in-itself, but rather that the public education system has so clearly deteriorated that it seems borderline criminal to subject your kids to it. The question for me, personally, is private school vs. homeschooling. If you can avoid many of the downsides of public education via choosing the right private school (and bei…

We didn’t go full home-school, but my wife and I intentionally left our city to go raise our kids out in a rural area so they could grow up in and around nature and with a nice, small school district that smokes anything we had back in the city. Better test scores, smaller classes, minimal major discipline issues. Prior to moving, our only “good” option for realistic schooling was putting our children in a local Cath…

I like collecting examples that confirm/deny my biases. Would you mind sharing the demographic differences between the two schools?

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

#505
post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in a home-school coop about 25 years ago. We attended it a few times, until we stopped going. I was just a kid so I have no idea why we stopped. I remember it didn't help. I didn't know how to do any of the homework they assigned so I never did any (a practice that carried into high school). Since I never had tests or grades of any sort it didn't really matter.

> Since I never had tests or grades of any sort it didn't really matter. I was homeschooled to grade 3, and just because my parents didn't give me tests or grades, it absolutely mattered. I had to correctly solve, both verbally and in writing, enough questions at the end of the current chapter of the textbook, to a standard that satisfied them. For every subject of study. Every single day.

> just because my parents didn't give me tests or grades

> I had to correctly solve ... to a standard that satisfied them

In other words, you had tests and grades

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

#506
I see all this comments about how the homeschooled kids fail academically, and I cannot help but wonder if the people parroting this have any idea of the current state of public schools in the US. Homeschooled kids are subject to the very strict scrutiny of the court of public opinion (and ironically some of the most academically sound kids I have seen were homeschooled...) while public school kids can finish high school without knowing how to read or do basic math, and that's ok...

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

#507
The lack of quality with public schools has degraded to the point of you facing the choice of either spending a boat load of money on private, and even some of those have gone downhill, or homeschooling. I also know a lot of people who were very successful with homeschooling.

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

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// other aspects of homeschooling were just a fig leaf over a whole lot of religious indoctrination I was raised totally secular but I now understand that religion is about fundamentally aligning yourself to the highest aspirations ("what kind of man does G-d want me to be?") and even w/o actual faith, I am starting to think that's preferable to the current mode of "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like an…

> "what kind of man does G-d want me to be?" Unfortunately, there is not a singular answer to this question. You still have to choose which religion/sect you want to answer this question for you. You can't really delegate your morals to a deity because the choice of which interpretation of that deity's teachings you want to follow is still yours to make.

I dont see the distinction between sect choice vs religious or not religious at all. If you're indoctrinated good and hard you're likely to be religious in the way the sect you were brought up in is. Choice elimination is the whole idea.

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

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// other aspects of homeschooling were just a fig leaf over a whole lot of religious indoctrination I was raised totally secular but I now understand that religion is about fundamentally aligning yourself to the highest aspirations ("what kind of man does G-d want me to be?") and even w/o actual faith, I am starting to think that's preferable to the current mode of "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like an…

> the current mode of "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions." That doesn't match reality. Do you have kids in public school? Of course they judge actions—especially those that harm others. Sometimes that's called social-emotional learning, one of the things that Florida politicians have tried to make a boogeyman. We're certainly willing to punish kids based…

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

#510
To add my two cents to the HN community scratching their head about this: my wife and I are the products of public school, we have the means to send our kids to private school, and I am actively lining up the people and resources to home school our two toddlers.

For us, it comes down to the belief that we can provide better moral education, values education, and intellectual rigor than the majority of public and private schools we've seen. I also don't see the social element being something that can't easily be solved for. Our kids are involved in so many activities and they are effectively home schooled, whereas countless friends and clients are bemoaning how toxic their children's high schools have become. The bar seems low to both of us and it's getting unapologetically lower. That's the plan anyway, we'll see how it plays out.

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