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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

#591

Post by robertlagrant »

defgeneric wrote: post #240
zarzavat wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The public school system is the primary way the state socializes kids

They aren't the state's kids. The school can help parents in things like socialisation, as far as they deem it appropriate, but I think the state raising kids is totally the wrong mindset.

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

#592

Post by robertlagrant »

civilitty wrote: post #222
zarzavat wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Were they actually socialized for thousands of years? The average (sub)urban school in the US teaches more kids every day than the average person would have come in contact with in their entire lives, often ten times over. Most people were subsistence farmers and didn't travel very far from their little village in their entire life.

Teaching about the world isn't the same as socialisation. Having said that, they did learn about their world.

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

#593

Post by xtat »

303uru wrote: post #17
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.

I find the word unregulated a bit loaded in this context- analogous to "unfreedom"

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

#594

Post by ReallyOldLurker »

I'm not surprised at the rise in homeschooling.

When you have anti-education groups like the Oregon Department of Education [1] running the public school system, any parent that cares and can make the effort should remove their child from public schooling.

This semester they switched my son from high-school chemistry to "environmental science". I asked him, "is oxygen flammable?" He couldn't answer. I looked at the content of the so called environmental science. Its really just a repeat of some basic biology material that he covered last year and lots of politics on pollution and climate change.

[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2023/10/oregon-again-sa...

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

#595

Post by robertlagrant »

FireBeyond wrote: post #279
pixl97 wrote: post #60

Earlier 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…

Very much so. Watching the Last Week Tonight segment ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI ) on this recently, in a startling number of states, a one time declaration that you're homeschooling effectively drops the kids out of the system with zero oversight from that point on. You get things like a Christian family whose "curriculum" for their daughters was: listen to classical music, bible listening 20 minut…

It's worth noting that this segment seems tailor made to instill in we the viewer what we should feel about this topic.

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

#596

Post by judge2020 »

ndriscoll wrote: post #403
tw04 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but ultimately when kids receive vastly different childhood educations, it will eventually fracture society because we're all starting from a completely different set of beliefs. Even if some schools are "better" or "worse" for the most part they have similar curriculum. As time goes on and that curriculum diverges, it'll make the political fractures in society today seem like a walk in the park IMO. The social…

In theory, society should be robust to differing beliefs: allow people to segregate into communities with shared beliefs and self-govern. Use higher levels of government sparingly to resolve conflicts and where coordination is necessary and general consensus exists that the thing you are coordinating is desired. In practice, people have trouble not butting into each other's lives. If we're going to try to force a sha…

Society would be robust to differing beliefs even if we had homogenous public schooling, but complete independence in education _will_ lead to underperforming workers and it's in opposition to what a world power needs to maintain its dominance in the global economy in the long-run.

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

#597

Post by rayiner »

jandrese wrote: post #264
jawns wrote: 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…

There is a huge spectrum, but back when we homeschooled (my wife wasn't yet comfortable sending the kids back to the classroom in 2021) we did a few events where local homeschool kids got together for various activities. Tree identification/nature trail at the park, visits to historic sites, stuff like that. Of the parents I met there was some variety, but 9 times out of 10 it seemed like they were mostly doing it be…

> They were all polite about it, but it started making me wonder if all of these other aspects of homeschooling were just a fig leaf over a whole lot of religious indoctrination. Maybe those kids are fine, I didn't quiz them, but it did raise an eyebrow.

Multiple studies show religious people are happier, healthier, and have greater civic engagement. Mormons, who you probably consider extremely “indoctrinated,” live 5-10 years longer than other whites, are tied with Jews for happiest, and have among the highest upward social mobility of anyone in the US. So those kids are probably in better shape than the public school kids.

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

#599

Post by ninkendo »

jeffrallen wrote: post #317
maxwelljoslyn wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Treating all these scenarios as a single thing that you can hold a single, consistent opinion about suggests to me a lack of familiarity with its wide spectrums along multiple dimensions. It's like passing a judgment on a person based on their race, country of origin, gender, etc. A huge +1 to this, from observing the many friends I have who do homeschooling. Judging by their results -- super-smart, super-well-beha…

Your children's future classmates wish you wouldn't keep your children from enriching their shared classroom. You might be just the kind of parent that the school needs to maintain a critical mass of involved parents.

Underrated viewpoint. Public schools are the only option for most people. Most people don’t have the financial ability to spend their time teaching their kids when they’re already working as much as they can to make ends meet. Heck, for a huge segment of the population, public school is the only place where their kids can even get a decent meal.

If every parent that does have the time to invest in their child’s future, takes said child out of public school, said schools are left with only the uninvolved parents, which makes it worse in a “self fulfilling prophecy” kind of way.

The arguments in favor of home schooling all seem to amount to “fuck you, not my problem, I take care of my own kid, you’re on your own.”

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

#600

Post by judge2020 »

guidoism wrote: post #358
FireBeyond wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Beyond that, there are parents who are well equipped to homeschool and parents who are not. And there is a small but hard-to-ignore percentage who claim to homeschool but really neglect their kids. There's such a disparity between states. States like mine require homeschooled kids to occasionally attend actual school for check in or certain classes, and participate in the same testing (regardless of your opinion of…

I wonder how the neglecters/abusers stay hidden. We are in a state that doesn’t even require notification. As far as the school district is concerned our kids don’t exist. But the medical system definitely knows them. I guess the neglecters/abusers don’t take their kids to their annual well-child visit? Maybe that’s the thing that should be made compulsory?

https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/current-policy...

https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/advocacy/policy/educati...

Note: Coalition for Responsible Home Education is the "good" group advocating for accountability to prevent neglected kids and abusive parents - while the Homeschooling Legal Defense Association is the group advocating for complete lack of government oversight over homeschooling.

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