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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

#711

Post by RuleOfBirds »

unsubstantiated wrote: post #655
ReallyOldLurker wrote: post #594

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 c…

Running away from the problem will only make it worse.

Implying "instead of path B, which is good for your child, do path A, which is bad for your child, to prevent A from becoming an even worse option?"

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

#712

Post by kelipso »

wizofaus wrote: post #277
civilitty wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Arguably any period of history where the majority of people lived as subsistence farmers and rarely interacted with others not part of the household was an anomaly though, and very different to how pre-agricultural societies lived.

It's very likely just a US thing. You go to Europe, you see villages (as in groups of houses) and agricultural fields extending out from each village. While US, I believe it's isolated houses surrounded by farmland.

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

#713

Post by ec109685 »

Reading the article: it dropped from the peak, still small percentage overall (a few million kids).

With online schooling supplemental options, parents working from home, it does seem like this will get more popular.

Part of why we end up with a cohesive society is that no matter where you come from, your kids will be educated mostly together. It will be interesting to see what happens long term if that stops being true.

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

#714

Post by rpmisms »

qup wrote: post #675
rpmisms wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's BS. I was unschooled (except for paying my way for my associate's degree when I was 13), and I wouldn't put a kid through school. The freedom let me get my first coding job at 17, and I was freelancing well before that. I got to do what I wanted, and I would be crippled if I was stuck in the thought patterns that public school entails. Socialization was hard, mostly because the other kids my age were really, w…

You can say it until you're blue in the face, point out how obviously true it is, and they can't see it. They'll invent excuses why you're wrong. What are you working on?

Was in e-commerce, got burned out doing meaningless work, so now I'm working at a pro-farm non-profit. I get to be self-directed and smart.

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

#715

Post by nostrademons »

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…

What geographic location? I grew up homeschool-adjacent in Massachusetts (I wasn't homeschooled myself but had common activities with many children who were), and the homeschooled families I knew were atheist, atheist, atheist, Unitarian Universalist, and Jehovah's Witness. All except the Jehovah's Witness were doing it because they felt the public school system wasn't serving their kids well (and usually also because the mom was a housewife with an educational or academic background), which kinda underscores the homeschooling diversity point of the grandparent.

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

#716

Post by nostrademons »

iosystem wrote: post #694
xyzelement wrote: post #329

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…

> I was raised totally secular How come your comment history says otherwise (Judaism). I'm perplexed that the new approach to selling religion is pretending to be raised secular and or have others perceive oneself to once be an atheist but then later found the truth in life. Religion was the worst, the worst thing for me to experience in life, and I wish everyone could've experienced similar to me. Since religious pe…

There are many secular Jews in the U.S. - people for whom Judaism is a culture and ethnicity that's part of their background, but who don't believe in a higher power or any of the scriptures.

I remember asking a friend's dad "So are you Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform?" and he was like "We're kinda beyond Reform."

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

#717

Post by prewett »

Teever wrote: post #427
xyzelement wrote: post #329

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…

If the purpose of religion is to align yourself to the highest aspirations why do so many large religious organizations get caught up stuff like this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mormon-church-ensign-peak-whist...

Why do we fail to live up to our own personal standards? Is it a surprise that a large group of people fails to do what even the best person fails to do? You get all kinds of people in a religious group: the legalists, the people who think they believe but actually have a higher priority, the immature people, and the mature self-givers. Legalism has inherent contradictions that can easily end up treating people poorly. The people who have a higher priority that than the values of the group are likely to act outside the values of the group, which is especially noticeable if they are in leadership. The immature people want to do the right thing, but fear, emotional issues, etc. exert a stronger pull.

I don't think the purpose of religion is to "align yourself to the highest aspirations", though, but rather to make sense of our place in the world and how to rightly live within it. They have rather different views of this, of course. Traditional Christianity says our place in the world is as children of God who are intended to be the image of God in the world and shepherd it with God's self-giving love. (Getting saved to go to heaven is a relatively new simplification.) Buddhism, in contrast, observes that all composed things are impermanent, so nothing is actually real and forming attachments to things causes pain. The ethics flow out of the views of our relationship within/to the world.

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

#718

Post by lolinder »

gemstones wrote: post #649
davemp wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty similar background here. Maybe successfully homeschooled adults are just hesitant to dive into this sort of discussion anecdote first?

You should be hesitant.

Agreed: generally speaking, diving into any discussion anecdote-first is unhelpful and should be avoided.

It's a pity that some people will take a collection of anecdotes as data and treat a lack of countering anecdotes as conclusive proof.

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

#719

Post by thfuran »

xyzelement wrote: post #329
jandrese wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

// 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…

>You may still disagree with what they care about but I find that harder and harder to do, personally.

Maybe you need to read more about Jehovah's Witnesses, Haredi, and Wahhabism.

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

#720

Post by lotsofpulp »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #578
ryandrake wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's all that money going? Surely not to teachers who are chronically underpaid and have 30+ students per class. It's not buying school supplies, which our teachers often have to pay for out of pocket or hold bake sales to fund. Is it all going to football fields, useless technology spending, and 5 levels of non-teaching administration staff?

For our kids' school, the main thing that jumps out to me compared to when I was a kid is that each class has a paid aide. So there's 1 teacher per 30 or so students, but there's also an aide in there, so 1 adult per 15 students. I don't know if every school does this. But ours is public and I wouldn't have known this was a thing if my wife didn't volunteer.

Every school that can afford it basically has to, by law. They are there for all the kids on “Individual Education Plans”, or IEPs. The bar to expel a kid from regular classes in school was raised super high, so the schools now have to spend a lot of resources on developing and administering IEPs for kids that are unable to function well in a regular classroom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEA_2004

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