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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

#731

Post by wredue »

henry_bone wrote: post #678
pkulak wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions Wow, what a terrible take. If anyone needs religion to live a moral life, I'm glad they have found it and hope they never lose it. I'm judged by my peers, my family, my community, and my country. But even if I wasn't, I would know what's right and what's wrong. Moreover, I guess it's good that amoral people can find eth…

No one needs religion to lead a moral life. That's not the argument. But without the transcendent, without a higher power, we have no grounding for our morality. Everything becomes subjective and "post-modern". Actions then become "justifiable" - if there is such a thing - by whatever criteria suits us: the greater good, the good of the nation, whatever. But essentially self-interest takes over completely. The more w…

You know what’s funny about this?

I got $1000 that says that I could name several “Godly” (greater than 90% abrahamic affiliation) that you would immediately label “a shithole country”, but if I were to name the most secular ones, you’d most likely state that “theyre great, beautiful places to live with good people.”

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

#732

Post by chefandy »

henry_bone wrote: post #678
pkulak wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions Wow, what a terrible take. If anyone needs religion to live a moral life, I'm glad they have found it and hope they never lose it. I'm judged by my peers, my family, my community, and my country. But even if I wasn't, I would know what's right and what's wrong. Moreover, I guess it's good that amoral people can find eth…

No one needs religion to lead a moral life. That's not the argument. But without the transcendent, without a higher power, we have no grounding for our morality. Everything becomes subjective and "post-modern". Actions then become "justifiable" - if there is such a thing - by whatever criteria suits us: the greater good, the good of the nation, whatever. But essentially self-interest takes over completely. The more w…

Read Cicero.

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

#733

Post by wredue »

lolinder wrote: post #495
Jensson wrote: post #464

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…

Err no.

The teachers generally push an empathy based approach to morality, which is absolutely not subjective.

Adopting empathy can cause a number of objective moral pronouncements on a good foundation.

I will take empathy based moral pronouncements over “the bible says so” any day of the week.

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

#734

Post by gammarator »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #700
jeffrallen wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or, the teachers will thank you for keeping the teacher:child ratio lower so that they can focus on kids needing more attention.

If there are too few kids the schools will let teachers go. Funding is provided based on enrollment.

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

#735

Post by gunapologist99 »

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…

> a whole lot of religious indoctrination

And just like that, a discussion about homeschooling veers wildly off-topic into a flame war.

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

#736

Post by xyzelement »

wredue wrote: post #725
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…

[flagged]

// If you’re not a Deep South religious person, I’ll eat my hat.

LOL. I am a New Yorker with dual (EU/US) citizenship and two graduate degrees. So you can eat that hat if you'd lile.

Like I said, I grew up secular and have developed a deeper understanding of religion and its benefits in my late 30s.

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

#737

Post by etchalon »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #682
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 think what you meant to say instead of "anything goes", was lack of duty. That's what seems to be missing, that organized religion did bring to the table. Duty. The duty of the teacher to protect the student from bullying? Gone. The duty of the parent to stay in an unfulfilling relationship for the sake of the children. The duty of the professional (cop? doctor?) to serve and protect the public. The duty of the pro…

The duty to stone someone working on the Sabbath? Gone.

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

#738

Post by gunapologist99 »

Server6 wrote: post #656
pokstad wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funding is not the issue. Private schools pay their teachers less and have higher success rates. Public schools are still teaching in a style suited for the Industrial Revolution. They also are a jobs program, so they can’t change to accommodate students if it hurts the employees.

Private schools have higher success rates because the kids are of a higher socioeconomic class. The teachers don't have to do the job of a social worker/parent. In other words private schools don't need to hire the best teachers, therefore they don't have to pay the best salaries.

> The teachers don't have to do the job of a social worker/parent.

Right, so home-schooling just brings that full circle.

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

#739

Post by somenameforme »

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…

The one thing I'd observe about near to all religions is that the values suggested tend to be about optimizing the overall outcome of a society. The most controversial topics are ones related to sexuality. But there's an utterly trivial, and even perfectly reasonable, explanation for why so many different religions look down on any form of sex except man+woman+babies. As one looks back in the past, the 'effective fertility' rates had to have been just barely hanging on by a thread. By 'effective fertility' I mean having children who also have children. Having 80 kids, but where only 1 succeeds in having kids, would be an 'effective fertility' of 1.

So let's consider some numbers for effective fertility. Imagine it was 4. That means each generation (which we'll call 30 years, even though it was probably close to 20) would be twice as large as the one prior. And this could be reversed (to see how big your parents' generation was) by multiplying by 0.5. So let's look back to see what the population would have been 2100 years ago, or 70 generations, using various effective fertility rates.

---

4 effective fertility => 8 billion people today * 0.5 (reversible fertility factor) ^ 70 (total generations) = global population in 100BC of... 0!

3 effective fertility => 8 billion * 0.66^70 = global population in 100BC of... 0!

2.5 effective fertility => 8 billion * 0.8^70 = global population in 100BC of... 1316.

---

So we can say that effective fertility rates had to be lower than 2.5 on average! Average being important since we probably went through cycles of higher and lower effective fertility, but that only makes this scarier. There were probably times in the past where humanity's effective fertility dipped below 2, which means we're on our way to extinction. Anybody seeing this, and thinking about the future of humanity, would have realized how fundamentally critical to our survival simply producing more children was. And what's the lowest hanging fruit there? People having non-reproductive sex.

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

#740

Post by TheBigSalad »

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…

OK but that's virtually the same thing as public school.
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