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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

#871

I 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…

For real. It's telling that the kids don't jump in here to defend the practice, hardly ever (also homeschooled, education was great, socialization was absolutely problematic despite doing all the homeschool group things.)

There's a selection bias where people who are happy and well-adjusted don't spend their lives picking fights on comment forums.

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

#872
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…

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

#873
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 would contend that sheltering your children from the outside world and not letting them have friends is child abuse.

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

#874

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…

There are many home-schooling success stories, and also many home-schooling horror stories. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...

There are many public school horror stories, and a few public school mediocrity stories (for those who can afford to move to a district where the homes are all $800,000 median now).

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

#875
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A school-like environment that doesn't indoctrinate their children in values that the parents disagree with, which is what would happen if their children went to public schools.

Public schools contributed to my departure from the faith decades afterward. Public schools weren't indoctrinating anything. Rather they taught me to think critically, using proven methods, and avoid fallacies. Faith communities taught me lazy thinking, blind faith, bigotry, etc. Thank Prussia for a system that -- for all its faults -- provides a way out for kids born into religion.

> Faith communities taught me lazy thinking, blind faith, bigotry, etc.

shame on faith communities - and parents - that teach laziness of mind. the effects are obvious, you are not the only person saying this.

> Public schools weren't indoctrinating anything. Rather they taught me to think critically, using proven methods, and avoid fallacies

you are not the first person to claim religion indoctrinates but public schooling doesn't. i'm always surprised how quickly logic and clear reasoning are thrown out in these statements. has it never occurred to you that critical thinking must be founded on something? that proven methods, useful as they are, can also be misused to support accepted truths that are wrong? that distinguishing fallacies requires recognition of truth, which requires acceptance of certain things as true? i guess what i'm trying to point out is that the list of things you were taught is indoctrination, and that to a high degree.

indoctrination is not a bad thing in and of itself. but a system of indoctrination that teaches it isn't indoctrinating scares me.

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

#876
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that the only relevant question here is how home schooling compares to public schools when it comes to “horror stories.” And there certainly aren’t a lack of public school horror stories…

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…

Ah, yes.

The "public schools as a warrantless, ongoing search by the government into parenting" model of schooling.

Why wouldn't everyone want to sign up for that? I mean, it's not even expensive. Just subject your kids to bullying, bureaucracy, and bumblefuckery (call 'em the Three Bs!) and you too can be under suspicion for 13+ years.

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

#877

Seems apropos to mention the works of John Taylor Gatto on the origin of the American public school system and in particular its motivation: social control of the lower classes by the elite of the country. You can find interviews on the web. He was teacher of the year in New York (both city and state) before he retired in disgust at what was being done to young people's minds with the current "schooling" system -- tr…

Controlling the mind? Are you completely mental? American public education system came out of the labor rights movement and the need to combat juvenile delinquency. It has its faults at the moment but only because it is continuously being dismantled for privatization.

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

#878

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…

There are many home-schooling success stories, and also many home-schooling horror stories. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...

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

#879
I can't really blame parents for homeschooling their kids when, especially after COVID, students have had their grades and proficiency fall off a cliff. The trend was pre-COVID but ACT scores have fallen drastically. If you watch teachers on Tiktok, etc, or just talk to them in person, they will tell you that the current generation of children are so far behind where they are supposed to be academically, even in areas with relative wealth. It's wild, the state of the US education system is in shambles. Some of it is related to COVID, but a lot of it is just policy failures and really strange incentives.

My dad was a teacher at one point and the principal told him he could only fail X number of students (despite a lot more not being proficient) because they'd miss out on certain funding, and it wasn't worth dealing with the parents. My dad eventually quit, in part because of this. That leads to sort of a education backlog where the next grade picks up students that don't meet the criteria, so they are teaching down, slowing the education of everyone else...which moves those kids to the next grade where once again they aren't proficient and it just dominoes. That was 20 years ago, I can't even imagine the state of things now.

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

#880
post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Point is, You’re VERY clearly not a secular individual.
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