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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

#891

Post by burkaman »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #882
Tyr42 wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but there are claims like: "Dinosaurs existed over 100 million years ago, before humans existed" which are controversial enough that it's part of the "culture war". And teaching it (and carbon dating) counts as taking a side. We aren't talking about fine points of evolution, we are talking about the earth being older than mankind at all.

As someone who was taught all of the silly, unscientific religious “theories” like Creationism as a child, and then had to unlearn it as an adult, my position is that it is absolutely never the governments place to tell a parent what they are allowed to teach their child. It is not the responsibility of the state, in any way, shape, or form, to dictate information to a child that the parents take issue with, even if…

> it is absolutely never the governments place to tell a parent what they are allowed to teach their child

Essentially everyone in America agrees with you. This is written into our Constitution.

> It is not the responsibility of the state, in any way, shape, or form, to dictate information to a child that the parents take issue with

This is an impossible standard. We have to make public schooling available, and we can't provide individual tutors for every student, so they must be taught in groups. This guarantees that some students will be taught things that their parents take issue with. To compensate for this we make some escape hatches available like homeschooling, private schooling, or moving to a different school district, but these are all difficult or impossible for most parents. Some schools have offered to let parents take their kids out of class when certain topics are taught, but this approach can't scale to all subjects and topics. It also can't address parents upset about what their child is NOT being taught.

I'm not aware of any educational model that gives all parents complete control over their children's education.

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

#892

Post by smcg »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #420
cycomanic wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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? Because your children are not your property, they are your responsibility and we as society have decided that we want to make sure that the education is to a certain standard. As a side note I find it fascinating how people who f…

I think I can explain the confusution. The state dictating and setting the rules is no more free than the parents setting the rules. This basically comes down to an argument not of freedom, but if the children are property of the state or parents. When you look at it this way, it makes perfect sense that libertairian minded folks would support homeschooling. After all, the state isnt offering the freedom of choice an…

Children are no one's property. Their guardians have a responsibility to them, they do not own them.

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

#893

Post by anon291 »

buildbot wrote: post #473
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's telling that the kids don't jump in here to defend the practice, hardly ever... Homeschooled kids are a minority, and therefore formerly-homeschooled adults are a minority too. More of a minority, even (since the rate of homeschooling was lower when we were growing up). It's not "telling", it's simply the fact that not a ton of people exist to give a defense. For my part I was homeschooled and had a great expe…

Counterpoint - why don't we see defense of homeschooling at the same rate of attacks? Even if they are rare, there are several posters here that have experienced bad home schools. If they are at least 50:50, shouldn't we expect the same rate of defense? That we don't see that is telling. Being bullied sucks and has huge negative impacts. I am glad though, that I have the tools and experience to identify that happenin…

Since we're simply in speculation land, perhaps happy homeschooled adults are less screen-obsessed than those who went to 'normal' school or those poorly homeschooled and thus have better things to do with their life?

> Negative interactions are something kids have to learn to deal with. It's not pretty or fair or even safe, but neither is the world.

Completely agree. If someone assaults you in real life, you should learn that you need to file charges to ensure your assaulter goes to jail. Not sit quietly in the corner while your abuser gets a talking to.

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

#894

Post by anon291 »

Auracle wrote: post #758
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.

People lived in tribes, close knit towns, or cities with public areas. Now a very large portion of us live in detached homes, far away from any groups of children.

This is a political problem with political solutions.

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

#895

Post by anon291 »

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.

Will it though? The pilgrims ran away from Britain with unashamed success. Running away turned them from oppressed minority group to the founding members of the richest, most prosperous, strongest society on the face of the earth

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

#896

Post by ngngngng »

haizhung wrote: post #261

Am I the only one thinking that home schooling is the wrong solution to the underlying problem? The problem is that the public education sector has been - for years - continuously squeezed dry of any funding. Teachers are quitting left and right, and schools are in a terrible state. Instead of fixing THAT problem, now people homeschool. Ok; I guess. At least homeschooling is something that the individual can control,…

If funding is truly the underlying problem, why does Utah have some of the best K-12 outcomes in the country while being dead last in per pupil spending?

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

#897

Post by thatfrenchguy »

zarzavat wrote: post #176
lapetitejort wrote: post #137

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…

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.

People were not educated by any modern sense back then

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

#898

Post by mcpackieh »

akira2501 wrote: post #120
burcs wrote: post #27

We're homeschooling our kids. I was pretty against it at first, but seeing our education system degrade to the state it is today, and being honest about my schooling experience definitely opened me up to it. I think the biggest argument for schooling is the socialization aspect of it. I don't know about the rest of you but I was bullied pretty relentlessly throughout grade school and it completely changed my personal…

> That's not the socialization that I want for my kids. On the other hand, I'd definitely want my children to be familiar with it. Bullying is not something isolated to schools. I've seen it in nearly every social and political situation that exists at nearly every age group. In my estimation people are getting worse at identifying it and collectively we're getting worse at punishing it.

Public schools teach you all the wrong ways to deal with bullies, and forbid the correct ways. They teach kids to run to teachers for help whenever they get bullied; in the real world that doesn't work because there's no teacher to run to. And when a kid stands up to a bully themselves, the school punishes him for exercising precisely the skills he'll need later in life. Schools don't teach kids how to deal with bullies, they teach kids how to be docile victims.

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

#899

Post by debacle »

IF I could do it again, I would homeschool. My kids are both relatively gifted. If you have a gifted child, this is what school looks like:

K-5: Extreme boredom and anxiety because roughly 1/2 the year is review or test prep. If you are lucky, your child might have a GT teacher.

6-8: Your child will struggle to make friends, especially if they aren't connected to social media. Thankfully, my kids were athletes and musicians but for the smart kids who weren't, I saw a lot of bullying.

9-10: Your kids will learn, but not all that much. They'll start being offered advanced and AP courses, but because of most kids' busy schedules these days, this simply means that they are completely segregated from their friends that aren't "smart."

11-12: Curricula have been gutted, and so your children will leave high school less smart than you are, especially when it comes to history. Your kids will be pushed to take AP courses, not realizing that many of the AP credits they earn wont be honored by many schools depending on their career track. It's relatively safe to say that 30-50% of all of the learning in the K-12 space happens during this time for gifted students. In fact you could probably give kids time off from 6th through 9th grade, and they'd still wind up being 90-95% as knowledgeable as if they hadn't.

In contrast, many of the homeschool families I know have kids who learn for 4-6 hours per week. When they aren't learning, they are at co-ops, on field trips, enjoying free play, or learning other skills (woodworking, music, etc).

Something is fundamentally broken with our public education system. The system is more stressful, less educational, and far more expensive than it was 20 years ago, and it's putting out students who are in many ways hollow.

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

#900

Post by hollerith »

ryandrake wrote: post #402
chasd00 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had someone (childless i might add) try to make me feel guilty for pulling my kids out of a school circling the drain and into a high performing one in the name of diversity. I told them, when the time comes, if they want to sacrifice their child on that altar then it's their decision but don't ask me to sacrifice mine.

Kind of wild and weirdly refreshing to finally see the "everyone is in it for themselves and their own" attitude on fully overt display in this article's comments. Usually it's masked behind talk of "freedom" and "individuality," but here, it's raw and out there in the open! FWIW I probably could afford to send my kid to a better private school or alternate-schooling group, withdrawing from the community and not-so-g…

So you're shocked, just shocked, that someone would openly admit to doing something that . . . is common practice and has always been legal? (in the US, where I'm guessing we all live)
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