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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

#911

Post by KWxIUElW8Xt0tD9 »

greenhearth wrote: post #877
KWxIUElW8Xt0tD9 wrote: post #867

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.

read Gatto

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

#912

Post by derivagral »

wizerdrobe wrote: post #119
keiferski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I have basically the same opinion. It's not so much that I believe homeschooling is amazing in-itself, but rather that the public education system has so clearly deteriorated that it seems borderline criminal to subject your kids to it. The question for me, personally, is private school vs. homeschooling. If you can avoid many of the downsides of public education via choosing the right private school (and bei…

We didn’t go full home-school, but my wife and I intentionally left our city to go raise our kids out in a rural area so they could grow up in and around nature and with a nice, small school district that smokes anything we had back in the city. Better test scores, smaller classes, minimal major discipline issues. Prior to moving, our only “good” option for realistic schooling was putting our children in a local Cath…

After going through something like this[0], it seems similar to what we do in tech. Try the fancy new thing! Don't worry that the creators aren't particularly qualified and mostly want to sell you stuff.

Hard to disentangle good change from bad; some of the initiative is good, but negative feedback seems to have been translated to "ignore those haters, they have no valid points."

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

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

#913

Post by qerti »

rando_dfad wrote: post #901
keiferski wrote: post #19

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…

The biggest US public school horror story is how we have taken a great instrument of social progress and decimated it. Public schools in countries where schools are treated well have phenomenal success. US schooling has been taken over (at the level of the state legislatures; blame goes to state Congress not to the schools) by companies selling "achievement" test. And also by charter schools whose success is based on…

[flagged]

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

#914

Post by ttymck »

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…

66 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37277997

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

#915

Post by micromacrofoot »

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…

In middle school I was beaten to the point where my jaw was wired shut. Nothing happened to the kid that did it and I had to be in his class for 2 years. Anything can have a bad outcome.

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

#916

Post by vb6sp6 »

qerti wrote: post #913
rando_dfad wrote: post #901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest US public school horror story is how we have taken a great instrument of social progress and decimated it. Public schools in countries where schools are treated well have phenomenal success. US schooling has been taken over (at the level of the state legislatures; blame goes to state Congress not to the schools) by companies selling "achievement" test. And also by charter schools whose success is based on…

[flagged]

No one was teaching this. It was a book in a library.

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

#917

Post by ianbicking »

ImJamal wrote: post #407
sweeter wrote: post #249

I mean its obvious. There has been a concerted effort to de-fund public schools and center the conversation about "right to choose" education, alongside a handout of vouchers to attend private religious schools AND the implementation of new laws that allow tax payer dollars to go to funding those privately owned religious schools (seriously). The intent imo is to make schools seem "scary" and push parents to put thei…

While there may be an effort to defund public schools, funding (inflation adjusted) has been increasing. https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditures-per-...

To me it feels like the duties of schools have been expanded more than their funding has been decreased. Demands and duties around special needs students have gone way up, with a much wider set of students being identified as special needs in some fashion, and more expensive interventions.

And there's expectations that the school should address other social needs the children might encounter. So there's lots of programs and interventions and support systems, and the bureaucracy to manage that... and maybe those things work and maybe they don't, but even ineffective programs cost money.

I also think schools would be a classic case where Baumol's Cost Disease would make the cost go up relative to other parts of the economy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)

And really if you go to schools today it's clear they are more well funded than 30-40 years ago. Teaching was hardly well paid at that time either. But society demands modernity and modernity is expensive.

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

#918

Post by magicink81 »

rando_dfad wrote: post #901
keiferski wrote: post #19

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…

The biggest US public school horror story is how we have taken a great instrument of social progress and decimated it. Public schools in countries where schools are treated well have phenomenal success. US schooling has been taken over (at the level of the state legislatures; blame goes to state Congress not to the schools) by companies selling "achievement" test. And also by charter schools whose success is based on…

I believe you are correct that public schools are instruments of social progress, but to assume that this is good for the students is a terrible assumption. A society may "progress" at the great expense of the people it's institutions purport to care for.

By definition progress is movement in a direction. Who set the direction? Toward which destination? To achieve which aim and goals? Who benefits? To assume it is the students, the teachers, or "the people" broadly, is a naive and destructive assumption.

Social progress by one definition might include the production of obedient soldiers and factory workers. It might include the limiting of cultural diversity, creating a common core of cultural conformity and homogenization among the youth a country populated by recent immigrants. It might include training the youth to accept authority without question.

If one is interested enough to learn about the actual thinking of the founders and maintainers of public school institutions in the United States and around the world, you can read what they published of their thinking for yourself. John Taylo Gatto unearthed much of this thinking and shared it with the world in his books and lectures.

Here is one transcript you may find enlightening:

https://smarthomeschooler.com/blog/2021/5/28/gatto-six-purpo...

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

#919

Post by zoogeny »

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…

A common trope in movies is parents living vicariously through their children. Like the parents that pressure their kids to go to medical school even though the kid wants to be an artist. Or the parent who forces their kid in sports and ends up screaming at the coaches and referees.

It is interesting to think of parents that see their own children as props, like pawns in some larger game rather than as individuals. I think there are subtle ways that this can happen.

I think a lot of people grew up in overly conservative homes. A common story you hear nowadays is a kid who grew up forced to tow the line in some religion and only once they reached maturity did they even realize there was another world out there. They may even promise themselves that they won't allow the same thing to happen to their own kids.

I don't know anything about you or your family or kids, but your attitude made me wonder if there is a backlash coming. If kids raised in forced diverse circumstances may rebel against their parents since they are being coerced into their parents view of "ideal world", much like the parents of stereotypical tiger asian parents or nutty sports dads.

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

#920

Post by jollyllama »

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.

Yes, they'll encounter it later, but the later they encounter is is probably better. They can then face it with a more mature brain, relatively speaking, and hopefully avoid forming deep pathways in their minds related to trauma.
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