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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

#931

Post by cooper_ganglia »

hxegon wrote: post #810

I think a good chunk of this feels like religious / conspiratorial indoctrination. But. A lot of kids in school genuinely wonder if they're going to die when they step on the bus everyday. I don't know how you couldn't see that as a parent. There were 51 school shootings in 2022, nearly a weekly occurrence. Is this the rise of home schooling, or just a natural response to the complete apathy and failure of our instit…

I think the public school system is failing in so many ways and homeschooling is a better solution, but even with that, school shootings are near the absolute bottom of my concerns. They're an issue, but we have so many more pressing issues that are hurting kids so much more. The shootings are so heavily promoted on the news because engagement is good, clicks make money. Keeping people scared is profitable.

Most of those recorded "school shootings" are simply cases where a gun was fired on school grounds, not a "mass shooting". In literally almost every single case, it's one kid shooting another kid an is gang-related. You can actually go through and see the exact circumstances around each incident, along with a pertaining news article:

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year...

So hopefully that gives you a little bit of comfort! As long as your kids aren't violent teen gang members in the school parking lot after a football game, it's highly unlikely that they'll even know someone who has witnessed gun violence at any school.

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

#932

Post by petsfed »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #535
petsfed wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you pick the subject, there's a hot-button issue. Could be evolution in the science side of things, the legacy of slavery or colonization in the history side of things. Math is generally pretty safe, although I do see a steady stream of "I'm so glad I'm homeschooling my kids, I can't believe what $currentEducationalBogeyman is trying to pass off as education" when presented with some way to understand math th…

> Could be evolution in the science side of things... I don't think that the theory of evolution was the issue in 2021... Here's an example that happened in France: parents disgusted by a performance where an adult male performer was pretending, in front of kids, to eat vegetables in a garden, naked, in front of kids "because ecological art" (or whatever that performance was called) [1] I'm sure I'm the evil, close m…

That's pretty hard to argue with, although (according to google translate, my french is a bit rusty), the performance was already banned from kids. Children weren't supposed to be there. So maybe that's less a question of "look at the filth they're showing our kids!" and more "why weren't the docents doing their jobs?".

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

#933

Post by sastaha »

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…

If you look at actual numbers, school funding has never been higher.

"Public schools in countries where schools are treated well have phenomenal success."

How do you measure such success? There's standardized testing but you don't seem to like that.

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

#934

Post by maire »

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…

California provides awesome homeschool support. A lot depends on where you live.

In California the student enrolls in a home school program through a local public school. You are assigned a homeschool liaison and can enroll in public school classes. The kids and parents get a weekly checkin and support. You have to pass public school tests. You get a budget from the public school to use for materials.

My grandsons are getting homeschooled through 6th grade. My daughter decided it was just too hard to duplicate a high school education at home so she is phasing them into public school in middle school.

She gave each child the choice of home school or public school. The Covid lockdown made that choice easy for the kids. They know that if they don't keep up, she will send them back to public school. That is quite the motivator.

Just like your neighbors she works with other parents to keep the kids socialized, take them on field trips, and to form a support system. She also signs the kids up for sports.

The downside (from her observation) is since some of the early homeschoolers were bible based, she had to really review the school material. A surprising number of text books use the bible as history or have questionable science. She also noticed that many parents homeschool their kids because they can't participate in regular school (for various reasons). Her kids homeschool as a choice.

The biggest upside is that time is more flexible and the liaison is flexible. The family took a trip to NYC and the liaison was asking the boys quite a few questions about what they saw and learned.

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

#935

Post by Clamchop »

tivert wrote: post #840
Clamchop wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it some comfort that you can see there is something to stop or change?

> Isn't it some comfort that you can see there is something to stop or change? No, of course not. Is being helpless comforting to you? How often does anyone actually fix a serious problem with an institution? Sure it happens sometimes, but the best almost everyone can hope for it to muddle through being subjected to the problems. The impulse to put homeschooling under the thumb of government officials is not comforti…

I don't think "of course" belongs in that sentence. Not everybody feels so defeated, or would feel better seeing the manifest evidence of societal dysfunction (if it happened, I've not foreclosed on it) emerging from black boxes concealing different interpretations of a good and complete education as numerous as there are families.

And I can't argue with your position on how often things are fixed. It wouldn't matter what evidence I found, the goal post would just move a little bit farther. Sure, "it happens sometimes," but never enough to satisfy.

But I can counter with, how often can you fix broken homeschooling that has no auditing or oversight?

Never. Not even sometimes.

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

#936

Post by sastaha »

cycomanic wrote: post #178
akira2501 wrote: post #114

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? > 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…

> > 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…

"Because your children are not your property, they are your responsibility"

I bet there's a correlation between this viewpoint and not having any children.

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

#937

Post by mcpackieh »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #354
ejb999 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because public school kids never kill people?

They generally aren't brainwashed to kill people. Bad apples will fall from any tree. A poisoned tree will mostly produce bad apples.

> They generally aren't brainwashed to kill people.

Lmao, yes they are. You couldn't be more wrong, kids who attend public school make better military recruits. Public schools teach kids how to conform to institutional systems and follow orders. These are essential skills for effective killers.

Btw, since you're so scared of kids learning how to build rockets.. I learned how to build rockets in public school through a program called TARC. The same design principles I learned for model rockets could be applied to homemade weaponized rockets. Does that frighten you? Do you think that makes me Hamas or something? (Hamas is who you're thinking of right? America doesn't have a domestic rocket attack problem, I'm sure you know that.) You should know that most people in the MIC went through public school. If you're actually afraid of people learning these sort of skills, shouldn't you be advocating for kids receiving a bible-only education that renders them incapable of engineering, and therefore weapon design, and unfit for military recruitment?

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

#938

Post by sastaha »

whatshisface wrote: post #125
303uru wrote: 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.

I have got bad news about that, the majority of abusive households send the kids to school and scare them into silence. Regulations against abusive households do exist but enforcing them completely would require a degree of inescapable surveillance that cannot exist.

Most abusive households are not going to homeschool because they're people who couldn't care less about their kids' education and wouldn't turn away the chance for free daycare.

A lot of people seem to be implying that religious indoctrination is abuse, when it isn't legally, even if you think it should be. I'm personally in between a rock and a hard place here, since I don't want my kids exposed to either religion or LGBT stuff.

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

#939

Post by qup »

thfuran wrote: post #820
qup wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How good were you at your profession when you got your bachelor's? How good were your "average" classmates? I can teach my (hypothetical) child better than the "average" teaching-degree graduate. You're selling yourself short if you don't think you can, too, with a focused effort. My friend group is like 20ish elementary school teachers (US). They are all great people, but they are quite variable in competence. Some…

>How good were you at your profession when you got your bachelor's? Rather a lot better than before I got it.

Which adds absolutely no information in this context. Well played.

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

#940

Post by ngngngng »

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...

This is a big nothingburger. If you only look at the enrollment at LDS church owned universities, then that fund would be a much smaller "endowment" than other comparable private universities have. Not to mention that the church heavily subsidizes tuition, tuition at LDS schools is unbelievably cheap. But also, the LDS church does way more than just run schools.
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