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Homeschooling hits record numbers

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Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make up for the resulting drop in interaction with other kids? I had a boss who did this with his children as well - it seemed as though his solution was to use PE credits to have his kids attend sports with other kids.

My kids are part of a co-op where they meet once a week and in this co-op they share some elements of their curriculum with everyone else, they spend one day going over the weeks assignments along with 8-10 classmates, and then during the week they are at home doing their work. As they have aged their school work now has a lot of collaborative elements, so my oldest is actually meeting with kids from his co-op almost…

Sounds like a wonderful setup. Have the kids ever shown a desire for public school? My brother is homeschooling his kids to start, but the oldest just asked to start going to public, so he sent her.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#182
post #167
post #3

I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before. We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools. We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise. But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or bette…

Covid showed me that on the average home schooling (or at least remote learning) leaves kids extremely under developed. The stunted social and academic skills were pretty apparent in retrospect once the schools reopened.

Remote learning. You didn't see homeschooling, which is a very different thing, you saw remote learning.

The homeschooling crowd has developed methods over the years to compensate. The COVID remote learning cohort did not, and suffered for it.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#183
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What works for one might not work for another one. Can't generalize.

We can actually. It's called theory of probability and statistics, which is probably "forgotten" by these amazing self-appointed homeschoolers. A few rare successes of homeschoolers doesn't mean this practice is good on average, and vice versa the rare failures of the public education system doesn't mean that it is bad on average.

This comment is so disingenuous. Few and rare?? Why would you frame it like this? Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.

https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:text=r...

https://chewv.org/college-preparation/college-admissions/?ut...

https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/?utm_sourc...

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#184
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

yeah, it would be crazy if people were allowed to raise their own children with their own values. we can’t have that.

Did anyone argue that you are not allowed to teach your kids your own values? It seems to me, the question is more: do you want to raise your kids without ever exposing them to values that are not your own? Opinion Bubbles have been increasing for a long time, do we really want to grow them even more? Social media is full of people left and right that seem to have no idea about the opinions and realities at the other end of the spectrum.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#185
post #130

> Recent estimates put the total homeschooling population at about 6 percent of students across the United States, compared to about 3 percent pre-pandemic. One thing that concerns me about many pro-homeschooling comments is a kind of tear-down-the-schools attitude, as if schools were hopeless and irredeemable, despite the fact they're still educating 94% of students even at today's elevated homeschooling rate. Of co…

I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children. There is no law or social imperative that children must be taught a secular view point. At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently. Honestly, I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion. It has become a belief system of it's own, and I for one fear the coming crusades :)

I say live and let live, parents should be free to teach their kids whatever belief system they want without political interference. Much to the dismay of the left (and I say this, being a left leaning moderate... I know, bad word today), kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children, full stop. The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism, is only putting fuel to the fire in this surge in global fascism. At the risk of sounding too kumbaya'ish, we all just need to accept each other and recognize the real enemies to society is a global loss of empathy and the rise of transactionalism. Now that is something I could really get behind, forced empathy courses! :)

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#187

My daughter is in college now, but we used a variety of private, part-time, and homeschooling approaches prior to that. One thing is that there are a lot of resources (e.g. independent teachers for subjects you don't know, co-ops for socializing, etc.), and the more people are doing it, the more true that becomes. My parents were both public school teachers, and yet we found ourselves home- and alternative-schooling…

Seattle schools have that issue. After covid a bunch of kids were moved to private schools, and SPS (the organism in charge of school) complained and blamed parents on having money and not wanting to mix with the riff raff and other bs. When they actually asked the parents why their children weren't returning after covid, it was because SPS decided to axe the advance/gifted programs they had for kids, among other educational quality things. The children that never came back were children who would have taken advantage of those programs, and parents decided to go pay to win instead to get those programs back in private schools, as it becomes a compounding advantage in today's competitive world. SPS is still using the stupid hippie approach about children magically learning how to read with pictures and guesses, instead of phonics, and some numbers for reading are worst than Mississippi, which went hard into phonics and overwhelmingly improved their numbers. WA is a clear example that spending a ton of money doesn't improve educational outcomes, you also have to do things that work.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#188
post #28

Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning. I don’t think we’re talking about remote ranch situations where you either do online school or have to send them to boarding school. So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boo…

Interesting point. I know of one home-schooling family—and the wife quit her career to homeschool. Is this family well off financially? Of course they are. I suspect the data on homeschoolers is going to reflect a generally affluent slant.

Anecdotally, I know of one child who was homeschooled recently. The mother is a single mother, of modest middle-class means. There was a homeschooling group nearby with a few volunteer mothers handling most of the logistics and teaching. This particular mother did not have to give up her job. It does stretch the definition of "homeschooling" a bit when it's a neighbor teaching in a neighbor's home, but they made it work.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#189
post #7

Anecdotally, two factors at work here: - Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values. - With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching. It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it'…

> pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values Which values? I haven't gone to school in a long time.

Not a GP and I don't know if any of these qualifies as "left-ish" (which is very US specific IMHO), but as I understand, the education all over the western culture is destroyed by few really simple and really crazy (for me) ideas:

- Kids are never responsible for anything.

- Teachers are responsible for everything.

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