Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
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Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
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Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#2The alternative many will be forced to take will be Homeschooling + Online Courses, which is great!
À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#3The alternative many will be forced to take will be Homeschooling + Online Courses, which is great! À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.
So, one of the big reasons homeschooling isn't more prevalent is that increasingly both parents have to work. Maybe a new, not before seen alternative is some sort of a quasi-daycare institution which has authority figures not teaching but just making sure the kids are focusing on their online courses and not horsing around! And only so occasionally answering questions the kids ask. Because you're still in an environment with other similar-aged peers, you can still have recesses to bond and mingle and have chances for having healthy socializing practices.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#4The alternative many will be forced to take will be Homeschooling + Online Courses, which is great! À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.
It might seem better to us but I doubt kids see it like that. Most kids enjoy being in a school environment with their friends. You lose the very important social aspect of school with homeschooling/online courses.
>> À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.
With online courses parents would most likely select what the child learns, it will still be "a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you". The reason being if given the choice I would be a majority of kids would decide against doing a Maths or English course.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#5The alternative many will be forced to take will be Homeschooling + Online Courses, which is great! À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.
Surely with homeschooling kids are going to get even more inconsistent results due to radically varying teaching abilities and knowledge of parents?
Not to mention severely biased curricular, I'm sure HN kids would all know haskell by the time they were 9 but what about poetry , sports and history?
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#6The alternative many will be forced to take will be Homeschooling + Online Courses, which is great! À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.
Home schooling doesn't have any quality control. That's only great if the parent makes it great. And it is often the case that parents don't make it great. A lot of parents are lazy and happy to do the minimum or less - they only home school, or pretend to, enough to keep the state off their back, and may prefer that kids do work for them. In addition, there is a strong tendency for home-schooling parents to be very ideological, so that kids who are otherwise smart and can read, write and do arithmetic end up with huge holes in areas like history, mythology and biology.
I wish we wouldn't so often reduce this issue to "public school is bad in every way, so it's better if there are no common public educational services for anyone".
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#7Linus talking about politics is... still politics, even if one happens to agree with him.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#8The alternative many will be forced to take will be Homeschooling + Online Courses, which is great! À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.
It might seem better to us but I doubt kids see it like that. Most kids enjoy being in a school environment with their friends. You lose the very important social aspect of school with homeschooling/online courses. >> À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you. With online courses parents would most likely select what the child learns, it will still be "a buff…
Two things:
1. Parents can choose what is best for their children, instead of a "democratically" chosen buffet.
2. The social aspect can be addressed by having physical activity clubs/gatherings/groups/centers. I don't know if schools already do this, but being able to choose Skiing as a Phy Ed since grade 1, or whatever tickles your child's fancy just sounds like a much better opportunity to perhaps become a professional athlete in that field.
The burden will fall to the parents to decide how well rounded or specialized they want their children to be in certain aspects - mental or physical.
There could be suggested coursework by companies/industries that would help parents choose what their child needs to learn to be successful in a certain industry.
Let's say my kid shows interest in becoming an Astronaut. I look up Space Company X's suggested education outline and roughly follow it instead of having my kid learn everything until they're in the later teens when they finally choose what they want to spend 8+ hours a day on.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#9I agree that our K-12 sucks, but why is our university system considered good? For instance, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT/FSF, Carnegie-Mellon, UIUC, etc, have made valuable contributions to Computer Science (this is becoming less true as commercial and open-source have overtaken academia in many respects).
Is it possible that our K-12 system is broken is the reason that our kids are capable of pursuing their own interests instead of the rigor of rote learning? As a kid, I remember the easiness of school homework allowed me to spend many afternoons in IRC and learning programming on my own.
E.g, with too much free time on your hands, are you capable of thinking different instead of answering challenging homework? Not defending our K-12, just wondering how bringing in a Confucian system like Asia and Europe would affect the outside-the-box thinking.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#10The alternative many will be forced to take will be Homeschooling + Online Courses, which is great! À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.
Home schooling doesn't have any quality control. That's only great if the parent makes it great. And it is often the case that parents don't make it great. A lot of parents are lazy and happy to do the minimum or less - they only home school, or pretend to, enough to keep the state off their back, and may prefer that kids do work for them. In addition, there is a strong tendency for home-schooling parents to be very…
> Home schooling doesn't have any quality control.
Neither do public schools.