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For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching
121–130 of 597 posts
Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching
#122[flagged]
We homeschool our four children, are religious, most of our friends homeschool, and this is nonsense.
We love the schedule flexibility of homeschooling, the ability to let our kids explore their own interests more, and most of all - we just love being with our kids and they get to have their siblings and parents all day.
> That's because teaching kids is super hard and real easy to mess up.
Forgive me, but this is just absurd.
Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
My brother and I were homeschooled after a point, but it had nothing to do with this. We followed the same curriculum and wrote the same exams at the end of grade 12. We scored well above average and had no trouble getting into university. I was on the Dean’s list at university and my brother scored in the 97th percentile on the SATs.
And, to be clear, I'm not saying there aren't legitimate reasons to home-school nor that it can't be done well. Heck, I'd even say that after essential skills like reading are mastered, homeschooling can lead to great results. A lot of that depends on the motivation (or lack thereof) of the parents.
I think it also depends on the kids. After about grade 4 my parents were mostly hands off with our schooling. We followed the program and phoned or emailed the teacher when we had questions. Our parents just made sure we were working. My mom helped us with our grammar and spelling. Some years we had trouble with that and got behind and had to work through the summer holidays.
Buy some kids just won’t work if you’re not right behind them every day making sure they work. Others would struggle with direction in that kind of environment.
My brother tried to homeschool his kids, but it didn’t work out.
Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's a lazy take. It's not the facts, it's the worldview. Socializing children into your moral and religious worldview is something that's widely recognized as a human right: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/... ("The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral e…
Homeschooling is, to a first approximation, the most individualistic approach to a child's education possible. If your goal is to instill values of mutual cooperation, a sense of obligation, etc. in a pluralistic society, I'd think that you'd want to send them to a public school in a large city. That's what the last ~200 years of American immigrants and children of immigrants have more or less done.
> Homeschooling is, to a first approximation, the most individualistic approach to a child's education possible.
In a superficial way, sure. The dominant American culture is intensely individualist. So if you don’t want your kids to grow up that way, you need to buck conformity in that narrow sense.
> If your goal is to instill values of mutual cooperation, a sense of obligation, etc. in a pluralistic society, I'd think that you'd want to send them to a public school in a large city.
The prevailing culture in large city public schools turns those ideas on their head. The focus is on individual self-actualization, and questioning authority, hierarchy, elders, and norms. It’s about what society owes individuals (“rights”) instead of what individuals owe society. There’s a veneer of cooperation and obligation, but it’s framed in terms of what “privileged” (whites, the rich) owe everyone else, not what each individual owes society.
Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching
#125[flagged]
> My main issue with homeschooling is mostly around the fact that it's generally done so parents can control and limit children's access to well accepted facts (such as evolution, age of the earth, or dinosaurs).
What is the problem with that? I am not aware of anything in the daily life that is dependent on the existence of macroevolution, the age of earth, or the history of dinosaurs.
So, I really deeply from my heart have a stance of "live and let live" concerning these topics. I might love science, but I am not a missionary or even an inquisitor for the "scientific truth".
Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching
#126[flagged]
I’m not even a homeschooling proponent or religious but this sounds like nonsense.
I can't recall a single instance that this would not be applicable to growing up home schooled. Sample size of dozens of families. Seemed to be roughly the case to teenage me at the regional "events" as well. Could of course be my personal bubble.
Very few would admit such in public, but social and moral reasons were the overwhelming cause for most to home school. Education was an extreme secondary priority to the point of being not one at all in some families. Some kept the kids out of school to literally put them to work.
The sequestering from society is usually the point - for better or worse. This attracts the exact type of people you would expect it to.
Perhaps the situation is different 20 years later but based on my continued exposure to the "scene" I doubt it. I'd be amazed if the majority of folks are not engaging in home schooling for what amounts to religious reasons - however we want to define religion these days.
Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching
#127Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching
#128Home schooling is a real burden on many parents who aren't professional teachers of course and are pulled in many directions. One of the most exciting emerging trends in home schooling is to pool the resources of multiple home schooling parents. It's simply not practical for parents to commit all the hours needed for full time home schooling 9 till 3:30PM every day. So home schooling parents can team up and share the…
>This means the kids gather together in one location because many kids can learn from the person doing the teaching. >Often as well it makes sense for the parents all to contribute a little money so that instead of the parents having to teach things that they are not expert in, the can pay as a group for someone with subject expertise to assist. >It can be problematic though gathering so many kids into one house for…
It's not. It's Poe's law, in action.
Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just as a counterpoint... I was homeschooled from 2nd grade until sophomore year of high school. I played sports the entire time (was the captain of various teams), had plenty of friends, and was pretty social. Even still, I felt like my social skills were significantly stunted when compared to others my age. It took a long time for me to feel comfortable just hanging out with others because most of my social time wa…
Not feeling comfortable could be question of time. You get comfortable when you go from kindergarten to 12th grade with the same kids. You know them well, because you've been in classes with a lot of them for 6-7 hours / day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year. As I typed the above paragraph out, it actually makes me question. Is that really growing social skills if they're always surrounded by the same kids? For example…
> You get comfortable when you go from kindergarten to 12th grade with the same kids. You know them well, because you've been in classes with a lot of them for 6-7 hours / day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year.
Or you get to deeply hate these children ...
Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This means the kids gather together in one location because many kids can learn from the person doing the teaching. >Often as well it makes sense for the parents all to contribute a little money so that instead of the parents having to teach things that they are not expert in, the can pay as a group for someone with subject expertise to assist. >It can be problematic though gathering so many kids into one house for…
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Out of all the things the government does, public education is a rare example of a positive externality.