Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by elil17 » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

tivert wrote: post #15

> Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught. Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either because they're failing at their job or doing things that are disagreeable to some subset of the population?

But should you be able to totally escape from scrutiny? To me it seems very wrong to deny a child the opportunity to learn the things they'd need to function in society like reading, math, and science. Most homeschooling parents are teaching these things to there kids, but there are some who aren't. That ought to be stopped.

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

#122

Post by burkaman » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

asynchronous wrote: post #38

tivert wrote: post #15

> Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught. Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either because they're failing at their job or doing things that are disagreeable to some subset of the population?

It is, and article hit pieces like this are exactly why it will continue to expand. Newsflash, there’s an actual large portion of the population that more and more doesn’t want what is taught to their children regulated by the government.

Will it continue to expand? This article makes the case that the large increase in 2020 was driven by temporary pandemic conditions, and explicitly not by politics or school quality. The graph shows it has already started to decline. Longer-term data shows a small peak in 2012 followed by a slow decline until the pandemic: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_206.10.a.... In the article's district lookup tool, most districts follow this same pattern of a pandemic spike that begins to decline, whether you pick a stereotypically liberal or conservative district.

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

#123

Post by whatshisface » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

psychlops wrote: post #113

Amezarak wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, there are many public school horror stories. For example, despite spending $21k/student, making it the third-highest funded school system in the country, 23 Baltimore schools failed to produce a single student with basic math proficiency.[1] One of my friends went to a school where she was beaten every day and the teachers had totally given up and most of them did not teach. Unfortunately, we need much mor…

I doubt if homeschooling would work in Baltimore either.

What "different" schools allow parents to do is pull the top 1% of lucky students out to escape. Maybe most of the parents in the low cost of living areas can't give any time to their children because they've got three jobs, but there are always going to be the few that can. The same goes for a few who can one way or another afford private school. It's better that three percent get through than none.

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

#124

Post by knodi » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC

Home schooling is also the worst form of education, only second to no education.

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

#125

Post by whatshisface » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC

303uru wrote: post #17

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…

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.

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

#126

Post by akira2501 » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 6:16 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #45

brodouevencode wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fundamental change versus the Prussian model, which provided a basis for much of the educational theory in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

It's funny how so much of social conflict today basically boils down to: industrial systems put in place in the 19th century aren't working anymore.

It's constantly going to be with us. These systems weren't "put into place" they generated "higher profits" when implemented. As such, the people profiting from their existence are willing to use some of those profits in preventing the advantages of technological advancement from reaching the populations they currently enjoy power over.

This is part of the reason why business monopolies are social poison.

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

#127

Post by CryptoBanker » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 6:16 PM UTC

colpabar wrote: post #84

rjbwork wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just not the case. In many states it's nearly completely unregulated, and the home school lobby is working diligently to strip even those regulations.

You didn't answer his question - why are regulations on teaching your own children in your own home so necessary?

Because one day those children are going to grow up, leave the home, and interact with other members of society. At that point it becomes a public interest.

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

#128

Post by vasco » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 6:17 PM UTC

I wasn't homeschooled and it's not legal to do it in my country even, so I have a bias. That being said it seems weird to me that parents in the US seem to consider that they "own" their kids to a much bigger degree than some places in Europe at least. I don't have kids but I think most parents around me growing up had a sense that their kid also belongs "to society" in a way, and going to school and learning about what society "wants you to" is expected, in the same way you also are just simply required to vaccinate and that's it, because you also "belong to society" in some way other than just belonging to your parents.

I wonder how much of the whole debate is mostly about difference of opinions between people on both sides of this specific subject rather than the ones the media focuses on.

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

#129

Post by standardUser » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 6:17 PM UTC

tivert wrote: post #15

> Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught. Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either because they're failing at their job or doing things that are disagreeable to some subset of the population?

And part of the point of schools, at least in the modern era, is that kids have access to authority figures if they are being abused at home. That access often ends with home schooling.

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

#130

Post by seltzered_ » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 6:18 PM UTC

"Many home-schooling families say they have re-created these communal functions through co-ops, or microschools, or Facebook. But such groups often cluster by shared ideology; home education’s rise has coincided with the fracturing of a nation unable to agree on the results of the last presidential election or how to fight a pandemic that has killed more than 1.1 million people."

There was a vice documentary that sorta touched on the political & religious biases with some homeschooling communities & programs: https://youtu.be/9kuNycfklN4 (2022)