"Fringe" and "fastest-growing" are in no way contradictory, quite the reverse.
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
#142This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent. It is pretty misleading for this article to talk about homeschooling being a “fundamental change” without mentioning that homeschooling was the default practice for most of human history. If anything, this is just a return to a long-established practice, not a fringe movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
Surely, this can't be true. For most of human history, children may have learned to do whatever their parents did behaviorally or vocationally, whether that be to become a forager, farmer, peasant, nobility, whatever, but almost nobody ever received any kind of general-purpose, primarily academic education, and whatever they learned, they learned by following their parents around and doing it, not by structured, formal curricula.
I'm sure homeschooling can work out fine, but that is hardly assured by simply being inline with historical tradition. If you go to war with broadswords and spears, you're going to lose. If you insist on living without indoor plumbing or refrigerated food storage, you're likely going to have your kids taken away, and rightfully so, in spite of the fact humans lived that way by default longer than not.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#143Earlier 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.
> 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…
This is my thing, like what right does a public school have to regulate when I can and won't send my kids to school? If I decide to take a trip abroad for a month, that's on me... why do i have to worry about truancy court and CPS breathing down my neck?
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#144When 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…
There are many home-schooling success stories, and also many home-schooling horror stories. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...
Sounds like regular schools or private boarding schools.
Schools are a tool to teach people at scale. Tools can be used well or poorly and for various end goals.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#145There's always this pretense that other people should have some say whatsoever in how another person chooses to educate their child. As if what people decided 100+ years ago should exist in perpetuity.
What does a public high school diploma afford one these days? The opportunity to work manual labor or retail jobs for starvation wages, and the opportunity to attend more school that costs money for jobs that pay marginally more for most people.
It's wasted time and resources for the vast majority of people. Could you imagine trying to train children to become elite athletes? As if everyone is going to play on a collegiate sports team, so we just spend 8+ hours per day doing athletic training? Even though most will never achieve success in collegiate or professional sports? Well, at least kids wouldn't be obese in that scenario, which is likely going to pay more dividends than teaching an average-iq person calculus.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#146I have a set of cousins that were all home schooled. Most of them went to ivy league schools, a couple own very successful businesses. I went to public school and haven't done too poorly. The most important thing is that your parents give a shit and can prioritize their children's well being.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#147"Fringe" and "fastest-growing" are in no way contradictory, quite the reverse.
Great point.
We need a "so-and-so's law" type name for this, even though it's obvious when you think about it.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, there are a number of people out there who only want to teach their kids what's in the Bible. We should all be so lucky as to be a bunch of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidts. Obviously I'm presenting an extreme example, but society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated. I'm not saying there are no problems with regulations, but I hate how the "deregulate everything!" crowd con…
People are making a choice for their kids, whether they want the after effects of religious or public school 'brainwashing'. For many, its a clear cut choice, one way or the other.
It's weird to strip the kids of any agency or consideration, but you've phrased it well. People are making a choice for their kids -- parents don't own their kids, they have something akin to justified paternalism over them. Society should care whether parents are providing a base level of education and opportunity to these kids. It's pretty apparent from the discussion here who grew up around e.g. fundamentalist Mormons or Baptists where homeschool kids were often abused as a matter of 'doctrine' and those whose experience with homeschool kids is more like the Bay Area version of precocious children learning in nature.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#149I 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 w…
So grown ups in a country where children aren't allowed to be home schooled generally believe that their children "belong to society"?
At what point do we call it culture and "difference of opinion" as opposed to just plain old indoctrination or brainwashing?
It's not a left vs right issue, this is freedom vs tyranny. Right now the left isn't able see it as Tyranny or indoctrination because their predominant opinions and values are being taught to children, so it's convenient. It's another form of "civilizing those barbarian ".
At the end of the day, I don't belong to society, and neither do my children. They belong to themselves and can choose for themselves how they see fit. Until then, I'll instill my values to them, and make sure they treat their fellow beings better than the way "society" treats them.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#150People talk about homeschooling as if it's one single concept, but it's actually a whole bunch of very dissimilar things.
There are people who homeschool because they don't agree with the government's viewpoints, people who homeschool because the public school system has failed their kids, people who homeschool because it just happens to fit their lifestyle. Those are all very different motivations.
Likewise, there are people who "unschool," people who use very formal curricula, people who make use of co-ops and traditional classroom settings, people who use a lot of remote learning, people who value social interactions and have their kids involved in lots of activities with other kids, and people who are more focused on academic achievement. These are all very different methods of education.
Beyond that, there are parents who are well equipped to homeschool and parents who are not. And there is a small but hard-to-ignore percentage who claim to homeschool but really neglect their kids.
Treating all these scenarios as a single thing that you can hold a single, consistent opinion about suggests to me a lack of familiarity with its wide spectrums along multiple dimensions. It's like passing a judgment on a person based on their race, country of origin, gender, etc.
Disclaimer: Our family homeschools. Both my wife (previously a public- and private-school teacher) and I were biased against it prior to having kids, but we came to find that a lot of our biases and concerns were unfounded.