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For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

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Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#161

Post by whynotminot »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #131
andrewstuart wrote: post #111

Home 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…

The biggest problem with the setup you outlined is that the central government has no say in what is being taught to kids. So no matter how similar homeschooling will look to government-controlled schooling, people with power will never stop attacking it because of that crucial nuisance.

The “I don’t want the government perspective imposed on my children” is so funny to me as a homeschooling argument.

Go to schoolboard meetings. Talk to your kids and their teachers. Understand what your kids are learning. If you feel a perspective is missing, fill in the gaps. Your kids will be better off for seeing different perspectives, understanding basic argumentation, and coming to their own conclusions.

Oh this sounds like a lot of work? Well, the alternative, pulling them out of school and designing their entire education sounds like way more work than just being reasonably engaged?

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#163

Post by novok »

qup wrote: post #127
soulofmischief wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a private school.

We like to rebrand things in 2023. Trailers and campers are now tiny homes. Pressure cookers are instant pots. Convection ovens are air fryers. NIH syndrome?

At least instant pot is a brand name effect, like xerox, and not a literal rephrase.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#164

Post by aleph_minus_one »

patmcc wrote: post #143
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 he…

I think there's an argument that not knowing anything about, say, dinosaurs, is probably fine. But "knowing" very wrong things about the age of the earth or evolution being real can lead to people making decisions that are terrible for everyone. Think antibiotic resistant bacteria as a simple example. And there's a real cost to society if there's some fraction of society that don't believe climate change could possib…

> Think antibiotic resistant bacteria as a simple example.

That is why I explicitly wrote "macroevolution" and not "evolution". The emergence antibiotic-resilient bacteria is a phenomenon of microevolution, whose existence is, as far as I am aware, much less controversial in evangelical Christian circles.

To my understanding, the offending topic in these evangelical Christian circles rather seems to be whether macroevolution and the formation of species can be suitably explained via undirected small microevolution over an insanely long time.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#165

Post by cogman10 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #157
cogman10 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just have a problem with parents closing doors for their kids. A lot of early education is about kids finding their interests and passions. It's also about making for a well rounded society. I don't care so much of a kid is like "I hate this dinosaur garbage" or whatever, but I feel awful for the kid that could have been a great paleontologist or biologist only to have that opportunity snuffed. Sort of the same rea…

[flagged]

> Interestingly, many people who argue this way are very hesitant to apply this argument to sparking knowledge about evangelical Christian theology.

I'm absolutely not hesitant for kids to be taught about evangelical christian theology. I don't think kids should be proselytized to by the state.

That is, I'm more than fine if kids study the bible as part of class. I'm less fine if kids are taught "The bible is the word of god and if you don't believe it you are going to hell".

To put it in another context, I'm perfectly fine if there was a class teaching about Hinduism in high school. I'm far less fine (and I'd think most people would be) if that class involved calling Christians heathens and requiring participation in Satsang.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#166

Post by novok »

whynotminot wrote: post #161
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with the setup you outlined is that the central government has no say in what is being taught to kids. So no matter how similar homeschooling will look to government-controlled schooling, people with power will never stop attacking it because of that crucial nuisance.

The “I don’t want the government perspective imposed on my children” is so funny to me as a homeschooling argument. Go to schoolboard meetings. Talk to your kids and their teachers. Understand what your kids are learning. If you feel a perspective is missing, fill in the gaps. Your kids will be better off for seeing different perspectives, understanding basic argumentation, and coming to their own conclusions. Oh thi…

Uh have you even tried that or know anyone who has? If you have issues with the curriculum, its not getting changed. It’s often set at a state or federal level with a lot of committees and politics.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#167

Post by pfannkuchen »

whynotminot wrote: post #161
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with the setup you outlined is that the central government has no say in what is being taught to kids. So no matter how similar homeschooling will look to government-controlled schooling, people with power will never stop attacking it because of that crucial nuisance.

The “I don’t want the government perspective imposed on my children” is so funny to me as a homeschooling argument. Go to schoolboard meetings. Talk to your kids and their teachers. Understand what your kids are learning. If you feel a perspective is missing, fill in the gaps. Your kids will be better off for seeing different perspectives, understanding basic argumentation, and coming to their own conclusions. Oh thi…

Are you suggesting that a single parent can meaningfully influence a public school curriculum? That is a ridiculous notion as far as I’m aware.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#168

Post by MrPatan »

whynotminot wrote: post #161
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with the setup you outlined is that the central government has no say in what is being taught to kids. So no matter how similar homeschooling will look to government-controlled schooling, people with power will never stop attacking it because of that crucial nuisance.

The “I don’t want the government perspective imposed on my children” is so funny to me as a homeschooling argument. Go to schoolboard meetings. Talk to your kids and their teachers. Understand what your kids are learning. If you feel a perspective is missing, fill in the gaps. Your kids will be better off for seeing different perspectives, understanding basic argumentation, and coming to their own conclusions. Oh thi…

What if it's not about missing perspectives, but exposure to infohazards?

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#169

Post by lolinder »

gemstones wrote: post #150
jawns wrote: post #2

We are in our ninth year of homeschooling. My wife and I attended private and public schools and grew up with typical biases against homeschooling, e.g. they lack social skills. When we got married, we always assumed we'd send our kids to traditional schools. What we learned, though, is that homeschooling has changed since we were in school. Back then, it was a niche, and the sort of parents who chose to homeschool u…

As a homeschooled kid: Be warned that I heard “homeschooling has changed since we were in school” in the early 2000s, from multiple parents who are now estranged from their adult children. It hasn’t really changed that much - it’s just something parents like to tell themselves to avoid thinking about the experiences their children are missing.

It sounds like you had a rough experience. I'm sorry about that. That said, for a lot of families homeschooling had changed by the late 90s and early 2000s. I was homeschooled around that time with my siblings, as were my wife and her family. We all still have great relationships with our parents, and our homeschool experiences were very far from the stereotypes.

We participated in many different co-ops. We took every AP class offered at the local high school. We're all functional adults with normal social lives.

It's obviously hard to come to any conclusions from warring anecdotes alone, but I thought it's worth sharing mine.

Strained relationships with adult children suck, but they're not a given when homeschooling, nor does sending your kids to public school necessarily save your relationship with your kids.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#170

Post by jquery »

mikhmha wrote: post #17

Why are people in the US so against public schools? I am someone who did not really enjoy “school” and found it anxiety inducing but I still see the benefits of it. In public school you are forced to mingle with the people of your generation. The ones who will inevitably go on to run the country in whatever big or small way. The objective of public school is to break down the regional identities of old and assimilate…

It all comes back to race in America, ever since schools were desegregated. And because in America school funding is local, rich zip codes have good schools and poor zip codes have bad schools (to a reasonable approximation). Instead of fixing this fundamental problem, bad schools are held up as "failures" and used to push bad policy.

Public schools require a lot of tax money and community involvement, and truly good public schools (say, Finland tier) require much more than billionaires are willing to pay. So we pretend public schools are fundamentally broken and push "school choice" which just drains resources from public schools even further in a negative feedback loop. We fracture the communities so that the wealthy experience one version of America and the poor experience an entirely different one. Rinse and repeat until the situation gets so bad like it has in Florida, and all the decent public school teachers are quitting en masse.

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