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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

#181

Post by woodruffw »

jkestner wrote: post #54

The reason we moved our kids from Montessori to public school is to throw our lot in with the majority of society. It’s made me active in the PTA and school library because up close it’s hard to ignore the challenges staff deal with, and with skin in the game, I don’t have the time to wait for someone else to do it. Hopefully the work we put into the shared system raises the tide for all families, so my children grow…

Thank you for sharing. Having gone through public schools for (parental) reasons not dissimilar to your own, I agree entirely about "skin in the game": a society that encourages its most privileged to turn away from public resources is not a healthy one, and not one where anybody's interests (including the privileged) are ultimately well served.

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

#182

Post by [deleted] »

jkestner wrote: post #54

The reason we moved our kids from Montessori to public school is to throw our lot in with the majority of society. It’s made me active in the PTA and school library because up close it’s hard to ignore the challenges staff deal with, and with skin in the game, I don’t have the time to wait for someone else to do it. Hopefully the work we put into the shared system raises the tide for all families, so my children grow…

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

satvikpendem wrote: post #22

I don't really "get" homeschooling. How can parents be knowledgeable in all the subjects that school teachers teach? There are also cases of parents homeschooling for the purpose of religiously or otherwise ideologically indoctrinating their children, something that does not often happen in public schools, both due to the curricula as well as heterogeneity of thought via socializing and sharing information with many…

> parents homeschooling for the purpose of religiously or otherwise ideologically indoctrinating their children

No, I think you do get it.

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

#184

Post by aleph_minus_one »

jquery wrote: post #154
rayiner wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

This is a very shallow understanding of "large city public schools" (is that a euphemism for something?). What you are taught is going to vary greatly depending on the teacher.

> What you are taught is going to vary greatly depending on the teacher.

And that's why you home-school: you don't want the education that your children receive depend on the school's choice of the teacher for your child.

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

#185

Post by gemstones »

lolinder wrote: post #169
gemstones wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ever…

12/13 of the circle of homeschooling families that made up our socialization group in the 90s/00s have gone no contact with their parents now. Congrats on your success, it’s not the norm.

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

#186

Post by cogman10 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #171
cogman10 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wor…

> 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 p…

> To play the devil's advocate: what you described in the last paragraph is exactly how I imagine that classes about evolutionary biology or earth history feel to evangelical Christians. :-)

Teaching a kid about evolutionary biology does not force them to believe it. Just the same as teaching a kid about Hinduism doesn't turn them into a Hindu. Or more extreme, just like teaching kids about harry potter doesn't turn them into wizards.

The more extreme evangelical christian (which to be clear, isn't broadly held) position is that "if my kids learn about this, they might reject the faith therefore they shouldn't learn about it." But that's a silly position. Just like it's silly to say "If kids learn about electricity they might reject Zeus".

Withholding information because it might damage faith is toxic.

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

#187

Post by kiba »

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.

So, the war is between state imposed ideology versus parental ideology, whatever the ideology might be?

What if parental ideology are whacky? What then? Yes, state ideology can be whacky as well, but at least it is in the public and in the open where that can be challenged on a field, instead of uncontested at home.

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

#188

Post by gamblor956 »

rayiner wrote: post #124
woodruffw wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.

That is a very bizarre fantasy that sounds like something a Fox News talking head that has never been within 2000 feet of a public school would say.

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

#189

Post by lolinder »

gemstones wrote: post #185
lolinder wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ever…

12/13 of the circle of homeschooling families that made up our socialization group in the 90s/00s have gone no contact with their parents now. Congrats on your success, it’s not the norm.

Not the norm within your social group, which was presumably mutually selected by your respective parents. That suggests that these families are not 13 independent data points, but rather a group of 13 families that all had similar predispositions and evolved along similar lines. I'd like to see the stats overall before coming to a conclusion about what the norm is.

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

#190

Post by abnry »

sdsd wrote: post #81
AlwaysRock wrote: post #64

Earlier 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…

If it makes you feel better, I was public schooled, and a lot of the kids seemed to have really awful social skills. This kind of numb mindlessness. Not everyone, but it was too widespread. Something about sitting still doing nothing for 7 hours, surrounded by people but forbidden from interacting with them. I'm sure there were many benefits but public schools don't seem to be doing great at socializing kids.

I have a bunch of siblings, all of us homeschooled. Between all of us, some are more "socialized" than others. You can't leave out the individual in this discussion.
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