Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 597 posts

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

#191

Post by alexb_ »

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…

You aren't playing the devil's advocate, you literally are the metaphorical devil. You are the person he is talking to.

The chief difference between evolution and intelligent design is that one actually happened.

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

#192

Post by jquery »

whimsicalism wrote: post #174
jquery wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think the story is quite that simple, for one: at least in my schooling experience, while it is true that property taxes help fund schools, most of the poor, bad-performing schools were allocated more $/student than the other schools once you account for federal funding. There's also pretty inconclusive evidence that school funding actually is tied to performance all that strongly at all. Interventions tied t…

> most of the poor, bad-performing schools were allocated more $/student than the other schools once you account for federal funding.

Show me a poor school district with a public school that looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm4dy25VmCw

>Interventions tied to giving schools more funding

The funding needs to be unconditional. What good teacher is gonna move across a state line and go work for a poor school that has a year of conditional funding tied to test scores? It's also absurd on its face to think money has no effect on the quality of instruction, the market works pretty well for everything else, but teachers don't respond to incentives? They, do, and research shows it: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-... However, we don't do nearly enough to correct for the affects of poverty. Someone growing up in poverty needs a lot more education help than someone growing up in a middle class or upper class family (on average). Also, it's way, way more stressful to teach kids who are growing up in poverty than otherwise, but the salaries do not account for this. So the teachers who work at the poor schools are often working at their last choice school, even if the school nominally has the same level of funding. They're the teachers who couldn't get hired elsewhere, or were hired simply because the last teacher quit out of frustration (I don't want to begrudge teachers at poor schools, there's a lot who are very good at their jobs and who love their students, but this isn't enough to overcome systemic differences).

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

#193

Post by deprecative »

lolinder wrote: post #189
gemstones wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Big no true homeschooler energy going on in your comments.

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

#194

Post by megablast »

glitchc wrote: post #113
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…

>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…

Nothing gets passed your professor.

If we do have online learning, maybe the need for schools goes away?

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

#195

Post by jquery »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #184
jquery wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not like the kids get one teacher their whole life, every kid going through the public school system will have dozens of teachers and the affect of any single good or bad teacher averages out.

Could public schools be better? Yes, absolutely. We do not fund them enough, the fact that so many of my friends send their kids to private schools despite the enormous cost is testament to that. I have leaned on private schools myself for pre-K, transitional K, and earlier because its support is quite spotty across the USA.

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

#196

Post by danans »

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…

> How can parents be knowledgeable in all the subjects that school teachers teach?

Some surely can, especially autodidactic parents, but most can't. The vast majority of parents aren't going to be able to teach their kids geometry, algebra, or analytical thinking and writing skills. Institutional schooling is the only way most people can access that knowledge.

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

#197

Post by LudwigNagasena »

kiba wrote: post #187
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.

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.

If parental ideology is whacky, one family suffers. If state ideology is whacky, million families suffer. Including those who didn’t consent.

What if someone can’t keep themselves healthy? Is it a good reason to regulate food consumption? What if someone is an alcoholic? Let’s introduce dry law?

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

#198

Post by kiba »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #164
patmcc wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 macro…

The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution sounds like nonsense. There's too much evidence for me to believe that evolution doesn't happen, at any scale. Evolution is clearly observable and foundational to biology.

Whereas Christian creation stories always felt like mythology, sounds human centric and made up. I read stuff like the Epic of Gilgamesh and realized that some stories in the bibles are based on older iterations written by ancient people.

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

#199

Post by lolinder »

deprecative wrote: post #193
lolinder wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Big no true homeschooler energy going on in your comments.

I don't mean it that way at all.

OP took their anecdote and generalized it very broadly [0]. I shared my own anecdotes, explicitly acknowledging that it's "hard to come to any conclusions from warring anecdotes alone". OP responded saying that their anecdote is actually a collection of 13 anecdotes. I countered that 13 tightly related and completely non-random anecdotes do not turn into a usable stat.

Nowhere did I mean to imply OP's experience isn't a true homeschooling experience, just that it's not necessarily as representative as they believe it is and that more information is needed before generalizing either of our experiences is fair.

[0] "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"

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

#200

Post by kevingadd »

MrPatan wrote: post #168
whynotminot wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As someone who was homeschooled, I'm having a hard time coming up with an "infohazard" I avoided exposure to other than things like "the theory of evolution" or "the concept of sex" or "it turns out 'the slaves were treated quite well' isn't exactly true"
Post reply on HN