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Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

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Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#301

Post by jandrewrogers »

autoexec wrote: post #266
chii wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Average" people are the norm society has always been this way, from the hunter gatherer days, to middle ages - that's why people want to become part of the elite. It's only recently that the average people have had the chance to become elites, rather than be born into it. But the desire to be elites, molded by evolutionary/darwinian pressure, is not gone, nor different, than in the past. Another word for it is "th…

> It's only recently that the average people have had the chance to become elites, rather than be born into it. It still mostly depends on being born into it. In the US your odds of going from impoverished to wealthy are extremely slim and socioeconomic mobility is among the worst compared to other developed countries. The US falls behind South Korea, Lithuania, Estonia, Singapore, Malta, and Slovenia, while the Nord…

In the US your odds of going from impoverished to wealthy are extraordinarily good. I personally know dozens of examples, even excluding tech entirely. Social mobility is a term of art in economics and only weakly correlated with the ease of becoming wealthy. It doesn’t mean economic mobility.

Social mobility is a measure of relative rank change. In countries with compressed wage ranges, such as those you mention, “social mobility” is an artifact of the mathematics, it doesn’t mean you are meaningfully wealthier than the average person. You can double your household income in the US to above average and still not be “socially mobile”. Social mobility is not a meaningful measure for continent-sized economically diverse countries.

A person can go from the trailer park to being upper middle class in a place like Mississippi and it doesn’t count as socially mobile because you are being ranked against the household income of someone in Seattle, 3,000 km away. As far as the person in Mississippi is concerned, they are living the dream.

The opportunity to improve your standard of living in e.g. Europe pales in comparison to the opportunity to do so in the US. It won’t be classified as “socially mobile” in the US as an artifact of how the math works, but no one in the US cares.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#302

Post by wisty »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #258
lotsofpulp wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The well known adage of “buy the cheapest house you can afford in the most expensive neighborhood” is a sign that is what many think. The rat race to make sure your kids are in league with other parents of similar or higher stature is a huge contributor to home price dynamics.

Lol what? I've never heard that adage and it seems like really bad advice. Your neighbors aren't going to cut you a check at any point so what even is this.

If you buy a cheap house in a good neighbourhood, you spend as little as possible on the building, and are mostly buying land. You are presumably buying a house because you think the land will increase in value.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#303

Post by [deleted] »

UltraSane wrote: post #201
nosefurhairdo wrote: post #23

I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. The reading/math skills are so dismal, any student who learns at home is bored as hell. Private schools are outrageously expensive. Homeschooling is becoming the pragmatic choice.

Homeschooling parents are divided into two separate groups. One is secular with college degrees who really want to give their children a better education than they could get in a school AND are able to do so. The other group are very religious who don't want their children learning about evolution or many other secular things. The only real issue I have with homeschooling in the US is that regulations vary wildly by…

[deleted]

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#304

Post by UltraSane »

aliasxneo wrote: post #294
UltraSane wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homeschooling parents are divided into two separate groups. One is secular with college degrees who really want to give their children a better education than they could get in a school AND are able to do so. The other group are very religious who don't want their children learning about evolution or many other secular things. The only real issue I have with homeschooling in the US is that regulations vary wildly by…

The way this is written seems to imply that religious people don't have similar (or the same) reasons as secular people.

I suppose from their perspective they do but from my perspective they are just going to raise scientifically ignorant people. I was raised young earth creationist Lutheran and understand this world quite well.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#305

Post by ConspiracyFact »

smogcutter wrote: post #273
UltraSane wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Expulsion works." There really seems to be two kinds of public schools. One is willing to expel students who are violent and disruptive and this allows the students who are willing and able to learn to do so. The other refuses to expel violent and disruptive students and they make it nearly impossible for the willing and motivated students to actually learn.

There are some rotten incentives at work here, as well as constraints that aren’t obvious from a parent or student’s point of view. For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them. In practice, this means that expelling a student (short of some extreme situations) is a lengthy process of ass-covering. Even when administrator…

>Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education.

They may have a right to an education, but they need to be at an alternative school with teachers equipped to handle their behavior and classmates who are in similar situations. If they’re going to ruin their classes for their classmates, those classmates shouldn’t be innocent, well-behaved students.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#306

Post by s1artibartfast »

windexh8er wrote: post #192
nosefurhairdo wrote: post #23

I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. The reading/math skills are so dismal, any student who learns at home is bored as hell. Private schools are outrageously expensive. Homeschooling is becoming the pragmatic choice.

I'm curious where you live. My spouse and I selected the area we live in based on the school district when our kids were around pre-K age. We live in a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation. Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works. I've never heard a story like…

I have friends who were teachers in San Francisco unified School district who quit because students were literally attacking and breaking the bones of teachers and not being expelled.

It was a really hard choice for them because they were a bleeding heart liberal and wanted to use their PHD to help the underprivileged

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#307

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #285
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Seattle schools have double the budget compared to the years ago, and spend more than 25K per student each year. The schools are worse than ever, which has convinced me that funding isn’t the problem. This might be a local issue though, with a very ideological school district that has ignored the basics of education.

OK, but the issue I was bringing up has nothing to do with funding for schools.

I was responding to the part about housing being expensive near good schools, and the idea of good schools in general. Expensive housing and associated taxes often affect local school budgets, and those budgets are often stated as the reason the school is good. But my experience has been that the budgets don’t change school quality, it must be other factors. Sorry it may have been somewhat unrelated.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#308

Post by dijksterhuis »

matrix87 wrote: post #210
woodruffw wrote: post #164

> These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people. It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way. "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people wi…

> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average." If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? Seems like there's only something to lose from adjusting to their shittiness. Like Harrison Bergeron And seeing the state of California tr…

> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?

learning how to be patient and tolerant regarding situations / people / things i do not like or think of as “beneath me”.

tends to lead to better decision making as one can respond, rather than knee jerk react to everything.

edit — also, i tend to find i can learn a lot more useful lessons from beginners.

in the beginners mind there are a lot of possibilities. in the expert’s mind (especially self proclaimed ones) there are few possibilities.

children are a great example of this.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#309

Post by ConspiracyFact »

williamtrask wrote: post #259
poulsbohemian wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that…

Forgive me, but with machine translation becoming nearly a solved problem — why would kids spend years of their lives learning new languages anymore? By the time they grow up, won't that be a rather useless skill — except perhaps in very nuanced contract negotiations?

Well, within 30 years or so AI will be better than humans at everything, so…

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#310

Post by andyferris »

vel0city wrote: post #117
zdragnar wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it merely made parents aware of what was already happening. My nephew texted my brother during his lunch break to ask for more credits for his switch account. My brother asked why play games instead of talking or hanging out with others. My nephew sent back a video of the lunch room: every single student had their eyes glued to a digital device of some sort. The experience kids have in schools isn't what we a…

Hearing accounts like this where apparently kids bring game consoles to school as a regular thing further makes me support schools having technology lockers.

Does the US really not do that yet? That's crazy. My children have school laptops for work and need to lock their phones up upon arrival until departure. You couldn't bring in a Switch, period. Sometimes they look at YouTube videos or play web games etc at lunch time on the laptop, but AFAICT they've been discouraging that more and more.
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