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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

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people have completely given up on society and said fuck it, we'll make our own. Fwiw, this type of thinking played a pretty strong role in how America began (and in other social/moral movements). It's not always a bad thing. > This is sad. The real solution is not to homeschool. It is to force ALL kids, regardless of age, location, and income to be forced into the same school system. Want to improve things? gotta…

I don't see it as social welfare, I see it as more "ensure everyone, ESPECIALLY the elite, are bought into the system". Otherwise we get conversations like we do today where "do we defund the education system" is a real convo. If those same people would have no choice but to send their kids to a defunded education system... we'll see change. To add a bit more incentive, I'd say the children of any senator / congressm…

If everyone was forced to attend the same types of shitty public schools then it would just increase the market for private tutoring and supplemental education. The trend tends to be lowering the education standards to match the lower students instead of making standards more rigorous. This is why my kids attend charter schools.

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

#312
post #218

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.

Why shouldn’t the government have a say in what is taught to children? Children are not their parent’s property. These are future citizens and I would prefer that society has a say in what is taught to them. In a democratic system the government represents the will of the society.

You could have a point if the government operating at the local school level was the least bit competent let alone functional. And that’s the government, public schools are shockingly badly run. I have two in middle school and it’s one of the top magnets in DFW yet my wife and I still have to be on top of the school to the point we’ve hired an “advocate” for our kids. Basically, a consultant that makes sure the school keeps the law breaking to a minimum and the accommodations o e of our kids needs are actually made.

If we had the option we would gladly homeschool but we don’t so off to the zoo every day..

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they have much more flexibility, up to individualization, in terms of curriculum content and pacing, teachers from potentially more varied backgrounds/main jobs besides teaching, and the ability to eject unruly and problematic kids that impact other kids’ abilities to focus and learn?

So... They have reinvented private school?

It doesn’t cost $10K a year to attend.

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

#314
post #218

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.

Why shouldn’t the government have a say in what is taught to children? Children are not their parent’s property. These are future citizens and I would prefer that society has a say in what is taught to them. In a democratic system the government represents the will of the society.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I heard a few years back put my life experience as a kid in perspective. At least for me, in the most important way possible, it doesn't sound like regular school at all. The main deep life impacting characteristic of standard public schools is coerced unwelcome company. You're forced by law to be around the same bullies for 5, 10, even 12 years. The natural order with organic friendships (and indeed probab…

That doesn’t sound right. For all of human history bullies who were bigger and stronger made the rules. The weak were ostracized. If anything, what you’re doing in homeschooling is reverting away from the norm and creating a sheltered environment. This is a double edged sword, you can turn your kids into fragile beings incapable of dealing with a harsh world but at the same time they will probably have productive, pr…

Bullying as in age-segregated schooling doesn’t exist in the real world. Adults and older children police any antisocial children, and the community of adults polices itself (because they’re adults and have mental faculties children lack).

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

#316
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.

Throwaway for sensitive topic.

I came here to write your comment and was thrilled to find it already here. As a homeschooled kid who considers myself damaged as a result, I completely agree. The OP comment is eerily similar to stuff my parents said in the 2000s-early 10s and were totally wrong about.

My parents weren't religious at all and were totally in it for academic enrichment. They were all about the "new wave of homeschooling": high-quality instructional material, study groups, plenty of socialization opportunities with other (homeschooled) kids. I turned out fine academically and probably do at least partially owe my career to it, but the social consequences for both me and my peers were severe.

The issue with playdates and study groups and the like is that the odds are good, but the goods are odd. Homeschooled kids playing with each other is an echo chamber of robotic parent-pleasers (for a while, until the break happens) who're incapable of tackling genuine social dynamics because their foremost, unbelievably deeply inculcated desire is parental praise. I feel it even now - peer approval is meaningless; only that pat on the back matters. This results in a weird simulacra of socialization: kids understand that they're supposed to have friends and social contact, but go through the motions of "this is friendship and social contact" without ever touching the real deal. Friends your parents select for you are fundamentally not real friends, and pretending they are fucks up one's ability to form genuine relationships for a long time.

Homeschooling is the ultimate egotistical project of attempting to form a living, human child - with the fractal of possible futures that implies - into a mirror of one's self. The typical liberal recognizes the abhorrence of that in a context of religious indoctrination, but is totally fine with it in a secular context. Fuck that. It's wrong for all the same reasons, and fundamentally negates the child's identity as a unique human. This is why I don't think better instructional material isn't a solution: the core problem is that one fleshed-out outlook on the nature of reality is way too little. Without multiple sources of approval and validation, it's way too easy to monopolize a kid's perspective. Again, this is realized in contexts of religious indoctrination but ignored outside of it - forcefully indoctrinating kids with a single perspective is wrong, full stop. And no, simply presenting alternative perspectives doesn't work; it'll inevitably be couched in the sort of condesencion that parents are unable to shed. Imagine your dad telling you about rock'n'roll culture: you're hardly likely to go from that to the Twisted Sister video.

Parents, of course, love this dynamic. The problem starts when those kids leave the nest and find that their parents' perspective is not the only one that matters.

The other angle is that, ime, parents who are themselves socially stunted, like mine, are unable to recognize this dynamic and insist that nothing is, or even could be, wrong. Like the parent comment, I've kept in touch with many of the kids I knew and this perspective is far from unique.

To the OP: I beg you, please don't do this. You will probably regret it for most of the rest of your life, and if you don't your kids will.

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

#317

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 no matter how similar homeschooling will look to government-controlled schooling, people with power will never stop attacking it because of that crucial nuisance. Just like in Florida, where teachers now face felony charges for having the wrong book in the classroom (not as required reading, just having it in the classroom). Yup, that's people with power attacking home-schooling for sure.

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

#318

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…

Why not spend all those hours and money to improving public schools?

There’s nothing worth saving and more money just makes it even worse. The districts are incompetent, the school administrations are wildly incompetent and the teachers union is just ridiculous. There’s nothing in the public school system worth working on. Homeschool if you can or do your best to budget for private school.

Edit: my wife is a HS teacher of 15 years. Her and many of her teacher friends are leaving the industry. It’s just not fixable.

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem: nobody wants what I'm selling. Solution: do some market research and improve my stuff? Nah, just make all the alternatives illegal. . Also, um, "force people to be activists and help fix things" probably requires actually listening to those people. As opposed to doing things like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_School_Boards_Assoc...

Nono, I do not advocate for a national association for schooling, similar to what we have today. I only advocate to force all people regardless of income, and living area, to have no choice in what school their child is sent to. That could mean distance, that could mean a lot of things. But basically we need to prevent rich kids from going to rich kids schools, and poor kids from going to poor kids schools. EVERYTHIN…

Nope. You’ll just have more private tutoring and other supplemental education.
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