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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

#321

Post by cratermoon »

chasd00 wrote: post #318
cratermoon wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Sounds like something with an axe to grind would say.

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

#322

Post by user3939382 »

opportune wrote: post #237
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.

Can’t both statements be true? If I had to guess, most of the original homeschoolers did it because they had strong, fringe religious beliefs. Then in your generations more secular parents started homeschooling but it was still a pretty highly self-selective group (a stay at home parent who didn’t mind staying at home most of the day teaching their kids, a belief they could do better at educating their kids even with…

[flagged]

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

#323

Post by sintaxi »

hedora wrote: post #302
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #255

What did you all think was happening? Parents chose to hold their children back in subject areas they were weak in? Of course we delegate teaching certain topics to professionals. The thing about those professionals, they know their continued employment is based on the merit of their work. You can fire your children's teacher(s) and hire better ones.

The article spends a long time on the fact that the “teachers” are not professionals and do not claim to be. Most of the controversy would probably go away if there were accreditation boards for these courses, but there are not. Also, much of the coursework is being offered by unregulated, gray market, for-profit platforms, and if you read HN at all, you already know this will end in enshitification.

What makes you think the free market doesn't regulate?

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

#324

Post by hackinthebochs »

vasco wrote: post #257
silverpepsi wrote: post #244

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…

Learning how to deal with adversity and dumb people was school's greatest gift. The world is full of both.

Reality is mostly segregated. It's only in artificial environments where you have no recourse to avoid horrible people (or people that are horrible to you).

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

#325

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

You should know and have a framework of understanding what is real, what is faith and what we don’t know.

That’s why education aspires to be more well rounded in most places.

All of this paternalism and hostility towards civil authority isn’t an expression of faith or aspirations towards the divine; it’s a means to exert control on earth to men.

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

#326

Post by supazek »

Justsignedup wrote: post #70

This is giving me the worst of vibes: - options for people who don't want to expose their children to out-of-family ideas, to perpetuate family biases - a completely unregulated market for children to go to a "school" with a few other kids, giving them small classrooms, BUT, no teacher with specialization or educational background. Would be extremely hit or miss, with little resource if it isn't working out. - only f…

Why should anyone else’s kids be any of my concern? The metropolitan areas (who have no answers for their own kids and therefore have not increased any socioeconomic situations) are now pushing into my district students who simply don’t care about education and have immediately pushed all perceived “weird” (not lower class urban culture) kids down the hierarchy via bullying. My district won’t even acknowledge this is explicitly a planned phenomena (the districts all come to an agreement) and so certainly won’t do anything to remedy the situation. They run their “everyone is the same and happy and everything is awesome” programs and people get pats on the back but come Monday the teacher is too busy trying to get these kids to not be disruptive to even get to the introductory curriculum much less an excellent lecture.

If every single actor in the bureaucracy is actively working against my interests and the interests of my immediate neighbors (who largely share my opinions) then why should I participate? They’re going to tax me anyway, how is that not enough for you? It’s my kid and I’ll do as I damn well please since I have the motivation to ensure their success and the school definitely doesn’t. People that want sweeping “force everyone to do this, see here’s a news article about Finland” are psychologically malformed in my opinion.

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

#327

Post by Hayvok »

cogman10 wrote: post #303
Hayvok wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We homeschool our four children, are religious, most of our friends homeschool, and this is nonsense. We love the schedule flexibility of homeschooling, the ability to let our kids explore their own interests more, and most of all - we just love being with our kids and they get to have their siblings and parents all day. > That's because teaching kids is super hard and real easy to mess up. Forgive me, but this is ju…

My concern is primarily around standards of education. If you gave your kids wonderful educations with excellent curriculum, more power to you. The issue I have is that's not universal. It's that I've seen far too many examples of children that are illiterate. Examples of lazy parents doing things like taking a walk in the park and saying "see, we did biology today!". Examples of parents that "oops, forgot to do scho…

I’m sure all the examples you listed have happened, and that sucks for those kids. Shame on those parents.

> But what about for the parents and kids where it is hard?

If it’s too hard, then public school is right there for you take advantage of. I went to public school and it was just fine.

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

#328

Post by CuriouslyC »

ethbr1 wrote: post #307
CuriouslyC wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your public school experience was mostly decent, but for a lot of people it's hell and it actively breeds misanthropy. You can learn to deal with stupid and difficult people without being exposed to soul poisoning doses of both.

Can you? Because I don't think recent child development trends bear out children learning things in spite of being exposed to less of it. If it sucked, and the requirement for it to happen is removed, it simply doesn't happen. And the lessons that it taught remain unlearned.

Research shows that people learn well when there is the right amount of stress, and the right challenge. If the stress and challenge exceeds that amount it can quickly become destructive, which is what we see in your typical public school for any child who isn't primarily concerned with "fitting in."

At best, public school is useful. At worst, it's a massive waste of time and absolutely destructive to a young psyche. You can expose your children to that massive asymmetry, but it's not necessary, people who cared got along just fine before public education, it's really there to uplift the lowest common denominator.

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

#329

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

WicWacWok wrote: post #273
david-gpu wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exposing kids to this reality doesn't seem bad to me. I hope your children don't get "exposed to this reality" in school, as you put it. The sorts of harrassment that school bullies inflict on their victims is, to put it simply, not tolerated anywhere else. Why should it be tolerated when it happens in school, where the victims have no choice but to attend every day?

> The sorts of harrassment that school bullies inflict on their victims is, to put it simply, not tolerated anywhere else. Workplace bullying is fairly common too, it just follows the corporate hierarchy.

If my co-worker gave me a wedgie or beat me up during our lunch break I would have them arrested.

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

#330

Post by jquery »

brightlancer wrote: post #251
jquery wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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. "averages out" - No, it may not. I had the same teacher for 4th and 6th grade in elementary school. I thought she was great. A friend of mine _changed schools_ so she wouldn't have the teacher again, because the teacher…

Teachers that harass students have no business being teachers at all. To the extent this is systemic, if a kid is stuck with an abusive parent who decides to homeschool, they get to deal with that their entire childhood. You can fire bad teachers but not bad parents.
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