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Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

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Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so worried for those parents raising children outside of school without degrees in childhood development! Think of all the unqualified parenting time happening without skilled teachers to supervise!

Teachers are mostly very uneducated and ineffective at teaching itself and the subjects they teach. I don’t think spending time to get an education degree or certification means much. Parents care for their children more than any random teacher, especially ones that resist performance measurements to judge their effectiveness. I would expect the average parent to be FAR more effective just based on that care.

But good teachers can make a huge difference, it's a shame identifying them is a black art and so few people get that access.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#342

Comment I was replying to was deleted so I will repost as a top level comment without additional context: ---- I agree this is probably the biggest tradeoff, but attention all parents, there's a cunning and affordable solution to the challenge of spoiling versus opportunity. It's guaranteed to work, anecdotally, at least sometimes: Live in a big house and send your kids to a nice school, but roster them on truly hood…

Ain't no one gonna take this advice seriously on here. hn is the most NIMBY place on the internet especially when it comes to their own kids. MMW pearl clutching is imminent.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#343

Homeschooling often gets confused with self-directed education, aka “unschooling”. These are not the same. The former tends to replicate school and requires a teacher, usually a parent. It’s basically school with added/paced/altered/enriched curriculum at the cost of socialization, although that can be compensated with other forms of peer groups, especially in urban area. Comparing this method versus school A or scho…

> abundance of science to support it

A few citations would be helpful.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#344

Homeschooling often gets confused with self-directed education, aka “unschooling”. These are not the same. The former tends to replicate school and requires a teacher, usually a parent. It’s basically school with added/paced/altered/enriched curriculum at the cost of socialization, although that can be compensated with other forms of peer groups, especially in urban area. Comparing this method versus school A or scho…

Can you cite some of these claims, to guide someone like myself who has never heard of any of these things?

https://www.self-directed.org/resources/research

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#345
It's true that there has always been a sizeable chunk of religion motivated home schoolers, historically there was a long tail with motivations and efficacy that was all over the map.

One thing that's really common is for parents to try it when they feel that the local system is failing their kids in some way and the family economics supporting are acceptable.

There are also many permutations - it wasn't uncommon when I was younger for parents to do it through middle school, but have their kids attend high school because they felt that it was the point where socialization became important in a way that couldn't be handled effectively with home school.

Obviously there's a huge range of efficacy, too.

That said, I think you have to ask why are charter schools and vouchers (not just home school) becoming even more fashionable despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large? And a lot of it is because society has gotten more and more zero sum and it's going to increasingly self cannibalize.

Which is not that far off from the writer's premise.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#347

> 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…

Not to forget that "Average" people are, in many ways, the foundation of any functioning society.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#348

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.

So homeschooling is not just an ideological choice anymore

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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's a big difference between someone with an IEP (usually massive trauma and mental illness also) doing things and a "regular" student doing them. Expelling a kid usually just means they move to a different school, and all expulsion is doing is moving the burden down the chain, usually from more affluent places where parents are equipped to complain, to less affluent ones. Particularly if the room destroying-violence kiddo's family don't have lawyers.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#350
post #332

People are getting disillusioned by education; partly because of politics, but also because there's a good reason not to trust the experts. Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see. If a doctor or nurse or scientist says something is "evidence based", it works (m…

[flagged]

Please try to be civil. I mentioned phonics, do you agree with what I said on it or not?
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