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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

#351

Post by Zetice »

whynotminot wrote: post #161
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.

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…

Try looking at this through the lens of a Native American parent circa 1880, and you may understand a bit better how these people feel.

They’re wrong, but we can have sympathy for them, at least.

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

#352

Post by synecdoche »

tiffanyg wrote: post #263
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can hire a private tutor, or teach them maths yourself. Only some kids truly have an aptitude for mathematics anyway.

Only some kids truly have an aptitude for mathematics anyway. That's an absurdly strong and inaccurate statement that feeds into psychological walls that then get erected in the minds of the young and perpetuate ad infinitum. The psychological research here is very clear: stressing work, over some sort of ethereal innate 'talent', in ANY area makes a massive difference in skill attainment. I don't have time this mome…

Dyscalculia is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia

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

#353

Post by allturtles »

whimsicalism wrote: post #261
jquery wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sch…

> Show me a poor school district with a public school that looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm4dy25VmCw Carmel HS in Indiana is funded at $9.6k/pupil [0]. My urban school district (DC Public Schools) spent ~$22k/pupil [1]. > 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…

Carmel also has well over 5K students. It's probably one of the largest high schools in the U.S. Scale like that allows you to fund more niche amenities.

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

#354

Post by klooney »

bandyaboot wrote: post #250
credit_guy wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that in regular school, if you want your kids to learn math, depending of the state you're in, you may be just out of luck.

Is this literally about states that have poor math achievement, or is it along the lines of some states aren’t teaching math because ? It’s become difficult to tell when a good faith discussion on public education is happening.

California is considering copying San Francisco's ban on teaching Algebra to 8th graders. So maybe more imagined than real, but real for a small number of people.

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

#355

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

JackMorgan wrote: post #340
suzzer99 wrote: post #310

“Eventually, something horrific is going to happen in one of these situations,” said Jen Garrison Stuber, advocacy chair the Washington Homeschool Organization. “A kid’s going to get killed, a kid’s going to get seriously injured or molested, because the safeguards that you have at a private school aren’t happening.” Uhh, not that I'm a big homeschool advocate, but kids get molested and (now) killed all the time at p…

A very good point. Public and private schools for all of recorded history have countless examples of child abuse. Kids die with alarming frequency in public schools. In 2022 there was an average of one shooting a week in US public schools. Even if you decide that the risks are not that high of a kid actually dying, there's a very real chilling effect. There's now paranoia, stress, and an atmosphere of fear. These are…

> In 2022 there was an average of one shooting a week in US public schools.

Not to downplay the tragedy of what we think of in terms of a school shooting…

But the claim you are making is NOT what we think of, a Covington or Coloumbine or Uvalde. That stat is a gun control talking point intentionally designed to mislead.

That list counts any shooting within a few blocks of a school, and at any time of day. There is one on that list that someone shot a cat at 3am. shooting + near school = school shooting

My city had a 16yo meet another student in the school parking lot late at night, over drugs of course, one was shot at and it’s now a school shooting on whatever sub-organization Michael Bloomberg is pushing at the moment (there are at least five I know of).

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

#356

Post by jbigelow76 »

labster wrote: post #348
paraknight wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. Why can't bullying exist in the group homeschool at church? It's functionally equivalent to a school. Are you making a brand new point about traditional homeschooling (parent-child) or replying to the OP in the thread?

As a child in a public school, you have no right to freedom of association, and no right to freedom from association. Your school chooses your classes, and the state will use violence to ensure you attend those classes, bully or not. In home school, there is less people and more choice. There are no perverse incentives that value attendance over education and health.

In home school, there is less people and more choice.

Choice for whom, the student or the teacher? The teachers are the ones with the agendas, in all senses of the word.

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

#357

Post by smt88 »

labster wrote: post #348
paraknight wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. Why can't bullying exist in the group homeschool at church? It's functionally equivalent to a school. Are you making a brand new point about traditional homeschooling (parent-child) or replying to the OP in the thread?

As a child in a public school, you have no right to freedom of association, and no right to freedom from association. Your school chooses your classes, and the state will use violence to ensure you attend those classes, bully or not. In home school, there is less people and more choice. There are no perverse incentives that value attendance over education and health.

A) You absolutely have freedom of association in public school. There is statutory and empirical intolerance for bullying, to the point that libertarians have been complaining that there isn't enough due process for the alleged bullies.

Parents can also easily move kids to other classes to avoid unwelcome company.

B) There is, in practice, no meaningful freedom of association in the real world. Childhood is an appropriate time to learn skills to mitigate the downsides of that fact, including forcing bullies to suffer consequences.

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

#358

Post by opportune »

allturtles wrote: post #264
opportune wrote: post #252

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?

Yes but not only does it cost much less (financially, debatable with time) but it’s individualized. Not many private schools offer truly individualized education

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

#359

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

sintaxi wrote: post #323
hedora wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In this case I would say that the latency of finding out a method or microschool isn’t teaching in an effective way might be longer than I would like to see as a parent.

So that’s a small problem as this is all rapidly developing.

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

#360

Post by logical_ferry »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #125
cogman10 wrote: post #76

[flagged]

> 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 am just wishing for a day when someone will say to me "Earth is 6000 years old" with a straight face. I'll cherish that day forever in my mind.
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