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Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

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Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#361

Post by drw3 »

xyzelement wrote: post #329
jandrese wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge spectrum, but back when we homeschooled (my wife wasn't yet comfortable sending the kids back to the classroom in 2021) we did a few events where local homeschool kids got together for various activities. Tree identification/nature trail at the park, visits to historic sites, stuff like that. Of the parents I met there was some variety, but 9 times out of 10 it seemed like they were mostly doing it be…

// other aspects of homeschooling were just a fig leaf over a whole lot of religious indoctrination I was raised totally secular but I now understand that religion is about fundamentally aligning yourself to the highest aspirations ("what kind of man does G-d want me to be?") and even w/o actual faith, I am starting to think that's preferable to the current mode of "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like an…

[deleted]

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#363

Post by hagy »

haizhung wrote: post #328
marcusverus wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that the public education sector has been - for years - continuously squeezed dry of any funding. Public school spending in the US is up almost 50% in the last 30 years.[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditures-per-...

Thanks for the data! It seems that adjusted for inflation, it still is an overall net decrease (11,500$ in 1990 equals about 27,000$ today).

The data is already adjusted for inflation as indicated in the y-axis label, "Expenditure in constant 2020-21 U.S. dollars".

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#364

Post by carlosjobim »

defgeneric wrote: post #240
zarzavat wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People socialised for thousands, in fact hundreds of thousands of years before schools were invented. I went to school and got beat up, colour me sceptical about school as a mechanism for socialisation.

Socialization is broader than just between peers. It's how the individual develops a relationship to society as a whole. The public school system is the primary way the state socializes kids. You learn the difference between the public and private spheres (the school vs the family), how the two relate, and how they relate to the broader community. Some are better served by it than others but on the whole it's a very…

You believe in a false god you call "the state" and "society". These things don't exist, only people exist.

Public schools are operated with the purpose of breaking the spirit of the children of the underclass so that they become obedient workers or soldiers. That's why the education part is so lacking and the obedience training so focused. Children are schooled in having no liberty of time, no liberty of movement and no liberty of thought. Perfect for a soldier or industrial or corporate worker.

On the contrary a successful adult is characterized by having liberty of her time, liberty of her movement and liberty of her thought.

The purpose of state schools is to create failed human beings, because they are needed to serve the rulers.

Schools are specifically made to break communities by separating children by age, leaving their main influence to be a few teachers, instead of having dynamic interactions with adults of all different types.

No institution has been more damaging to humanity than state schools.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#365

Post by [deleted] »

boxed wrote: post #345
scarmig wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who do co-ops might not object to public schooling in principle but to the particular implementation that their locality has adopted. If co-ops becomes public schools with better management, all the better.

And if they become public schools with worse management and driven by crazy people.. what then?

[deleted]

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#366

Post by MattGaiser »

haizhung wrote: post #261

Am I the only one thinking that home schooling is the wrong solution to the underlying problem? The problem is that the public education sector has been - for years - continuously squeezed dry of any funding. Teachers are quitting left and right, and schools are in a terrible state. Instead of fixing THAT problem, now people homeschool. Ok; I guess. At least homeschooling is something that the individual can control,…

> something which is normally a profession for which you have to study O(years) (and even then most people aren’t really good at). What gives parents this confidence? And what gives parents the right to squander the future of their children on a whim?

You have to consider capacity. It is a parent educating 1-2 children vs a teacher educating 30+. So while the teacher has a lot more training on how, a lot of the how is how to do it in bulk.

Would an individual focused on solving any particular problem outperform a PhD trying to solve 30 at once? I don't think that is unreasonable. Someone who hasn't picked up a book on software development yet has a reasonable chance of beating me (professional software developer) if I work on 30 projects at once.

If you have the means, you can also buy a lot of teaching a la carte.

When faced with similar resource and time constraints, teacher is going to win. But the gap in those is huge.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#367

Post by Justsignedup »

jawns wrote: post #150

People talk about homeschooling as if it's one single concept, but it's actually a whole bunch of very dissimilar things. There are people who homeschool because they don't agree with the government's viewpoints, people who homeschool because the public school system has failed their kids, people who homeschool because it just happens to fit their lifestyle. Those are all very different motivations. Likewise, there a…

Homeschooling _can_ work. But the likelihood of it working well is pretty low. You literally have a teacher wife who is homeschooling the kids. For most people homeschooling = not schooling.

Very heavily used by the hassidic community here in nyc to prevent girls from having any education.

I linked to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI as a top level post, but just to give you some ideas. This is John Oliver's take on it.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#368

Post by Guvante »

efd6821b wrote: post #335
verisimi wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> religious indoctrination indoctrination is a given. Do you prefer your secular type, the religious type or the government type?

All education is intertwined with indoctrination. At least religious indoctrination is a known quantity, unlike other less self-aware forms.

Are you saying "I believe it is true so it is fine to indoctrinate that way"?

I can't find any definition of known quantity otherwise given how extremely wide the variations on religious teaching is only focusing on science let alone other topics like history.

Let alone that there isn't only one religion in the world.

If your perspective is "if the parent says it is correct it is correct" you cannot say that is different in any meaningful way.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#369

Post by bitlax »

CharlesW wrote: post #12
brightball wrote: post #7

When I moved into my current house about 10 years ago, the family next door home schooled. I'd never known any home schoolers before and definitely had some notions about how terrible it must be until I learned about it. This family was part of a home school group with other families. The kids went to different houses every day and had an instructor focus on 1 subject for half of the day, mixed in with free time, dep…

There are many home-schooling success stories, and also many home-schooling horror stories. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...

I guess enough time has passed that people are posting Elizabeth Bartolet again.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#370

Post by AlexandrB »

xyzelement wrote: post #329
jandrese wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge spectrum, but back when we homeschooled (my wife wasn't yet comfortable sending the kids back to the classroom in 2021) we did a few events where local homeschool kids got together for various activities. Tree identification/nature trail at the park, visits to historic sites, stuff like that. Of the parents I met there was some variety, but 9 times out of 10 it seemed like they were mostly doing it be…

// other aspects of homeschooling were just a fig leaf over a whole lot of religious indoctrination I was raised totally secular but I now understand that religion is about fundamentally aligning yourself to the highest aspirations ("what kind of man does G-d want me to be?") and even w/o actual faith, I am starting to think that's preferable to the current mode of "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like an…

> "what kind of man does G-d want me to be?"

Unfortunately, there is not a singular answer to this question. You still have to choose which religion/sect you want to answer this question for you. You can't really delegate your morals to a deity because the choice of which interpretation of that deity's teachings you want to follow is still yours to make.

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