Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

431–440 of 597 posts

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

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

When your child is coming home in tears every day because other children are mean, and the teachers and administrators won't do anything, and your child is sitting bored through bullshit indoctrination and being harangued for skipping brainless homework to write or make art or do any number of other things, feel free to sit down and tell them how valuable the public school system is, and how their suffering is stupid…

This entire thread is why I think public schools and private schools are both really important and need investment. Homeschooling as well but that I see as a gap solution.

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

#432

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?

Is it good that children get bullied or ostracized? Obviously not. It is far preferable however to the alternative of never having experienced that humans can act like this. We're sometimes assholes to each other for poor animalistic reasons, and that's probably not going away in my lifetime. One should be prepared for other people to act like this. > Why should it be tolerated when it happens in school, where the vi…

> It is far preferable however to the alternative of never having experienced that humans can act like this.

Should we get our children bullied deliberately then? It is not necessary to be bullied to learn that humans can act like that. I've never been assaulted, for instance, but I know that it's possible and act accordingly.

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

#433
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner.

Minor groups often have excess power from tie breaking between major factions.

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

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t normally comment on this sort of thing (I don’t have kids, am not precisely “normal” (whatever that is) and dislike speaking publicly on sensitive topics, anonymous or otherwise), but this touched a nerve for some reason, so I’ll throw a couple of things out there for you to consider: 1. Parents are not the only ones who push their own desires and beliefs. Thought experiment: how many members of the group tha…

> 1. Parents are not the only ones who push their own desires and beliefs. Thought experiment: how many members of the group that decides the curriculum vote Republican or Independent? Scuttlebutt (unverified by me) is that most folks in US schools and on US school boards are Democrats. Regardless of one’s opinion on political matters, that (if true) would suggest a certain uniformity of thought, and the likely prese…

Did you totally miss the part where I clearly indicated that I’ve not bothered to research and find out if it’s true? Hanging around schools to observe it firsthand would be pretty damned creepy at my age since I don’t work in education and don’t have kids. Nor do I pay much attention to the board elections for the same reason.

The fact that those running for board positions typically have their political affiliation next their name on the ballot, though, should tell you something.

Whether it be Republican or Democrat is entirely irrelevant to the point I was making. The fact is that almost all school boards likely do lean one way or another. They have agendas beyond education, either consciously or unconsciously. Those agendas will make their way into the curriculum, however subtly or overtly. Those agendas will be political, religious, and/or just plain personal.

Whether you agree with whatever agenda they have does not change that simple fact.

That agenda is being taught to impressionable children. Whether that’s good or not depends on who those people are, and what your own opinion of that agenda is, and whether your child is enrolled in a school using the resulting curriculum.

But there IS an agenda that they’re pushing, just as much as any homeschooling parent pushes their own.

And that is the ONLY point I was actually making.

There was no need to try to shame my political views or knowledge —- which you aren’t even aware of, because I never reveal such online since people are so damned irrational on such topics, and that irritates me.

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

#435
post #395
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Getting knocked down then kicked every day at recess, cowering and begging for them to stop, solely because of the color of my skin, while children laughed at my misfortune, until the teacher eventually waddled over to save me was not, in fact, a great gift for me.

You can push anything to an extreme to make it bad. I'm sorry the adults around you failed you is all I can say. It doesn't mean school is a bad idea, or that going through moderate levels of crap doesn't build one's character. There's a point where adversity turns into actual abuse and that's when grown ups should support kids, either in school or in a pod or wherever.

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

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yep GP, we can clearly see that homeschooling has changed a lot.

It has. Some of the issues parents have to worry about today parents of the past couldn’t even imagine.

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

#438
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution sounds like nonsense. There's too much evidence for me to believe that evolution doesn't happen, at any scale. Evolution is clearly observable and foundational to biology. Whereas Christian creation stories always felt like mythology, sounds human centric and made up. I read stuff like the Epic of Gilgamesh and realized that some stories in the bibles are base…

> The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution sounds like nonsense. It is nonsense through the lens of biology, but it's nonsense that's very ideologically convenient to certain demographics, which (perhaps paradoxically) means that terms to talk about the distinction become useful in some sociopolitical or anthropological contexts. For what it's worth, the very particular term for the religiously-motiv…

Now I am reminded of the YouTube clickbait I loved, something like, “evolutionists will hate this video.” I thought I would, but in fact I saw a lot of great biology and science and was glad that they were teaching how life can change over time…

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

#439

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…

For some kids, going to school is the only escape from their bullies.

For many it is opposite. Going to school means meeting with their bullies.

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

#440

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…

As a human person you have a right to education, regardless of whatever your parents might happen to think. School is there, in part, to ensure kids are exposed to thoughts, experiences, people, even those that parents might find objectionable. A daughter of fundamentalist Muslim parents has the right to have an education, even if they think girls should not be educated. A girl whose parents are "anti woke liberal ge…

[dead]
Post reply on HN