Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 597 posts

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

#451

Post by rayiner »

phito wrote: post #362
rayiner wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the obsession with sex, sexuality, and dating in American schools, which the adults do nothing to discourage? If I had to identify one reason why poor Asians have vastly higher income mobility than poor white people, that’d be it. We literally have twice the bandwidth to focus on studying.

School isn't just about studying?

That’s where you’re wrong. At least in a capitalistic, credentialist society like America is, school is all about studying, whether you want that to be the case or not: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.h...

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

#453

Post by gemstones »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #288
gemstones wrote: post #235

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…

Do the tears eventually end without permanently destroying the child/parent relationship? If so, you might actually be describing something better!

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

#454

Post by rayiner »

watwut wrote: post #413
rayiner wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to American public schools in the 1990s, in a very moderate county. Several teachers joined with the students to protest the county’s attempt to impose a dress code. And what does Fox News have to do with anything?

That sounds like a healthy school in which some teachers think the dress code was bad. Simple as that.

[flagged]

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

#455

Post by aleph_minus_one »

kiba wrote: post #198
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think antibiotic resistant bacteria as a simple example. That is why I explicitly wrote "macroevolution" and not "evolution". The emergence antibiotic-resilient bacteria is a phenomenon of microevolution , whose existence is, as far as I am aware, much less controversial in evangelical Christian circles. To my understanding, the offending topic in these evangelical Christian circles rather seems to be whether macro…

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.

Even from a biological perspective this distinction is not nonsense: couldn't there exist an additional mechanism that is not arbitrary mutation and survival/selection of the fittest, which could be an additionally important for the formation of species and macroevolution?

Candidates for such possible additional mechanisms have been proposed from biologists, such as Lamarckism or epigenetics (though the mainstream view in biology is these either could not be observed (Lamarckism) or are not considered to be important for macroevolution (epigenetics)).

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

#456

Post by treis »

gemstones wrote: post #150
jawns wrote: post #2

We are in our ninth year of homeschooling. My wife and I attended private and public schools and grew up with typical biases against homeschooling, e.g. they lack social skills. When we got married, we always assumed we'd send our kids to traditional schools. What we learned, though, is that homeschooling has changed since we were in school. Back then, it was a niche, and the sort of parents who chose to homeschool u…

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.

Why are they estranged?

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

#457

Post by SamBam »

mvnuweucxqokii wrote: post #203
whynotminot wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain this more to me. Presumably something so insidious you need to remove your child from even the possibility of being exposed to it. Perhaps, the existence of gay people?

That's a strawman. The steelman version is something like the following chain of reasoning: (a) gender identity is something that everyone has that is distinct from sex, (b) with enough introspection, everyone can discover their true gender identity, (c) if you don't have a strongly felt gender identity, you need to introspect, (d) if introspection does not yield certainty then this suggests genderfluidity, or even w…

Wow, that's a completely ridiculous strawman. My kids go to one of the most liberal school districts in the nation, and never once have they been told they need to "introspect their gender identity," let alone the absolutely absurd notion that "if they're not certain, they're genderfluid and/or need puberty blockers."

Literally the only thing along those lines that is taught is to respect other people's gender identity. This has been no harder for them to grasp than "Gay people exist and that's ok" was for my generation.

If you really believe that school districts out there are pushing puberty blockers, then your YouTube algorithm is probably feeding you a heck of a lot of crap.

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

#458

Post by jawns »

el_benhameen wrote: post #119
jawns wrote: post #2

We are in our ninth year of homeschooling. My wife and I attended private and public schools and grew up with typical biases against homeschooling, e.g. they lack social skills. When we got married, we always assumed we'd send our kids to traditional schools. What we learned, though, is that homeschooling has changed since we were in school. Back then, it was a niche, and the sort of parents who chose to homeschool u…

If you’re willing to share, I’m curious to hear what changed your mind about homeschooling and what made you choose to homeschool your kids.

There were a few things that led to us recognizing and adjusting our biases. But what led us to homeschool ourselves was pretty straightforward.

My wife was a teacher in private schools for about 7 years, and once our oldest was ready for kindergarten, we decided that she could either go out and teach other people's kids, or she could homeschool and teach her own kids.

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

#459

Post by achates »

fatfingerd wrote: post #443
chongli wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a closed group. You can pull your kid out and put them in a different group. It’s not like public school where your kid is forced to go to the one school in your catchment area. The parents also have the option of reorganizing the group to kick the bully’s parents out, along with the bully.

Private schools achieve that and have more ability to do so than homeschooling teacher as a service does. This model isn't new and had problems before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capturing_the_Friedmans

If I can find a news article about a public school teacher who molested children will you support shutting those down too?

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

#460

Post by silverpepsi »

soligern wrote: post #276
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…

That doesn’t sound right. For all of human history bullies who were bigger and stronger made the rules. The weak were ostracized. If anything, what you’re doing in homeschooling is reverting away from the norm and creating a sheltered environment. This is a double edged sword, you can turn your kids into fragile beings incapable of dealing with a harsh world but at the same time they will probably have productive, pr…

Firstly, what I said can be true in one scope of reference and what you say in another. It's not mutually exclusive.

I feel your perspective is more about lots of the world after the rise of nation states and dense civilization.

For me I'm actually thinking back to the Pirahãs tribe from Daniel Everett's book as how we realistically lived as tribes. Conflict might arise, but a group might split off and go live in an entirely different patch of forest permanently, at which point the conflict is done without fuss. Things can be much less pleasant with permanent settlements and all land being owned by someone else.

A couple, man and woman, possibly with children, might also do something like this and just reject the benefits of being part of a larger community as loners.

Not all conflict is existential, we all choose to live facing a certain amount but also have our limits. Kids have way less flexibility to make the call and it is the cause of much misery

Post reply on HN