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Homeschooling hits record numbers

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Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#451

Post by codingdave »

hereme888 wrote: post #234

The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against…

> increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.

You really might want to explain that further. At face value, that sounds like parroted right-wing rhetoric.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#452

Post by cosmic_cheese »

ryandrake wrote: post #362
BrenBarn wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion is definitely a big motivator. My perception though is other motivations have been on the increase, especially since the pandemic. One other group attracted to homeschooling is the hippie-type who thinks school is some kind of diabolical machine designed to crush kids' souls. Since the pandemic there's also been a big surge in the "I don't trust vaccines" group (which already had a good deal of overlap with…

I have a feeling a really large percentage of homeschooling is about religious separatism and political separatism, and not about academic performance. Yes, you'll hear HN commenters sing the praises of homeschooling because this site is going to be disproportionately represented by the group doing it for actual educational reasons. Also, we HN commenters typically see the success stories around us at work, not the f…

Both were certainly major motivating factors for my parents’ choice to homeschool me in the 90s. Quality of education was a concern too, but it very much took a back seat to the other two.

The overwhelming majority of other homeschooling parents they had contact with also held separatist motivations.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#453

Post by lazyasciiart »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #289
jorts wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the son of a teacher and a friend of several teachers, you're way underestimating their workload.

I estimated that a class of 22 children would require one full time teacher and one full time teaching assistant. What am I missing? My table has $200k left over so we could add another full time teacher at $150k?

Any specialized teaching: art, languages, in high school I understand they have a different teacher for each subject, a librarian, a substitute teacher on sick days, an individual aide for one of the kids to represent the special education budget…

But I remember you previously and you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#454

Post by array_key_first »

seneca wrote: post #310
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave. In the military, say, you don't get that option. In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while. So you…

> In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave. Agreed! And that is exactly what home-schooling families are doing. Choosing to leave a dysfunctional environment. > In the military, say, you don't get that option. Yep, and other government institutions, like prison. I don't think those are what anyone would call a typical life environment though. > In your neighborhood, you can mo…

Public school is not dysfunctional, per se.

And, to be clear, EVERY workplace will have people you don't like. Every. Single. One. No exceptions.

Kids needs to be taught resiliency and healthy mindsets, to a degree. They need to learn to live and let go, to learn their value isn't derived from what people think of them, to learn that embarrassment is self inflicted.

You just can't do that if you're only around people who don't challenge you. If you're in a nice, cushy, social bubble, you will develop self esteem and confidence issues.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#455

Post by russdill »

nxm wrote: post #70

At the end of the day, it's a form of school-choice where parents decide what's best for their kids which I strongly support.

Only parents of privilege are given choice though. Parents who are struggling are not. And then when it comes to vote on fixing classrooms, paying teachers what they are worth, etc, there's a great bulk of people who would rather just not because it doesn't effect them.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#456

Post by lazyasciiart »

BJones12 wrote: post #182
jayd16 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid showed me that on the average home schooling (or at least remote learning) leaves kids extremely under developed. The stunted social and academic skills were pretty apparent in retrospect once the schools reopened.

Remote learning. You didn't see homeschooling, which is a very different thing, you saw remote learning. The homeschooling crowd has developed methods over the years to compensate. The COVID remote learning cohort did not, and suffered for it.

Remote learning has also built many methods for success, and absolutely nobody even consulted them before implementing their ad hoc systems for Covid. There are entire online public schools and their staff were just ignored.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#457

Post by perrygeo »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #147

I can't say my public school experience was great, I was bullied and didn't really click with the popular kids, but being around a cross section of actual American kids in my age group (my school district mixed middle class with lower class neighborhoods) helped me shape my worldview and learn to deal with people who didn't look or talk like me. I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch…

Fully agree. The foundation of education is learning how the world actually is, not how we wish it would be.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#458

Post by HaZeust »

emtel wrote: post #444
afavour wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? ...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it? I think your view is a very black and white one. Kid…

It absolutely is. If you are well equipped to navigate the adult world, you place yourself in hand-picked groups of people. I do not work with, socialize with, or live near a random sample of the population, and I highly doubt most people reading this thread do either!

Yeah but how do you LEARN the ability to do that? To keep that practice always in your mental backburner, and remembering how important it is? Why, you learn it by seeing the impacts from those succumbed to negative influences they surrounded themselves with!

You can't learn the application of hand-picking your people and environments if you don't first see the outcomes when such application is neglected, and understanding its importance from there. If you have the hand-picking done for you as well, you risk not learning the ability to do it yourself. Or how to handle the situations where you can't.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#459

Post by toasterlovin »

lurking_swe wrote: post #378
toasterlovin wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optionality has costs. If you live your life like it's going to go astray, then you miss out on a lot of the upside if it doesn't go astray (such as by being a stay at home mom, if that's what you actually want to do). The statistic that 50% of marriages end in divorce is often bandied about, but it also means that 50% don't. Which means that going all-in on your marriage is a completely reasonable thing to do.

what you say is true. But consider, the “cost” of going back part time is not very big. It’s not very stressful, and _greatly_ reduces long term risk. Your take is a bit like saying in the year 2000 “i believe Apple is an amazing company, i’ll go ALL IN with my life savings”. If you’re right the you think you’re a genius. But what if you were wrong? What if apple turned out like IBM? Then you’d look back and think “h…

It's a really bad analogy. And the "cost" of working part time for someone who doesn't want or need to work is literally every single hour they spend working. If they're working 20 hours per week, that's 20 hours per week spent doing something they don't want or need to do. It's a huge cost.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#460

Post by lazyasciiart »

This topic is such a basket case. “Homeschooling” in the US is a word that has come to mean “not enrolled in an accredited school” and can mean anything from being the Duggars to “my 4yo audits classes at MIT” or “we have an unaccredited private school that is identical to any other private school except for not being subject to laws”.

Advocating for homeschooling is simply advocating for absolutely no regulation on schooling, which is fine for the Zuckerbergs and will condemn children like the Duggars.

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