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

washingtonpost.com

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

#561

Post by jandrese »

wskinner wrote: post #469
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…

I don't know where you live, but my anecdata from being homeschooled starting ~20 years ago in the Bay Area contradicts this. I was part of a group of more than 50 homeschooled children of various ages. Our parents all had their own reasons for homeschooling us, but to my knowledge, none of them did it because they thought the public schools were too secular and teaching "sinful" science. We were aware of families ho…

Absolutely, all politics is local and the plural of anecdote isn’t data. I only homeschooled for a single year. I fully expect the communities to vary by region.

To be fair the topic of evolution only came up because the arborist made an off hand comment about how a particular tree had evolved from a tree that is native to warmer climates to survive in our area and it caused a bit of a stir with the parents. I think the park service got some sternly worded letters afterward.

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

#563

Post by calvinmorrison »

liveoneggs wrote: post #391
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…

Religion and its associated anti-science (etc) is the majority reason for home schooling. The groups in highly-skilled co-ops are a small minority and are not what the word normally invokes.

Poor people do homeschooling :

Yeck gross bleck! Religious zealots!

Rich people do homeschooling :

Oh how jealous I am Bartholomew, I wish I could have a private tutor like yours to teach my kid all of the great languages, and look the Au Pair is bringing in the lunch!

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

#564

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

biomcgary wrote: post #170
lapetitejort wrote: post #137

I was home-schooled until high school. Long story short, it was a disaster. I bordered on having no education at all, on top of no socialization. I'm so fortunate I got at least four years of public school. I still think I suffer to this day. For parents who are thinking of home schooling your kids: best of luck to you. If you succeed, maybe your kids will be smarter. If you fail, you could be setting your kids up fo…

Did you notice that the article highlights the rise of homeschooling co-ops? This is intentional on the part of the homeschooling movement. It improves both socialization and educational opportunities (e.g., shared lab equipment). Rather than pearl clutching about individual anecdotes or doubling down on government control, I think states should provide direct funding to homeschool co-ops in addition to direct fundin…

I don't agree about the funding. UBI is a great idea because the conditions are clear: you have to be a person to get this money.

Government funded homeschool co-ops or government funded homeschool families... Not so much.

As someone who pays taxes under the expectation that the government will do its best to use the money to provide a consistent education for all, I have a limited set of options when it comes to influencing how it gets spent. There is opportunity to improve that situation, certainly, but it's not corrupt. We pay in together and we vote for people who will spend that money on our collective behalf.

I don't have kids, so presumably I won't have the option to redirect that money towards Newton and away from Chaucer (or you know, whatever politically motivated alteration I come up with). People who do have kids shouldn't get different options than I do w.r.t. how the money is spent.

If somebody wants to influence the curriculum that gets funded with tax dollars, they should have the same power to do so as all of the other taxpayers. It should not be coupled to their educational choices for their own kids.

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

#565

Post by minitech »

ndriscoll wrote: post #546
PsylentKnight wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While this may technically fit the definition of "indoctrination", that's a pretty loaded way to describe what parents teach their own children. I'm a former homeschooler that had to watch countless Ken Ham and Kent Hovind videos. These videos were filled with strawmen and faulty logic. I distinctly remember one of them tearing into Lamarckism, a theory discredited in the 1930's, as if it were something that people…

Unless you wanted to be a research biologist, does the precise mechanism driving evolution really matter? And the ideas did turn out to have some merit with epigenetics, right? Sure it's largely wrong, but it's a strange sort of indoctrination to care about. Sort of like how we tell children the story about electrons being balls that orbit the nucleus. Wrong, but only important for physicists and chemists.

“tearing into Lamarckism” as in using it to discredit evolution.

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

#566

Post by seti0Cha »

underwater wrote: post #474
xyzelement wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// 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 a weird take. Religions ability to influence behaviour works because of our lizard brain, not despite it. The idea of God judging people from afar is an extension of the important humans place on social conformity. We are hard wired to care about what other people think of us. If you remove the religious decorarions then that underlying trait still exists.

You have a greatly simplified understanding of what religion is and how it operates. Many religions, for instance, encourage people to act against social norms. Also, strange that you would characterize conformity as an artifact of our lizard brains. Reptiles are not generally noted for being highly social creatures. Conformity seems like it'd be situated closer to what makes us human than what makes us animal-like.

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

#567

Post by xyzelement »

seti0Cha wrote: post #566
underwater wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird take. Religions ability to influence behaviour works because of our lizard brain, not despite it. The idea of God judging people from afar is an extension of the important humans place on social conformity. We are hard wired to care about what other people think of us. If you remove the religious decorarions then that underlying trait still exists.

You have a greatly simplified understanding of what religion is and how it operates. Many religions, for instance, encourage people to act against social norms. Also, strange that you would characterize conformity as an artifact of our lizard brains. Reptiles are not generally noted for being highly social creatures. Conformity seems like it'd be situated closer to what makes us human than what makes us animal-like.

Yeah exactly. Especially today when being religious, much less "virtuous" is totally against the cultural grain.

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

#568

Post by PsylentKnight »

ndriscoll wrote: post #546
PsylentKnight wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While this may technically fit the definition of "indoctrination", that's a pretty loaded way to describe what parents teach their own children. I'm a former homeschooler that had to watch countless Ken Ham and Kent Hovind videos. These videos were filled with strawmen and faulty logic. I distinctly remember one of them tearing into Lamarckism, a theory discredited in the 1930's, as if it were something that people…

Unless you wanted to be a research biologist, does the precise mechanism driving evolution really matter? And the ideas did turn out to have some merit with epigenetics, right? Sure it's largely wrong, but it's a strange sort of indoctrination to care about. Sort of like how we tell children the story about electrons being balls that orbit the nucleus. Wrong, but only important for physicists and chemists.

> Sure it's largely wrong, but it's a strange sort of indoctrination to care about

That was just one example of a particularly egregious strawman. It made "evolutionists" out to be a lot dumber than they actually are by misrepresenting what they believe. They made similar arguments against some of Darwin's since discredited theories, again, as if they were things that modern scientists believe. And there were plenty of other untruths and logical errors, so much so that I think it's very likely these people were not arguing in good faith.

I agree that it's not a very important subject for everyday life or for most careers, but that kind of intellectual dishonesty being presented as the absolute divine truth is not good for developing a child's reasoning abilities imo.

And as another sibling comment points out, creationism tends to pit people against science and intellectualism in general. The only thing that can be truly known is the absolute truth of the Bible.

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

#569

Post by quesera »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #433
darigo wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it is possible to have plenty of "socialization" with other kids. I agree. Public school is not a great place for socialization, and it's not hard to create something better. Nothing socializes kids like sitting next to each other motionless in silence for several hours lol

The advantage of public school isn't that the socialization is super high quality, but that it's going to be broader spectrum than pretty much any alternative. It's not about getting your kids to form the best relationships possible, it's about teaching them to be comfortable with and learn to handle a huge swathe of people that are different from themselves. And, possibly more importantly than that, it's about teach…

In my experience, socialization at school is "broader" in that you meet kids from a wider range of the population, but that breadth is destroyed by the fact that they are all exactly the same age as you are.

Homeschooling brings you into contact with a self-selected subset of the population, but across much wider range of ages.

This often turns out to be more broadly valuable.

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

#570

Post by seti0Cha »

r00fus wrote: post #441
drw3 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

If you want an example of current events as it applies to the danger of religion take a simple look at the Israel/Hamas war. 1) Hamas jihadists cultivate decades of repression of the Palestinian populace into a spectacular terrorist strike on Oct 7th. 2) Israel, an apartheid ethnostate, where Rabbis call for extermination of Palestinians in response to the Hamas strike (after decades of dehumanization), drops a nucle…

It's not even exclusive to religions. Ethnic tension with and without religious difference. In fact, religious conflicts are not infrequently dressed up ethnic conflicts. People are tribal, and religious affiliation is just one means for defining tribes.
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