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Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

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Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#621

Post by zaphar »

I can't really know nor do I care to speculate on why it's becoming fashionable. But I'm a successful, well adjusted, homeschooled child from when it wasn't fashionable. This comment stood out to me: "Opt out of interacting with average people."

And my immediate thought was: "I can't imagine a less effective or worse way teach kids how to deal with people, average or not, than to throw them into a pool of similarly untrained people and telling them to just "figure it out". Which is essentially what public school does. Teachers can't be expected to help 30+ children work through that. They don't distribute across the pool of students in a way that can be effective for that. Homeschooling I firmly believe can be a more effective way to get exposure and learn how to deal with other people than a public school.

Public schools are training grounds for poor social skills.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#622

Post by 9rx »

bell-cot wrote: post #528
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the US, we're about the same age, and I went to a public school where I had a similar experience. More than anything else, I remember the crushing boredom and the feeling that time had slowed to a crawl. I wasn't beaten or abused, but I felt trapped in amber, and the school really was prison-like, just as you describe it. I've never hated anything so much in my life as I hated school. So I escaped the pr…

> Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but ... In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable. Some of those screaming people probably cared about you and your future. Most of them just resented you, for highlighting the actual state of their society and schools. And perhaps making them doubt their own choices.

> In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable.

That depends.

Those who drop out because they can't hack it will find misplaced regret, blaming future woes on dropping out when in reality the problem is a continuation of the deficiencies that lead them to dropping out.

Those who drop out because they have bigger and better plans won't think about it again.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#623

Post by Scubabear68 »

So we chose private school over home schooling, for both time reasons, educational reasons, and social reasons.

But the important thing is we choose to take our kids out of public school. The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year.

We did not like what we saw. A few teachers were really good. Many never bothered to show up, “class” was a note to do homework or something. Others were just plain terrible teachers who didn’t know their subjects well and couldn’t really teach.

More and more our district was also relying on computers and software to make tactically replace books and teachers, and not surprisingly that did not work so well.

Yes, remote learning and covid and all that was a shock to everyone, and all schools took a hit during that time. But this was a window directly into schools, and seeing how well yours did in the face of adversity.

The truth is, at least for our school district here in NJ in the US, schools suck in massive amounts of money, give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it.

There has also been the constant creep over the years to turn schools into social welfare systems. This is well intentioned, but in reality is just another bureaucratic money suck.

I could go on. But in short, home schooling and private schools both have risen in popularity because Covid revealed just how bad many public schools in the US have become.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#624

Post by crabbone »

lmm wrote: post #364
woodruffw wrote: post #164

> These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people. It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way. "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people wi…

> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average." Nope. For some people it may be valuable. For me it was miserable, almost to the point of being deadly. It does not prepare you for adulthood or life or what have you in any meaningful sense (think about what would happen in your everyday life if someone…

Your argument is similar to burning the house down, once you discover that you don't like the couch in the living room. Or, more realistically, arguing against taxation based on the idea that rich people avoid being taxed anyways, and it's only poor people who will get the short end of the stick. The school system isn't perfect, and is hard to improve due to many reasons, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't try. It has a purpose which is much more important than the suffering of any individual who goes through it. It's a shared good that can only be made better if everyone participates. When people who can contribute the most are allowed to be excluded, the whole thing becomes worthless. But, guess what, those who thought that they may be exempt from contributing to the public pool will inevitably find out that the public who was in this way deprived of a public good hates them, and will eventually come after them with pitchforks and torches.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#625

Post by BeFlatXIII »

gadders wrote: post #441

I think a lot of home schooling is a culture war issue as well. A quick look at Libs of TikTok will show some of the teachers that some parents would like to avoid.

Especially the ones who keep sneaking furry propaganda into elementary school.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#626

Post by gmm1990 »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #613
woodruffw wrote: post #164

> These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people. It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way. "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people wi…

> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average." Yet it's not worth the cost of a slowed curriculum.

I'd argue social skills are more valuable than improved curriculum. Not saying you couldn't learn social skills outside of the school system too, but seems to me that curriculum is easier to learn outside of the system than social skills.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#627

Post by ubertaco »

demosthanos wrote: post #56
vodou wrote: post #40

One thing I've never understood with homeschooling: How come parents think they have the competence to be a teacher? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.

We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids. We think we have a relationship with our own child that allows us to understand what they need and how to communicate with them in a way that works for them. We think we have the time (assuming one parent is full time parenting) to give our child the attention they need to excel. And we believe that a combinati…

>We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids.

While this is a good and rational awareness of one's own capabilities, as someone who grew up in Bible-belt homeschooling circles and saw a wide variance in approaches and effectiveness, the "homeschool co-op"/"homeschool group" model where one parent teaches one subject to many kids, classroom-style, is super common. See, for example, "Classical Conversations" [1], a pretty common one in my area, that leans on "parent as classroom teacher to many kids", without much in the way of prerequisite qualifications.

[1] https://classicalconversations.com/

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#628

Post by spandrew »

zaphar wrote: post #621

I can't really know nor do I care to speculate on why it's becoming fashionable. But I'm a successful, well adjusted, homeschooled child from when it wasn't fashionable. This comment stood out to me: "Opt out of interacting with average people." And my immediate thought was: "I can't imagine a less effective or worse way teach kids how to deal with people, average or not, than to throw them into a pool of similarly u…

This doesn't make sense to me.

We all get better at a talent by practicing it. We make mistake. We watch others. We determine our own preferences for what we like/don't like. We learn, grow. Kids figure it out.

How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better? You wouldn't get same exposure to the buttload of social interaction and scenarios in a closed system like that.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#629

Post by NoGravitas »

rayiner wrote: post #214
Terr_ wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math After a bunch of years overseas, I returned to the US to complete my last two years of high school. I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.

The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization. They don’t learn anything substantive about the founding U.S. cultures (big differences between Puritans and Jamestown settlers). They don’t study European history as a required course so they know almost nothing about how the modern world came to be (Westphalian nation states, etc). And they learn almost no world history beyond ancient c…

> some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe

Do you mean the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee [1]? I.e., the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy? The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers? The form of government of one of the major regional powers at the time the US was formed? Don't know why your daughter's teachers would bother teaching her about that. Sure, it's awful if they were neglecting all those other things, but seriously, anyone learning American colonial-era history needs to learn about the Iroquois Confederacy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Law_of_Peace

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#630

Post by [deleted] »

JJMcJ wrote: post #620
dijit wrote: post #389

OK I guess I’m going to go against the deluge of comments here; And give an appreciable reason instead of denigrating those who might choose this. The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school. I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country. However, school, for me, was by far the sin…

The book Lord Of The Flies made a lot more sense when I realized it was a satire of British elite schools, rather than a real exploration of what cast away young people would actual do in that situation.

[deleted]
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