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Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

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Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#661

Post by dyauspitr »

PaulHoule wrote: post #93
daft_pink wrote: post #36

Personally, I have high functioning autism. I would do terrible at interpersonal relationships, but then get near perfect scores on all the tests. Teachers would anticipate that I would be terrible and then when I got perfect scores on all the tests, they would be pissed off. I think there are a lot of tech people that are neurodivergent and had terrible experiences in school and would love to avoid my child having t…

My son's district has a black superintendent and at least one black principal but otherwise black (and other) kids don't get to see the example of black teachers (and learn school is a "white thing you wouldn't understand" the same way that boys come to the conclusion that school is for girls when they don't see any male teachers -- the problem here is representation-ism that stops at the very top, if they do get a b…

The support of trans ideology is destroying the progressive movement. What a shame because they’re driving people straight into the arms of fascists.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#662

Post by protonbob »

dyauspitr wrote: post #658
csa wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I'm living under a rock; what extreme views are going through the school system? Not op and not taking a stance on any of these here, but: 1. Critical race theory (CRT) 2. Gender fluidity 3. Endorsement and use of Christianity/Bible in public schools These are all hot-button issues in education today, at least in some states and districts.

CRT is a boogeyman. It’s not ”taught” anywhere.

Its principles are most certainly taught. They were 10 years ago in my high school. Come to find out these were from CRT sources.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#663

Post by deltarholamda »

spandrew wrote: post #628
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.

You don't just stay home with your siblings. A major factor of how homeschooling works is homeschoolers have local organizations or co-ops where they do things together.

And, yes, this is just reinventing some aspects of the public school system in the private sphere. But that is because parents, rightly or wrongly, feel they have zero influence over how the public school works, so they just sideload their own version.

(I would say that the parents are right about having zero influence, as quite a lot of American public schools are so big and so bureaucratized that parents do not have a real voice without herculean effort.)

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#665

Post by scarmig »

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 people who say "it's to make you interact with normal people!" miss a key point. In the real world, you meet a person, and if they treat you like shit, you walk away. If they physically assault you in the workplace, you can report them to HR, and there's a good chance you'll never have to see them again. In school, you get told you need to have empathy for their propensity to beat you, get subtly or not-so-subtly victim blamed, and you still have to interact with them for at least a year, and maybe years.

Exit is probably the most powerful strategy to dealing with certain kinds of situations, and schools deny you that.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#666

Post by rbanffy »

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

A billion times this. School is not to train you on Math, English or Science. It's also to teach you how to cooperate, how to reach consensus, how to make decisions as a group, and so on.

These soft skills are absolutely critical to maintain a properly functioning society.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#667

Post by chongli »

rob74 wrote: post #402
chongli wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going? Schooling didn’t fix all that. There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications… the list goes on and on and on. Some of these things contributed major improvements to the average person. Advances in medicine a…

> There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications… You might say that's also a success of the schooling (and higher education) system - unless the people who produced these advances were all home schooled, which I somehow doubt...

Most scientific advances throughout history prior to about the 1950s were made by people whose education was either informal or private (including apprenticeship). Private tutoring was the predominant mode of formal education (below university level) throughout history.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#668

Post by cratermoon »

theamk wrote: post #90
nineplay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poster above references the 'average person'. Do you think that the average person is not going to be a good influence?

Average person _where_? If the school is bad enough, then an average student there (because there are many more students than teachers) might not be a good influence. There are schools in my state with <50% graduation rate, the average student there won't even finish the school.

So ability to graduate from high school determines the worth of a person?

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#669

Post by ravenstine »

geye1234 wrote: post #563
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…

I went to grammar school (UK) in the 1990s, and also absolutely loathed it. I think it set me up horribly for life and (especially) for my career. People use the phrase "PTSD" too lightly, but I think it gave me something like it that I often feel in an office full of people, and especially during in-person meetings. Years of CBT and ERP have helped a lot, and now I'm middle-aged I think I've put the worst of it behi…

PTSD is misapplied quite a bit these days, though CPTSD (the C stands for complex) seems to be the most appropriate clinical definition for the kind of scattered traumatic damage people experience, especially from childhood.

Glad to know you've received the help that you needed and have been able to move on. I compartmentalized and put off working on my traumas for far longer than I should have. People underestimate how much a dysfunctional school environment can mess someone up even when the home environment is mostly healthy. I screwed up great relationships in large part because I still had trust issues and CPTSD triggers that I didn't even realize at the time.

No joke, I'd rather have only known the neighborhood kids growing up than have thousands of kids to socialize with while having fucked up things happen to me. So what if I wouldn't experience prom night? If it's not the right environment for me, then it's not worth it.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#670

Post by arkh »

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…

> Teachers can't be expected to help 30+ children work through that.

The big mystery is: how did teachers manage this miracle 50 or 80 years ago?

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