71–80 of 173 posts
My wife are secular homeschoolers and have homeschooled our 3 kids: 10,8,5 for 5 years. We use outschool regularly, its a great platform to introduce random topics. I would invest in it honestly. AMA I guess
What does outschool offer that khanacademy doesn't have?
"Travel to Paris"
"Viking Art and History"
"Waldorf Form drawing"
"The History of Halloween"
They also get to see the instructor and interact with them and other kids.
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My wife was from a very competitive school district which forced overachievement and I got beat up by bullies in a small town school. Besides the personal anecdotes, 1. we felt like time was passing too quickly and wanted to have them around, we wanted to be together basically. 2. with 3 kids my wife hasnt been able to work (her line of work is not well paying), so it made sense to start homeschooling vs private scho…
It seems like you’ve achieved something great, congrats! What are your estimated cost per year per child? (Including the aforementioned private teachers etc). It’d be interesting to compare that with the average expenditure per child in your local schooling district (it’s hard to compare directly due to hard to quantify factors like a parent staying home, but it’d still be interesting to see if it’s significantly mor…
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> You are proposing to offset economic inequality by degrading the education of the privileged. Your goal should be improve the education of the disadvantaged instead. Raise all boats, don't drain the lake. It's obvious that the United States could spend much more on education and do a much better job with the schools they have. Pinning any significant portion of the "huge cost" of the current system on middle class…
I think you're looking at different school systems and using it to leverage criticisms of home schooling in the US. Fix public schooling in the US first, make it so it isn't so easy for home schoolers to out perform. Don't make kids guinea pigs while you figure out how to fix it. Then and only then can you level a critical eye on US home schoolers if the vast majority weren't doing a better job than public schools. I…
This is like people saying to fix the bus system before adding bus lanes that would increase congestion for cars. The system is broken because smarter kids or kids who come from more educated families are escaping it. The effect is that public schools in the US are becoming like public transportation in the US: only those who don't have any other option are using it.
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You don't have to be a religious fundamentalist of any type (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) to be deeply offended by the political indoctrination in the history and sex-ed classes. Atheists and agnostics are not of one mind on those subjects.
I don't think that contradicts any of what I said. If people have a principled objection to public school, good for them. They should have the right to secure an equivalent education any other way they choose ... but it has to be equivalent. If not, too bad. Parents aren't allowed to feed their children sawdust instead of food, and they're not allowed to fill their their children's heads with religious/libertarian do…
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> Any teacher must be familiar with both the subject matter and basic pedagogy, regardless of whether they're teaching one student or many I think you are imagining a homeschool from the 1980s. My kids learn many aspects of the subject matter from sources like Khan Academy and Outschooling. The idea that the teacher needs to know the subject matter deeply in order to manage the child's education is obsolete.
> Khan Academy and Outschooling If those allow you to outsource the entirety of your child's education, including personalization of the curriculum to individual needs, answering arbitrarily-deep questions about the subject matter, etc. then great, but I'm not sure I'd call that home schooling. That would be more like a (virtual) private school, with the same level of parental involvement. If you want to be more invo…
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> The idiots that don't take their kids to the doctor...are idiots. Do you think that being a teacher is easier than being a medical doctor? I know somebody who is a primary school teacher in Northern France, on the border with Belgium (a disadvantaged area for France, but no worse than some parts of the American South), every single year she has to deal with medical or social issues that would have gone otherwise un…
> Do you think that being a teacher is easier than being a medical doctor? What the hell does that matter? Look, I'm not saying there isn't value to public education. And I'm not saying that educators don't provide a valuable and important service. But forcing public education as the panacea for finding all the ways parents fail their children is sub-optimal. If you want to find abuses, diseases, malnutrition, etc, t…
If you think that homeschooling is fine, but homedoctoring is crazy, then you think that being a teacher is a job that any idiot can do, while being a medical doctor requires a specific set of skills.
I'm not saying that all homeschooling parents are crazy and are doing a horrible job, I'm just saying that people have to study a bunch of stuff before becoming teachers, and even then they work as a team and have different specializations, I highly doubt that most people can do a better job than them on their first shot.
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You don't have to be a religious fundamentalist of any type (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) to be deeply offended by the political indoctrination in the history and sex-ed classes. Atheists and agnostics are not of one mind on those subjects.
I don't think that contradicts any of what I said. If people have a principled objection to public school, good for them. They should have the right to secure an equivalent education any other way they choose ... but it has to be equivalent. If not, too bad. Parents aren't allowed to feed their children sawdust instead of food, and they're not allowed to fill their their children's heads with religious/libertarian do…
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=trump+history+school+book&t=canoni...
About half the population would be offended by those textbooks. You're insisting on an equivalent education, which would mean teaching with that same bias. The whole point is to do otherwise.
One can find other examples in the way books treat the Vietnam war, the North American aboriginal population, LGBT, premarital sex, the causes of the Great Depression, unions, nationalized health care, the electoral college, the second amendment, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Ruth Ginsburg, and so many other political topics. History and sex-ed classes are deeply tied to politics.
You say that parents should be "not allowed to provide their children's with religious/libertarian dogma instead of an actual education", but many parents take the view that schools today are doing exactly that.
Homeschooling seems like an ideal solution for those with a parent at home to improve their children's academic learning. But it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system.
There are a ton of homeschool groups in our area too that organize activities where all of the kids get together. It is very active giving kids plenty of opportunity to socialize.
We don't homeschool for religious reasons. We do it because we want our kids to get the best possible education without all of the indoctrination and other crap that is pushed through the public education system. This is pretty much the reason most of the other homeschoolers that I engage with do it too. I think homeschooling has a bad rap because of the media and a few bad apples but at least from my experience, that portrayal is not the norm.
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What social experiences do you feel like you missed out on? Having teachers ignore you and spend 90% of their time dealing with problem kids? The petty drama? How many people look back fondly on K-12 and think “man, that was great?” Read Sasse’s “the vanishing American adult.” It’s got some great commentary on what’s wrong with modern school. We take kids, and instead of having them be around adults to socialize them…
Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children.
It certainly is, the book even beats you over the head with it when (spoiler warning I guess?) the warship shows up to rescue them at the end.
I do think the K-12 school doesn't particularly resemble adult life, and is a lot worse in most ways. For one thing, leaving bad situations isn't really an option, while at the same time anti-social behavior is more tolerated. Meanwhile you're doing a bunch of work on things that are quickly round-filed when you're done with them, year after year, and operating under a system that's strangely strict and dehumanizing considering how much shittiness it allows to go on. And I had a pretty good school experience, so this isn't coming from some place of special bitterness.
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> There is plenty of evidence of the contrary though, that kids born in families with low income and educational achievement do much much better when they are in a socially diverse school as opposed to a ghetto. Sure maybe homeschooled kids are slightly better off, but that comes at a huge cost for all the kids who have a single parent who works three jobs that will never be able to afford to homeschool them. I was t…
> I was that kid anecdata > You're running on a theory with no evidence https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/19/increa... Here an article reporting on a study by the OECD, but I'm sure you'll be able to find more scholarly sources if you just took the time to research it. The truth is homeschooling is almost exclusively an American (maybe I should say anglophone) phenomenon, in most of Western Europe ho…
Homeschooling is exclusively American because American schools are almost completely shit like most government provided services here and saying because German schools are good, American kids shouldn't homeschool is ignoring all the data that says US public schools are in trouble, on a steep decline and home schooling has for many, become their only viable alternative. Look at the colleges complaining about kids coming in who can't do basic problem solving or critical thinking. Anyway, I've linked this stuff so many times.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/15/robots...
http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/03/29/social-jetlag/
https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/01/homeschooling-as-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13086098
https://ideapod.com/born-creative-geniuses-education-system-...
If a school in someone's area is crap and not addressing their child's needs a parent ABSOLUTELY should have the RIGHT to pull their kid out and seek a better alternative. Saying home schools are bad because public schools should be good and use data that has nothing to do with test scores, performance later in life. The social thing has been debunked multiple times. Sending a kid to school to learn to socialize has the Lord of the Flies effect, learning to socialize in a school, not from adults. Home schoolers are typically seen as more mature than their peers.
https://reason.com/2019/01/22/homeschooling-produces-better-...
You're defending a dumpster fire with doctored data when their are news articles every day about how much trouble public schools and outdated the education system is, and using anecdotal out liars to prove home schooling is terrible. For every home schooler you show that had issues, I can show you an article about a kid who committed suicide because of bullying, who had a learning disability that can't be addressed in large classroom settings, who experience severe social anxiety because of the social hierarchy high school taught them about.