"Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth".. I'm not sure if the "Post" didn't understand that the problem isn't "quality" per se or they are full supportive to the principles that make the parents wanting the kids out of the school in the first place.
Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
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Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#772Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The local public school program that he would be in is overwhelmed. Pay more taxes. Solve the problem for all people who run into it, not just the ones who can afford it.
Do you see any upper limit for how much you are willing to pay per student to have them educated in society?
The upper limit would be the expected total contribution to society that person would create in their lifetime.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#773Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, this cuts both ways. One of the most consistent predictors of success in public school is parental involvement. The only school I ever went to that was good for socialization was community college. Tbh, for learning too. I basically learned all of math, from arithmetic up, as an adult at community college, to compensate for learning nothing and getting pushed through all of the grade levels at public school.…
Exactly. There are involved parents whose kids are going to thrive in the public school. There are uninvolved parents whose kids are going to do poorly no matter where they are.
So the question becomes "should more taxes be spent to disproportionately favours kids whose parents are uninvolved, in the hopes that they reach the same outcome as kids of the involved parents?"
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#774Earlier quoted context omitted.
People socialised for thousands, in fact hundreds of thousands of years before schools were invented. I went to school and got beat up, colour me sceptical about school as a mechanism for socialisation.
Socialization is broader than just between peers. It's how the individual develops a relationship to society as a whole. The public school system is the primary way the state socializes kids. You learn the difference between the public and private spheres (the school vs the family), how the two relate, and how they relate to the broader community. Some are better served by it than others but on the whole it's a very…
> the state socializes kids.
that's sometimes called indoctrination.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#775Earlier quoted context omitted.
> anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions Wow, what a terrible take. If anyone needs religion to live a moral life, I'm glad they have found it and hope they never lose it. I'm judged by my peers, my family, my community, and my country. But even if I wasn't, I would know what's right and what's wrong. Moreover, I guess it's good that amoral people can find eth…
No one needs religion to lead a moral life. That's not the argument. But without the transcendent, without a higher power, we have no grounding for our morality. Everything becomes subjective and "post-modern". Actions then become "justifiable" - if there is such a thing - by whatever criteria suits us: the greater good, the good of the nation, whatever. But essentially self-interest takes over completely. The more w…
Was society better in the past when it was more religious? If you think so, maybe you could give a hint about how far back we might look. 50 years? 100 years? 250 years?
Is there a threshold for belief in God that you think is necessary for a healthy society? 50%? 75%?
It's not true at all to state that morality has no grounding without a "higher power". (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics)
For example: belief in a higher power simply isn't required to allow people to make their own medical decisions. Belief in a higher power isn't required to give someone food.
It's absolutely fine to propose religion as an ethical framework, but I don't think it can possibly make sense to propose it as the only ethical framework, or to propose that society will become worse if humans "move away from God".
There are plenty of good alternatives.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#776I mean its obvious. There has been a concerted effort to de-fund public schools and center the conversation about "right to choose" education, alongside a handout of vouchers to attend private religious schools AND the implementation of new laws that allow tax payer dollars to go to funding those privately owned religious schools (seriously). The intent imo is to make schools seem "scary" and push parents to put thei…
While there may be an effort to defund public schools, funding (inflation adjusted) has been increasing. https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditures-per-...
Between 2008 and 2018, there's a drop, then recovery, of school funding (back to 2008 levels). That's a decade. I think this underfunding during that period may have contributed a lot to the current state.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#777Earlier 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…
// 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…
While Nietzsche was generally construed to be anti-religious he had some observations along these lines. He famously said - "God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown" and what he meant by it was that while science had eroded the moral supremacy of religion, we now faced a dilemma where nihilism would consume society, and we'd likely proceed to do bad stuff without God's help. Sure enough as a species we have gone on to commit all sorts of horrifying atrocities without the help of religious dogma, last century's mass murders under Nazi and Communist regimes being prime examples, no God required as a justification, it may be even scarier when all the justification you need for murder is the words of some charismatic strong men in politics.
He still really didn't like religion and the morality associated with it, but it seems he was correct when he predicted that getting rid of it would leave a vacuum in people's lives. His solution to all this, the ubermensch stuff, was a sort of radical self-actualization which I feel we've barely scratched the surface of understanding and applying.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#778People 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…
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…
> too secular and were teaching "sinful" sciences like evolution
Kids shielded from this kind of actual reality tend, IMHO, are never really then equipped for going out into society of the workplace, where teaching evolution is small change compared to the kind of "sinning" going on all about.
Admittedly some public school systems are just a mess, and private schools are out of the budget for most folks, so home schooling becomes the default. However, unless there's a social education alongside lots of other kids, this is just kicking problems down the road.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#779People 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…
One reason i prefer the term home education (it gets away from the idea it is like school - methods are very different).
The term used historically in the UK (essentially when posh people did it with tutors, look up older biographies of the Queen!) was "private education".
The way I think of it is that it is every form of education other than school.
https://pietersz.co.uk/2021/01/there-is-no-home-education
My experience of it has been good. My kids definitely prefer it to the experiences of their school going friends. I think the individualised opportunities of home education has a lot to do with my older daughter going into a male dominated field - she is doing a degree apprenticeship (work while at university, takes a bit longer, get work experience and salary, and fees paid) in Electrical Engineering at the University of Warwick and Jaguar Landrover.
My only regret is not starting home education earlier.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#780Earlier quoted context omitted.
The facts don't line up with your opinion. A 2016 study by the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) indicates homeschoolers scored between 15 and 30 percentage points higher on standardized academic achievement tests and usually scored higher on the SAT/ACT. https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/
No, that's not a fact. It's an observation that shows how people with training and resources can do a better job than the public school system. But as more affluent kids move out of the school system, funding will decrease, leaving the kids belonging to poor or uneducated parents stranded, until they too are forced to homeschool. It's funny how people will gut the foundation of public education over decades, then tur…
If you look at more detailed studies you will see that many of them correct for parental education and income etc. and home educated kids still do better on average. This is true across multiple countries - I know of studies in the US, the UK, and Australia.